Research

Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents - BBC 3

Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents is a documentary/reality television series, first aired in early 2011 as part of the Dangerous Pleasures season on BBC Three. Parents secretly keep tabs on their teenage offspring's summer holidays following them on their first girls/lads holidays abroad for up to a week. Throughout the programme, parents get extremely close to their sons/daughters whilst being hidden away watching their every move on video screens, they are often in stockrooms of nightclubs or in minivans following their children.

Sun, Sex And Suspicious Parents (a lame title) is the logical consequence of the many programmes which follow young British people partying abroad – Ibiza Uncovered, Holiday Reps, etc. As they whooped it up onscreen, you knew that somewhere their families were sitting aghast, with emotions ranging from mild embarrassment to deep disappointment. But now we get to see their head-in-hands reactions as part of the show – in real time, as the parents aren't just watching at home, they've been flown to the resort where they're watching everything with binoculars and camera crew in tow. - Andrea Mullaney

Jamie Oliver's Dream School

Jamie's Dream School (2011) is a Channel 4 series which looks at young people’s educational problems and attempts to uncover whether they are down to personal circumstance, society, or the education system itself. It also examines how the new teachers get on as they try to translate their real-life expertise into the realities of the classroom. The experts include scientist Professor Robert Winston, historian David Starkey, barrister Cherie Blair, journalist and political aide Alastair Campbell, actor Simon Callow, artist Rolf Harris, musician Jazzie B and Olympic gold medallist Daley Thompson.

“I’ve seen with many of the kids at Fifteen that if you can find something that sparks someone’s passion, they’ll absolutely embrace it. Not everyone’s into cooking, of course, so what we’re trying to do with Dream School is to provide loads of different academic subjects and some fantastic teachers so that there’s something inspiring for all the young people, whether it’s politics or history or sport or music. It’s fascinating to watch the kids in different lessons and see what switches them on.”  - Jamie Oliver

BBC: You cannot apply the celebrity part to real life school, however you can apply the guests e.g. bringing in a local archeologist

Guardian: He's taken a high-flying head, a sprinkling of celebrity teachers and a bowlful of teenagers with barely a pinch of GCSEs between them. It's an entertaining mix. We hear Andrew Motion on poetry and Rolf Harris on the impressionists. But there's one ingredient that's missing – the pupils' voice. Despite all its dressing as a daring democratic experiment, Oliver's school is still an adult fantasy served up to young people.

"In Jamie’s Dream School, he invites a bevy of assorted celebrities into the classroom to become teachers, in an attempt to inspire 20 young people who have left school and have little to show for it. So David Starkey has a crack at teaching history, while the hip hop singer Tinchy Stryder tackles poetry classes.

It’s all very well-intentioned and sparkly, but the problem with putting celebrities on television is that the show becomes more about them than it does about disillusioned teenagers who are adrift in the system. If Oliver wants to raise standards in education, what makes television the best vehicle? If he’s serious, he could petition to start a free school, rather than conducting a short-lived and limited TV experiment. While it’s highly entertaining to watch Starkey peer through his spectacles at a class of marauding teenagers like a stuffed owl at a circus, it’s not going to do much to fix the education system" - Ceri Radford commented on The Telegraph online

Brat Camp

Brat Camp is a reality TV show about a group of out of control teenagers who are sent away to a special camp located in the Utah desert. Originally a UK show by Twenty Twenty Television shown on Channel 4, an American version was seen on ABC in the summer of 2005. These special camps are either wilderness therapy programs, also known as therapeutic outdoor education, or residential treatment centres. The first season, featuring RedCliff Ascent, won an International Emmy. Subsequent seasons saw declining viewership. The American version of Brat Camp was cancelled after its one-season run, but is being aired in Canada on Slice as of early 2007. The UK version was also aired in the United States in 2004 on ABC Family, and its popularity resulted in ABC ordering an American version.

On August 24, 2007, it was announced that the show had been axed, along with shows such as Celebrity Big Brother and You Are What You Eat.

This summer, though, reality lured me back—not by reaching some new level of ironic self-regard, but through an appeal to my most primal emotion: my hatred of teenagers. Brat Camp documented the hormone-saturated plight of nine worse-than-average teens (their crimes ran from drugs to ADHD to the attempted murder of a twin brother) as they griped their way through a wilderness self-improvement program called SageWalk. Though I'm normally a pretty empathetic person, I hate teenagers with incredible fervor. It's nothing personal: I hate them categorically, like I hate injustice. I hate the way they roam around in packs, wearing floppy, Technicolor clothes, sculpting their marginal facial hair, slapping and tripping each other, shouting strings of banal obscenities as if they were delivering the "Gettysburg Address." I hate the way they express personal inadequacy through car accessories and vandalism. Critics have unanimously panned Brat Camp, usually based on superego-driven misreadings; its fundamental appeal is pure id. No matter how much the show tried to cover its tracks with feel-good narration and solemn music, we watched it for the breakdowns, not the breakthroughs. The campers' tantrums were jarring and authentic, exquisitely hateable, while their moments of clarity tended to sound like a word salad cribbed from self-help books: They proactively opened doors, cleared lines of communication, broke down walls, surmounted obstacles, and maximized potentials ad nauseam. My favorite line from the finale came when the fatherless and intermittently likable hothead Frank was reunited with his mom, who immediately broke into rite-of-passage talk: "You've turned into a man." To which he responded, "No, it's just from not shaving." - Sam Anderson

Of all the shows that take stroppy teenagers and try to beat some manners into them, Brat Camp has always been the finest. It consistently found the stroppiest, lippiest little gobshites in Britain (remember Fran? And Rachel? God, I loved Fran and Rachel). Then it tore them away from their cosy little lives of smoking super-strength skunk and hurling abuse (and vodka bottles) at their parents, and sent them to hell in a handcart - almost literally, except that they weren't allowed in the handcart, they had to push it around the empty wilds of hell (Utah) for weeks on end, living like medieval Mennonites. - Sam Wollaston The Guardian

Beinart thinks our busy modern lives can get in the way of growing up. "Developmental tasks of adolescence are perhaps not being recognised. It is important for them to learn to become an individual, and this can be supported by having space away from their family. The space allows them to mature." David Spellman, a consultant clinical psychologist at Burnley General Hospital, agrees but he does have some reservations. "What are the morals of the approach?" he asks. "Who's to say what needs to change? There is a common stereotype of teenagers as difficult, such as Harry Enfield's Kevin, that fails to recognise teenagers as carers and contributors to their community. Adults often make crude attempts to bludgeon them into what we want, not taking account of their goals and objectives."

Praising RedCliff's partnership approach, Spellman emphasises that adults should not take control of dealing with adolescence. "The thing that struck me was how the adults at RedCliff did not retaliate when the teenagers were kicking off. The fact that the people running the project have restraint and clarity of purpose is very important. Adults need to collaborate with teenagers to help them sort themselves out by inviting them to take responsibility, rather than by imposing views of how they should behave." - Dan Lee The Guardian