(This discusses disturbing themes, and can get viciously satiric and slightly disturbing)
EPISODIC TENSIONS
Anyway. As I said before, we have four one-hour episodes. I’m
going to run through them all briefly, along with a couple of observations
about all of them.
DAY 1
is the first installment. It starts off with the police raid on the home of Jamie. We are introduced to two of the main characters, the main cop, DI Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and DS Misha Frank. Some unfunny banter and an inappropriate fart joke ensue, before they lead the police assault on the Miller home. Several cop cars and vans show up, and armour-wearing cops with machine guns pour out, knocking the home’s door down. Seems pretty heavy-handed to just arrest one puny 13-year-old, which did make me wonder how much of this is real, and how much just propagandist heavy-handed authoritarian fantasy.
Because make no mistake about this, this risible swill is anti-young-male propaganda, and, to me, this shows the consequences for any young guy watching it who misbehaves. Jamie and his family are terrorised by the armed cops, and he pisses his pants as a weapon is thrust in his face. Well, that’s a move straight out of a Larry Clark film, or The Exorcist. The rest of this episode is just basically a police procedural, which shows Jamie being booked, his shocked and frightened family turning up at the copshop, and his lawyer turning up as well.
You have to hand it to the cops. This takes place the morning after Jamie murdered Katie. He is detained at 6.31 a.m. The murder took place at 10.13 the previous evening. So in less than eight hours there has been a murder, the body has been found, the cops have had a call about it, turned up at the scene, blocked it off, investigated, found out who she was somehow, alerted her parents, found out who the kids were in the park (Jamie and his friends), found out who did it, found out where he lives, collected overnight CCTV footage from shops and the park and doorbells and such, assembled armed cops, planned and executed a multi-vehicle military-style raid on a family home, and caught the murderer.
Jamie’s lawyer crows about his personal record being beaten timewise in getting a case. Again you have to wonder…really? Is this honestly how quick these cases get solved? Seems pretty far-fetched to me but, well, I suppose maybe I shouldn’t comment, never having been a teenage murderer or anything. And I’m a bit too long in the tooth to start at that caper now, sadly. Oh well.
So Jamie gets processed, not being allowed to shower, stinking of piss as he creepily gets changed and then strip-searched (in a thankfully off-screen scene, watched by his concerned dad, with a cringe-making events-describing voiceover), then is sat with his lawyer and dad and shown CCTV footage of him murdering his victim in the park. There is no doubt whatsoever about his guilt, and dad and the family are righteously devastated.
Random fact: all four episodes are filmed in one single take, for added veracity…or something. It’s a total gimmick, one that the director Philip Barantini has used in his work before. Must have taken a lot of rehearsal. Ho-hum. Still, this accomplishment is not as impressive as the English 607-minute BBFC censorship protest film Paint Drying, about, well, paint drying. Still, the subject matter is from the same corner of the entertainment playground, so it’s not all a total loss.
DAY 3
is the second stalled installment. In this one, the much-admired DI Bascombe (more on which in a moment) and DS Frank go into the high school attended by Jamie and Katie to do some digging about, see who knows what. Everybody except the cops seemingly knows everything, and it’s hilariously appalling to watch them getting rings run round them by the teenagers. A teacher named Mrs Fenumore (Jo Hartley) shows them around. A classic dialogue exchange between the two cops takes place, with Bascombe starting:
““It’s our job to understand why.”
“You can’t understand why, do you actually think you can? We’ve got the video, we know what he did. You’re not gonna know why, mate, we’ve got all the things we’ve seen, you are not gonna know why. You just won’t.”
I am laughing here. Frank is absolutely correct. So the whole point of this slick lame yawn of a series has been utterly obliterated by this one small part of the second episode. So much for taking it into schools, as has been done, as educational material! Still, the cops and Fenumore aren’t going to let something as silly as their job here being meaningless get on top of them. They wander round the school looking for clues, talking to teachers and pupils. There are some very, very odd exchanges in this episode. A young black girl called Jade (Fatima Bojang) who was best friends with Katie is shown in this episode.
