A curiously popular pastime in the later years of the twenty-first century was to present young people with the surviving examples of antiquated domestic technology and simply watch their attempts to make sense of them.
At first this was confined to the home for the amusement of immediate family members, but very quickly, videos of these incidents began to find their way online, first in a trickle and soon in a flood, to the great embarrassment of the individuals concerned but to the great entertainment of almost everyone else.
Eventually an enterprising television executive had the ingenious and perhaps also inevitable idea of turning this into a show which proved to be a surprising hit for a minor free-to-air channel. Originally aimed at family audiences, the programme’s popularity took an unexpected turn after a now notorious episode in which a nine-year-old child’s frustration with an Olivetti typewriter led him to dash the malfunctioning machine against the head of the sound recordist, killing the man instantly.
The release of this episode, considered highly risky by twitchy station bosses still mindful of the backlash which accompanied coverage of the catastrophic Ebola outbreak on the most recent series of Love Island, proved to be a bold stroke of programming genius. Cautious analysis revealed a sharp increase of viewers for the channel during the episode’s timeslot, particularly in the coveted 25-to-39-year-old age group, and a total audience share of 17%, compared to the channel’s previous peak at just 0.6%.
This turn of events had no doubt been helped along by an illicit marketing campaign which deliberately leaked information about the episode’s content in the week leading up to its broadcast. But all that notwithstanding, the point had been forcibly made, and realising the potential crossover to a more adult audience with a keen appetite for such savagery, the producers set about filming a specific strand of the series dedicated exclusively to the violent consequences of children being handed objects they did not know how to operate.
Researchers were tasked with combing Internet auction sites and charity shops to find as many pieces of ancient equipment that they could get their hands on as possible. A special team was seconded to start excavating landfill sites for the household goods which earlier generations had carelessly thrown away. A series of telephone calls at the highest level failed to persuade curators of the Science Museum to relinquish any of the more than two thousand domestic treasures squirrelled away in its collection. But through patience and perseverance, a steady stream of objects continued to find its way into the television studios and into the hands of some increasingly fractious juvenile contestants.
Tracking down hard-to-find artefacts was not the research teams’ only responsibility. A small group had been tasked with working alongside child psychologists, paediatricians and social workers to identify volatile young people with histories of unstable or violent behaviour who might be the network’s newest stars. Of course, the professionals working alongside this team had to remain entirely unaware of the real purpose of their consultations, believing instead that they were supporting the creation of a documentary exploring radical new responses to the rapid rise in anxiety amongst under-sixteens — which, in a manner of speaking, they were.
Week after week, the public tuned in in increasing numbers to enjoy the misadventures of a succession of these pre-pubescent anti-heroes — marvelling at their initially comic attempts to fathom out the functionality of Betamax video recorders, floppy disk drives and such like — then variously gasping, giggling or guffawing at the disproportionate degree of rage which always followed the youngsters’ failure to figure out the correct solution.
The film crews were now sensibly kept out of harm’s way during these experimental encounters, and so, deprived of other people against whom to direct their anger, the subjects turned their aggressive attention to destroying the objects themselves, or by extension, the set on which the programme was being filmed. (The producers had sensibly foreseen this eventuality and had come to an advantageous deal with a flatpack furniture manufacturer which gave them competitive discounts on repeat orders of replacement set elements in return for prominent product placement opportunities.)
The irony that none of the audience members had any more clue about how to use these machines than the contestants did was entirely lost on everyone concerned. Indeed, it was not always possible for the researchers themselves to be entirely sure of the purpose or practicality of many of the devices they discovered. Only the very oldest members of society could have had even a vestigial awareness of how to place a call using a rotary telephone, for example, or how to listen to music on a portable cassette player, but in any event, audience data showed that people in this age category made up less than 0.1% of the programme’s burgeoning spectatorship.
The appeal of the show lay not at all in the audience’s fascination with the relics of a bygone age (and surely no-one ever believed it did), but in the pure spectacle of unmediated onscreen violence, given its most extreme, most alarming and arguably most compelling expression through being perpetrated by children.
There could, perhaps, be only one logical outcome of this state of affairs, and it came as no surprise, either to the network or to anyone else, that the programme’s highest ever ratings peak occurred in the week when a ten-year-old girl was given what was once commonly described as a cut-throat razor. This term had been completely forgotten, become thoroughly obsolete, by the time the producers handed it over to the child and pointed the cameras at her to see what would happen. What did happen, of course, is now the stuff of TV legend. Arguably, the child did with the object precisely what she was meant to do; or strictly speaking, the razor did precisely what it was meant to do; the child merely facilitated that process.
Needless to say, despite astronomical viewing figures, the show was swiftly cancelled, and despite many other episodes having been filmed, none was ever transmitted and no episode has ever been repeated since. A release for home streaming now would be unthinkable. Unsurprisingly, scores of home viewers recorded the episode for themselves, and to this day, bootleg copies of it remain in circulation, though whenever it surfaces on online video channels, it is removed with uncharacteristic swiftness by the channels’ watchdogs.
But, like any truly epoch-making TV spectacle, once this episode is seen, it can never be forgotten. In the course of researching this article, I determined to see it for myself — for the sake of complete accuracy, you understand — and, I will admit, to satisfy a by now utterly insatiable curiosity. After lengthy discussions in a number of online forums, and after coming up against endless walls of silence (presumably from forum members who suspected me of being an undercover agent in some kind of anti-obscenity sting operation), I eventually gained the trust of one person who had a copy of the episode and was willing to let me see it.
It arrived on a small flash stick, discreetly left under the front passenger side wheel of my car in a city centre car park on a perfectly ordinary working weekday. Needless to say, I couldn’t get home quick enough to watch it.
I only watched it once.
But even now as I write this, every time I blink, it seems that, for a split second at a time, the dark space on the inside of my eyelids becomes a miniature TV screen, filled with a face, the face of someone who would never fulfil her promise as a grown woman, and who will instead remain forever young, seared onto thirty million memories and now seared onto mine, with eyes that register a total lack of comprehension, before the camera pans down to an undifferentiated area of pure red, and the credits start to roll.
