Source: Guardian >> Read full article and comment
Once upon a time, children aspired to be teachers, bankers, doctors. Now they just want to be celebrities. As a new series of Britain’s Got Talent kicks off, Emma Brockes asks why
Emma Brockes
The Guardian, Saturday 17 April 2010
Do they really want to be Ashley and Cheryl? Photograph: Perou
If you were watching TV sometime in the mid-1980s, you might remember a little girl who won a competition. She was on a show calledSaturday Superstore and sang a song called It’s ’Orrible Being In Love When You’re 8½. You’ll remember it if you saw it, and if you were a child and had eyes you’ll have seen it, because there was nothing else to watch on Saturday mornings, except TV-AM and racing from Doncaster.
The reason it made such an impression was that she seemed at the time anomalous, an apparently normal eight-year-old with a bizarre desire – to sing on television. There were abnormal eight-year-olds likeBonnie Langford, who looked as if they ran on batteries and talked about “the business” and did the splits while being interviewed by adult talkshow hosts. There were child movie stars like Michael J Fox. ButClaire Usher was none of these. After winning the contest, her song was released and she appeared on Top Of The Pops, where they put her in a school scarf and what looked like her mother’s high heels, just in case you missed the point: that a child “pop star”, a child caught up in the processes of fame, could only properly be presented as burlesque.
It’s taken for granted these days that children aren’t what they were. They’re fatter, taller, louder. They are, thanks to the creation of the tween advertising market, more sharply aware of self-image. (They always had one; it just wasn’t shaped by focus groups at Topshop.) Above all, they are subject to the corrupting influence of celebrity culture.
Last year, a survey found that the top three career aspirations for five- to 11-year-olds in Britain were sports star, pop star and actor, compared with teacher, banker and doctor 25 years ago. The number of child performance licences, issued by councils to pupils who miss three or more days of school per half-year to perform, increased, in five years, by 80%. At Stagecoach, the performing arts school franchise, student numbers leapt from 12,000 in 1999 to 36,000 today. … Continue reading