She’s an angry wee bugger (as you would be if your best friend was murdered), and is basically presented as a father-free nasty piece of work. She physically attacks one of Jamie’s friends, Ryan (Kaine Davis). But it’s the strange fetishisation that Bascombe gets from Ryan, Jade, and Mrs Fenumore that is the odd element here. Bascombe introduces himself as the father of one of Jamie’s pals, a kid called Adam (Amari Bacchus). “He didn’t get your cheekbones, did he?” the 13-year-old coos flirtatiously at the man three decades her senior. Coupled with the mention of her lack of a father in her life, this plays out as a strange father fixation for her character. Truly weird, especially in a programme trying to be as sober, sombrely morally upstanding as this one.
Ryan is next up on the cop worship scene. He himself coos over Bascombe in a jokey, blokey sort of way, giving mucho respect to the man investigating his pal, and by proxy him, for murder. Sitting with a bloodied shirt and a scraped-up face, due to Jade’s rage, he randomly pours on the compliments towards the cop:
“Yeah, you were popular in school, though.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I just know. You were.”
“Well I was, once I got rid of the big Afro that I had.”
Bascombe is put out of his case-floundering misery by Adam, who explains the cryptic clues behind the case that the DI has been missing all along: the (dum da dum dum!!) emojis of Katie she put on posts of Jamie’s on Instagram! I am laughing here. The scene is so ludicrous it’s impossible not to laugh, as Adam explains the hellish enigma of red pills and blue pills from The Matrix, that piece of obscure cinema that has been at the forefront of online (American) 'political' discourse for literally decades now. Shock horror! Bascombe isn’t down with the kiddy murder emoji lingo! The scene with his son explaining it to me made me laugh out loud. It reminded me of this hilarious scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
Shaken by the evidence right in front of his face, Bascombe gathers Frank and they bugger off out of the place. But not before the salivating Mrs Fenumore can run her hand briefly across the DI’s stomach. The fetishisation of the man from boys, girls and women during this episode has been strange, creepy, and hilariously bizarre.
What has been even more bizarre, though, has been the absolute lack of discussion of net radicalisation.
Apart from one dismissive reference to “that Andrew Tate shite” from a cop, there is not one single reference to any extreme porn or gore or angry male websites that Jamie might have been visiting that would have radicalised him, turned him into some raving, crazed, homicidal misogynist. I won’t use the term ‘incel,’ I think that’s American rubbish made to demonise young men. The only website that gets mentioned in connection with Jamie is fucking Instagram, which is hardly a deranged hotbed of murder and misogyny and mutilation. Or maybe I just look at the wrong pages on there.
Which makes a total mockery, again, for the whole reason for this show existing. If it was meant to be an expose of how a young boy can be radicalised, it doesn’t even attempt to go into the mental processes or websites behind him being turned into a murderer beyond him being bullied in school and getting some dodgy emojis left on Instagram posts from Katie, whom he could easily have blocked anyway! It’s utterly ludicrous, of course. Clearly the middle-aged writing duo behind the series, Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, are as clueless as their cop character when it comes to all this stuff, so have tried to conjure up a just-turned-teen bogeyman out of smoke and mirrors and stuff and nonsense that they simply don’t understand. They never get behind the forbidding barrier door of Jamie’s bedroom that they somehow have convinced the whole of the UK (or the gullible, naïve, stupid ones, that is) that they have. Quite the sleight-of-handjob trick.
is chapter 3 of the ongoing teen nightmare saga. In this cliffhanger nailbiter snoreborer, Jamie has a jabberjawing session with a psychologist, Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), an attractive woman in her early 30s. The two of them have a back-and-forth for the full episode, It’s not exactly Mindhunter, and it’s not exactly Silence of the Lambs. In fact, it’s really not all that interesting at all. She’s meant to find out what makes Jamie tick. And she doesn’t, really, of course, as DI Frank correctly surmised in the previous episode.
