Growing Up

I have a troubled relationship with Vernon Kay. Or at least I used to, when he was fronting T4. On our good days, he was a special-haired edifice of wicked good times, carved from a plasticine brick of Cool. He hurled himself out of the telly and into my arms, offering reassurance that this violent, seething, mendacious existence is nothing more or less than one big cheeky prank. When Vernon was treating me well, all would be resolved within the hour, each contestant in the benign gameshow of life would leave the stage with a good-sport smile, every band would get their five minutes, then it’d all be over; we’d get the bus to Bolton and have some chips. I was young, life was good, and the world was my soundstage.

Then came the shame. It would come in the night, when your well-behaved T4 viewer should be tucked up in their single bed, staring moonily but asexually at the Colin Farrell poster on the ceiling. I would dream of a twenty-foot Vernon stamping destructively through a post-apocalyptic world where all that survives is banter. I would join and leave Vernon-dedicated Facebook groups at lightning speed, terrified that the Youth Police were going to come round and take my hard drive. ‘Vernon Kay is a Twat.’ ‘Vernon Kay is the best thing on telly.’ ‘I want to have Vernon Kay’s babies.’ ‘Vernon Kay should have been sterilised at birth.’ I used to sit, whey-faced in front of a blank telly, imagining Vernon’s beautiful hair growing and growing and growing until his smile was concealed and he became a six foot four Cousin It, but a friendly one, who’d give big hairy hugs and leave you smelling of serum and shampoo and man.

This wild confusion was born of shame. Not just Vernon-shame, but T4-shame. At the height of mine and Vernon’s sado-masochistic broadcast relationship, I was nearly 21. I wasn’t hormonal, I was post-hormonal. I was at the stage of life where all endocrine processes should have been cancelled out by a surplus of mid-priced liquor, where ambition ruled and the future was a land of Finals and houses and tax. No, T4 – I can’t come to your beach party. I’m off to Courchevel for a drunken yet aspirational skiing holiday with a bunch of future-centred uni chums. But still I tuned in, Sunday mornings, Friends, Gwen Stefani, Vernon, June, and a pummelling sense of dangerously arrested personal development.

I still watch T4. Not every week, and I try not to text in as much as I used to. But now, aged 24, I will watch that damned show openly and proudly, like the mother defiantly breastfeeding her six-year-old in Waitrose.

What changed it for me, what made it suddenly OK, was Miquita Oliver. More specifically, discovering that Miquita Oliver and I are the same age. Seriously, we were born within days of each other, we were gestating together, if only we’d known it. We might have passed each other on trollies in the maternity wing, her on the way to a life of pop-tastic, sun-kissed ebullient fabulousness, me on my way to school, then university, then work, then boredom, then death (for such are the options open to those who lack the gift of telly). Knowing this, seeing my precise contemporary on screen being a bit flirty with Tony Blair, turned T4 from a yoof-tastic guilty pleasure of a magazine show into something more genuinely, solidly aspirational. If Miquita can enjoy life that much, then so can I.

The T4 team portray early adulthood as a sort of childhood-plus (adolescence need never come into it). We can still frolic and roll and hug like puppies, but oh, look, there’s an innuendo, there’s a surprisingly insightful reference to the Young Conservatives, and there’s an episode of Friends we’d long since forgotten. We’re growing up without losing the primary coloured innocence of a ten-year-old, we’re paying taxes with a wink and a smile, to the sound of Gwen Stefani’s latest. My dream night out involves me and the T4 gang, who will always have the same company spirit, no matter how the cast changes. We’ll romp in a ball pond for a while, then get tipsy at Nando’s and make some prank calls to members of the Shadow Cabinet. It’s adulthood, but not as we’re forced to know it.

If T4 eased me into adulthood with a cheery backwards glance, then it was another show which made me happy to be a grown-up, happy in a ‘yes, it’s a good world, I can really do something with this’ sort of a way. It was the most serious, least flashy show I’ve ever truly loved – Operatunity. From the winning clumsiness of the title-pun to that final, triumphant night at the Coliseum, Operatunity showed the warmth, compassion and genuine hope with which reality television can be made, and so seldom is. The format rang alarm bells, of course – untrained singers do opera on telly, judges give feedback, There Can Only Be One Winner, leave your dignity at the door and let your dreams be pounded to pieces before the altar of light entertainment. But that wasn’t Operatunity’s style. Only the truly gifted were invited to audition, the feedback was kind, and we were privileged to see hearts and voices expand before us under the passionate, professional tutelage of some real opera folk. It was a fabulous shock to see a camera cut tastefully away from a tear-stained face – a far cry from the common tactic of shoving the lens right in there like a snout, as Kate Thornton pricks the weeper with a pin and holds up photos of dead puppies. And then the finale – God, the finale. That hour of air-punching, sofa-smashing, joyful-howling transcendence when our winners, Denise and Jane, shared the role of Gilda in Rigoletto. We didn’t really care who they were. Their supermarket jobs and young families and disabilities and very British struggles weren’t even the point, they’d just done their new jobs as singers, and done them as well as we’d all hoped.

Nothing’s ever matched up to Operatunity, either on C4 or any other channel. Even Musicality – a similarly-toned musical theatre talent hunt – for me lacked the Operatunity magic. Perhaps the musical theatre vocals threw up too many memories of Pop Idol, perhaps there were a few too many tears and a few too many tortured close-ups. No, Operatunity was a risk, and one that was very much in the spirit of Channel 4 – a show so elitist in content, populist in style, yet suffused with such goodness, went so strongly against the televisual grain that it became subversive, radical. To an extent, T4 does the same thing. It’s music hall, variety, a kids’ party to which a few lucky grown-ups are invited. Shows, comedy, turns, stooges, the lightest, most youthful bits of satire. It pokes fun at itself without being knowing or snide, talks to youth (and I use the term loosely) without talking down to it.

I’m grateful for these bite-size chunks of the world, thought provokers, a quick kick in the direction of a more universal knowledge

It’s a peculiar time, your early twenties. A discomfort zone between adolescence and adulthood. So I’m grateful for those programmes which ease the transition. Not just the two I’ve mentioned, but Dispatches, Channel 4 News, and – God help me – Deal or No Deal. Bite-size chunks of the world, thought provokers, a quick kick in the direction of a more universal knowledge. Let Miquita and I grow old together, consistently delighted and surprised by Channel 4.