Naterally wicious

A casting breakdown came into our office this week, describing the characters needed for a new television drama and inviting agents to suggest actors to play the roles. We get about twenty of these per day but what caught my attention on this one was the phrase:

This is a children’s drama, so low budget.

Why? Why should it be accepted that just because it’s for children the budget will be low?

It’s because children are second-class citizens in our society: we really don’t like them very much.

Food is a good example. Attitudes to food are at the core of every culture - look at our attitudes to children’s food, from the intermittent complaints about women breastfeeding in restaurants (“It’s upsetting for the other diners – can’t they do it in the toilets?”) to Jamie Oliver’s discovery that we were spending an average of only 37p on every school meal.

When I got married the register office asked us not to invite children to the ceremony in case they made a noise. What were those relatives with children supposed to do with them? Lock them in the car perhaps? (We invited them. They were great.)

I think there’s a lasting legacy from Victorian times. We don’t regard children as trailing clouds of glory (Wordsworth) but as naterally wicious (Mr Hubble discussing boys in general, and Pip in particular, in Dickens’ Great Expectations). Here’s another quotation from that novel:

I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuading arguments of my best friends.

Although many children nowadays have more clothes and toys than their ancestors would have believed possible, I still don’t think we welcome their presence in the way that, say, the Italians do, and I think it’s a shame.