Youth is Back

Sometimes the idea of youth is very different from the reality of being young. The idea of youth is our shared belief in the creative force and power of a mind not dulled by experience, convention or inhibited by time-tutored pragmatism. The idea of youth is our faith in the power of raw inventiveness and in the ability of fresh eyes to imagine the world anew; it is a talent to be developed; a gift that fades without diligent practise. Youth is lived most intensely by those with fewer years on the clock. But the relationship is not linear. Britney Spears may never be quite as old as she was when she burst onto the scene, the carefully choreographed and word perfect embodiment of a Disney Club domesticated young person.

So as Channel 4 hits 25 the time is right to consider its role in both nurturing the idea of youth and in serving the needs of young people. Because both have never been as important as they are today.

Yes, the young are back, having survived the great youth culture drought of the late Nineties when it seemed like they were in danger of becoming relegated into some hazy category of less affluent, less old people. They dressed and talked like grown ups, thought and bought like grown ups. A legion of middle youth had seemingly succeeded in taming the young, pulling them into the orbit of their ageless but docile tastes.

Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker was the unnamed agent of this whole process, secretly undermining all youth stood for with his considered 30-something cool. Cocker invited us to abandon the idea that the young really mattered at all. Only now, in recently discovered personal papers, do we learn of his plan to invoke the mass intonation of Alan Bennett monologues, his requirement for daily tea and biscuits sacraments.

Thankfully, Cocker’s scheme floundered and the young are once again unintelligible to their elders, once more the object of middle English anxiety, once again utterly alien in the eyes of their elders. We are, once again, going to hell in a hand basket and it is once again all the fault of the young.

The young are tearing up the rules of our culture again, are exacting a casual retribution on the ageing hipsters of the record and film industries, ignoring the politicians and laughing at the last century’s sources of authority. But in all this magnificent disorder their relationship with Channel 4 seems only to get stronger, because Channel 4 is somehow one of them, a unifying point of identification across all the new youth tribes. Only Channel 4 seems to be a place where we can all connect with their disparate energies and unruly potential.

And I think I know why. It has nothing to do with the brand being young. Channel 4 connects with them because it is a lifelong servant of the idea of youth. It has a constitution that has to ask questions and a temperament that relishes the discomfort of conflicting ideas. Channel 4 believes the new is to be nurtured, not just welcomed. In a new century where inventiveness is society’s necessity not its ornament, we have never needed Channel 4 more. The idea of youth that it so profoundly embodies matters because without it we will never make sense in this bewildering new century.

Thank you Channel 4 for helping this ageing fan remember that the young are worth it and that youth, full of force and fascination, belongs to all of us.