The misandrist agenda comes fully to the fore here. Jamie has had a previous male psychologist, who asked “easier” questions than Ariston does. She sits and tries to just talk him into…what? A confession? We know he’s guilty. Self-awareness? Who knows. Or cares. She doesn’t want to talk to him about what he thinks of his mother and sister, which I would have thought were vitally important in any crazed misogynist killer’s young life, because that had apparently been done at a previous session.
We are privy to nothing she has been told during that session. Here she just wants to talk about Big Bad Dad, of course…and that turns out to be a bit of a damp squib. Jamie’s dad Eddie (Stephen Graham) was never a crazed drunken woman-beater, or violent or abusive to the family, or anything like that. The best she can get out of Jamie is that his dad smashed up a shed once, and that made the kids laugh. So her examination of the main male in Jamie’s life is a pretty pointless one, really, because it doesn’t reveal any big brutal bastard secrets, except that he might very occasionally have a bad temper. He’s certainly not presented as a ticking time bomb ready to explode. How awkward in the psychopathology-comprehension and manhating stakes! Once again, this is just pissing ideas up a wall and hoping some of them drip down in a meaningful pattern. But they never do.
One very, very strange, and ludicrous, aspect of this whole episode is how totally at ease Jamie is with Ariston. She has brought him a sandwich and he shamelessly flirts with her about it, as he does at other points during the interrogation-cum-conversation. At no point whatsoever does he come off like a 13-year-old scared or hateful of females, or disgusted by them. He comes across as really flirtatious, funny, self-confident and charming – the exact opposite of what a murderously creepy kid who had done what he did would be like.
Yet again, we have child-adult flirting and teasing. Shaking my head here. Ariston asks Jamie “Do women find you attractive?” What is a 13-year-old boy meant to say to that? The woman in question would technically be a paedophile if she did, and let him know it, or tried to act on it. So why is she asking this sort of weird question? Why doesn’t she ask him more about girls his age finding him attractive, or if he has even had girlfriends? There are so many wrong, strange notes here. And she doesn’t seem all that interested in an answer, either, except to prove to herself what a scumbag he is – she often looks at him with unprofessional open, complete contempt. If it were real life it would be shocking. She asks Jamie what “being a man feels like.” How in the Hell would he know? He’s 13! “Do you have any mates who are women?” I’d worry about women wanting to hang about with boys that age.
But see, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Ariston’s character is totally representative of the legions of manhating middle class women infesting the media and clinical professions today. She’s present in every misandrist female newspaper columnist, of which every paper has at least a couple. These cold, hateful women have been spouting their hate speech towards men and boys for so long they seemingly have forgotten that it is hate speech.
They spit on men constantly in a manner that they wouldn’t accept for a single second being aimed at them, which makes them and their double standards utterly impossible to take seriously. It’s no mistake that the vast majority of the people breathlessly hate-wanking in print over this series were middle class female columnists, who thoroughly enjoyed their chance to spit on working class white males yet again, this time with ostensible artistic discussion impunity and immunity. They’re truly disgusting people. Still, spewing sexist hate speech is a living, I suppose.
So Ariston’s open contempt towards her flirtatious charge is no surprise, really. Of course, she knows he is a murderer, though if he’d killed another white working class boy she probably would have shaken his hand and gotten him out early. The end, where this self-assured child is somehow manoeuvred into a crazed rant about how he could have felt up his victim’s corpse, but didn’t, because he is “better than that” – is utterly unsurprising. She’s sort-of broken the code, seen the eternal male necrophile murderous horror…and somehow lived to tell the tale and write the harshly condemnatory psychiatric report. It’s as close to an ‘explanation’ for anything that the series ever comes close to.
CONTINUED IN THE THIRD AND FINAL PART HERE:
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2025/05/adolescence-worst-exploitation-series-i_39.html
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