Quick question: have you ever had to watch a 47-minute programme where children do your job with a degree of competency that could be described as “career-threatening”? That’s what happened to me this week while watching When I Grow Up (Thursday, 8pm, Channel 4), a new show in which a group of seven-year-olds parachute into three different industries – real estate, chocolate manufacture and, this week, journalism – and prove that, well, a seven-year-old can actually quite easily do what I do. Beyond being in charge of my own bedtimes and being allowed to swear without being banished to the stairs for 15 minutes, there are essentially just a couple of SAT grades between me and these kids. It’s rare that TV so completely humbles you.
Channel 4’s latest child labour law offender is a throwback to when every TV concept would be called a “social experiment” and sold as some great psychological gambit, as if locking Nasty Nick in a house with Craig and a few scraps of paper was high and insightful academia. The vague idea is this: six kids from diverse backgrounds around the UK get an insight into industries their geographical and financial backgrounds might not have afforded them. Plus, kids being in offices is cute and funny, isn’t it?
Sadly, Isabella is here to derail all that, because even at the tender age of seven she is the world’s most sinister goth. A Middlesbrough native and voracious reader, Isabella has been nominated by Hello! bosses to become their new editor-in-chief, on the strength of a newspaper she made last year, Isabella’s News, a publication that actually included the headline “SCIENTISTS FIND A NEW KIND OF HEAD AND NECK CANCER”.
Ryley, meanwhile, seems to be channelling me in a way I find deeply unsettling. After a morning’s worth of toil and a half-hour distraction where he has to look up how to spell “theatre” (me), Ryley is devastated to learn he has only managed to write one sentence (me), then, on a shoot with Myleene Klass, he gets distracted by a swing (me) so hard it causes a four-way argument (this is me). Ryley’s arc is the one we’re rooting for: remembering to pay penance to the “social experiment” construct briefly, producers cast a broad spectrum of children, from impoverished nothing-happening towns and high-flying cul-de-sacs. Blackpool native Ryley – conquering both his own confidence crises as well as middle class-nemesis Charlie (nice kid, but I see a future of burning £20 notes in front of homeless people ahead of him) – gives the show some meat.
I am sad to say that it’s all painfully adorable. A light-touch edit means the squabbles are kept to a minimum; the scenes in which the kids experience personal growth avoid being corny; every shot of an adult patiently taking a seven-year-old extremely seriously is hilarious; and when Leicester-born Samuel stands up to make a speech in the first episode, I quietly whispered “go on, mate” at the screen. It’s like a direct punch in the heart from a fist made of candy but, weirdly, not as saccharine as you’d expect. Enjoy this show now, before Isabella figures out how to buy knives on the dark web and comes for us all.
