When I was fresh faced out of uni, I worked on a BBC TV show called A Family of my Own, which came under intense scrutiny by those labelling it 'Pet Rescue for kids' - esentially a show highlighting the amount of kids looking to be adopted in the UK, and how to go about starting the complicated procedure of adopting. It seemed like a worthy cause, but there is always a reason for people to get their knickers in a twist.
So it was with no surprise that when Channel 4 aired
Boys and Girls Alone last night, there would be the odd hairy moment as sticky-beaks and serial-complainers alike did their best to take it off the air, with it's own special label of 'Big Brother for Kids'.
A group of girls and a group of boys were placed in separate communities away from parents, school or rules, to see whether The Lord of the Flies would, indeed, happen.
And my, wasn't it interesting?
While the girls began in style, chosing rooms, painting walls, baking cakes, the boys literally played until they dropped - settling eventually down to a tea of cold beans and dry pasta (none of them knew how to cook), drank a few mugs of Coke Cola, then passed out exhausted at about 10pm.
The girls mean while, had decided that no amount of DIY SOS or Ready Steady Cook would keep the peace, and warred with each other until the early hours - big girls vs little girls - big girls bullying their way into the psyce of the less popular, tormenting, demonising.
In an alarming twist they then scribbled what can only be described as twisted messages from the dead on the walls of their enemies, and tried to pass off the grafitti as a peace-offering.
Both groups ended up realising somewhere along the way, and the boys endeeringly came up with a list as sensative as to include 'no animal hurting', but the girls couldn’t agree long enough for the rules to ever get written.
How marvelous and insightful journey into the scocialisation of the different genders. Mothers confessed to still doing everything for their sons, while preparing the girls for independence and self-sufficience. How the girls, seemingly the better prepared, then almost self-destructed with the responsibility of it all, while the boys simply played and starved.
Are we treating our kids differently in comparison to their gender? Are we still teaching boys to rely on their future wives to cook clean and organise the home? Or is it nature?
My mother always reminised that although she would give my brother and I idential toys, I would without fail always end up 'homemaking' with the dolls, while my male counterpart would fashion a gun out of sticks and dedicate himself to turning the local woodland into an imaginary war-zone. Is this simply what the different genders are hard-wired to do?
