THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

Chris Evans’ show TFI Friday does not form part of my regular viewing, so I missed the upset which took place in June and which is only now surfacing in retrospect.

In two particular programmes of the series – which does not claim to be a standard-bearer for ‘good taste’ – two families were competing, via their young children, to win in one case a new car, in the other a £15,000 speedboat.  Two seven-year-olds were pitted against each other, and the first one to blink was the loser.  Certainly a less sophisticated sport than chess.

The fun seemed to disappear from the screen when the first week’s loser was seen struggling not to cry, and the second week’s loser, a young girl, burst into tears.  At this point, we are told, the audience “turned against Evans and the competition” and Chris Evans, in an untypical moment of sympathetic concern, muttered to his producer that they couldn’t do this sort of thing again.

What a funny state of affairs.  An audience, who are quite happy to see children having a blinking contest knowing (?) that the winner earns his family a speedboat, then become dismayed because the loser starts crying.  That seems rather like being in favour of boy chimney-sweeps until one sees one coming down the chimney dirty.

The programme was criticised for breaking the TV code by failing to “avoid causing any distress or alarm to children involved in programmes”.

Fair enough, except that – and this is the other side of the coin – one might ask if tears actually represent “distress and alarm”.  The families in question wrote in afterwards to say that they had nothing to complain about; the children had enjoyed being in the programme, even if they had cried when they lost. 

Now I am not suggesting that we should always treat children’s crying lightly, and I am not here referring to the long-term ill-treatment of children which can never be taken lightly, but could it be that we adults tend to overdramatise children’s passing tears as though their souls were being scarred?  As parents know, children often live by the emotion of the minute and then get on with the next thing.  “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” as Jesus might have said, “for they will keep things simple”, while adults are huffing and puffing and setting up committees in indignation.  All the same, I wouldn’t have been very happy if I had lost my family a speedboat because I couldn’t keep my eyes open.