Young people are horrendously misrepresented in the media. Read the Daily Mail and you'd think that they're all pregnant pickpockets. Watch daytime TV and they're confidence tricksters out to defraud the elderly. Listen to Radio 4 and they don't exist at all. This is a tragedy. Here are five types of young person we need to hear more about in the media.
The moderate drinker
Some young people, although this is impossible to believe, don't go on holiday just to gel their hair and binge drink and throw up in a bucket full of sexually transmitted diseases behind a grotty disco in Magaluf. They just have a beer or two and visit the sights. Where's their series, huh?
The skilled tradesman
Not the struggling unemployed. Not the obnoxious entrepreneur. We should hear more about the newly qualified locksmith, or the regional prize-winning milliner. Why isn't there a TV show about the 50 most talented sausagemakers under 30?
The married homeowner
It happens. Just because you're sharing a bedsit with a stranger who never blinks, it doesn't mean that other people don't start saving as teenagers and put a deposit down on a modest house with their playground sweetheart. It must happen, surely.
The average athlete
The media either concern themselves with bright young Olympians whose bodies have been transformed into works of precision engineering, or obese bed-bound shut-ins. As a compromise, let's hear more about the middleground – people who walk energetically, or swim once a week before sitting down and eating a bacon sandwich.
The master criminal
The problem with showing young thieves on TV is that they're nowhere near aspirational enough. They're all muggers and hapless burglars. That's no fun. More stories about aristocratic teenage jewel thieves who live in underground lairs, please.
