Authors: Lisa Gee
From what I’ve seen, read and researched, even in those instances where the child is acting out something that would be illegal or terrible in real life, it’s not the actual acting part that’s damaging to a child performer. That can – as it was for the kids on
The Sound of Music
– be both enormous fun and a superb learning experience. It’s the attendant publicity, the individual’s growing attachment to media attention and the public’s perception of them that have, time and again, proved destructive. It’s hard enough coping with fame when you’re grown up. No one should have to deal with it when they’re still too young to cook their own dinner.
‘Doing the work,’ says Mark Williams-Thomas, ‘is the fun bit, the
bit
that’s not exploitative. It’s all the rest that goes with it. That becomes exploitation. There is now no cutoff between adult and child. As long as a child’s parents say yes, they are interviewed and spoken to in the same way as an adult would be.’ It’s the way the kids are featured in newspapers, magazines and television programmes designed to be read or watched by adults. ‘They are,’ says Mark, ‘in quite a vulnerable position, because they are entering an adult’s world.’ Paul Morley concurs. ‘As soon as child performers are commented on in a grown-up context, they become grown-ups, they’re in the same competitive zone.’
In some senses, we’ve come a long way since Noel Coward, commenting on a stage production of
Gone With the Wind
, recommended cutting both the second act and the child actress’s throat. Most journalists these days try to be kind to the children they write about. At least while they’re children. When they hit their late teens, it’s open season. ‘Having warped their entire character by indiscriminately celebrating them when they were too young,’ says Paul Morley, ‘we abuse them when they cannot cope with the pressure, and the strangeness, and the fact that they were famous before they really knew what that meant.’
It’s a tough call because on one level it’s nobody’s fault. It’s not like an evil entity is sitting in the wings, cackling, twiddling its moustache and planning to destroy the innocence of defenceless children. When kids go out on stage to perform professionally, they do so because they want to, because they love doing it. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get the job in the first place: to win a part, as well as lots of luck, you need talent and, crucially, enthusiasm. And it’s partly because the children on stage are innocently and enthusiastically enjoying themselves that people in the audience get an entirely innocent pleasure from watching them. It’s also natural for the people who watch these children doing something fantastic on stage to feel curious about them, to want to know what they’re like. It’s also natural for the media to want to celebrate talent and
innocent
enthusiasm. After all, talent and innocent enthusiasm (not to mention hard work) should be celebrated, just not
indiscriminately
. It is, I think, the ultimately cruel lack of discrimination that implicates us all, collectively – however innocent we may be as individuals – in the failure to protect these children. There should be boundaries. For starters, headline writers could stop describing performing children as ‘stars’.
One of the reasons that it isn’t usually the doing of the work that is damaging to children is that, in the UK in particular, children are very well looked after when they’re working in professional theatre productions.
Some concerns have been raised. The law, says Paul Kirkman of the National Network for Children in Employment & Entertainment, is open to too many varied interpretations. Theatre school Stagecoach is campaigning for the government to provide councils with more guidance on licensing and for the law to be changed so that employers, not individual children, are licensed. There is also some disquiet, Russ explained, about the varying levels of assessment different local authorities apply before licensing chaperones. In some areas they interview and test chaperones face to face every year before granting or renewing their licence, in others it’s a paper exercise, and licences are granted on completion of a form, provision of a medical letter and a CRB check. The latter, Russ feels, is not enough. I tend to agree with him.
But overall, in the UK, the work children do in the entertainment business is very well and appropriately regulated, certainly compared to the US – where, despite the presence of a child welfare officer and/or teacher, an unpaid parent or guardian is legally required to be within sight or sound of their child. Here there are strict limits on the hours they are permitted to work and controls on the conditions they are permitted to work under. Child welfare is paramount, and in my, albeit limited, experience treated seriously as such by everyone involved in working with the children.
On the publicity front, it’s a different story. Because parents are almost always present when their children are interviewed, they – not the production company – are responsible for their child’s welfare. Under most circumstances this would be entirely appropriate: after all, you only need someone to be
in loco parentis
if there are no
parentes
around at the time. The problem is that most stage parents are not wise to the ways of the press (why would we be? Is anyone, for that matter?), and that it’s no one’s job to hold our hands when we come face-to-face with the ladies and gentlemen of it. The production company’s responsibility is to look after the children working for them, not the children’s parents.
Also, there is no part of the Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice that limits and circumscribes coverage of children who do something interesting, exciting and worthy of celebration on their own account. The Code of Practice does, of course, have a section on how the press should deal with children, but its focus is on ensuring that their school life is not intruded upon, that they are not interviewed or photographed without parental consent where ‘issues involving their own or another child’s welfare’ are concerned, and that victims of and witnesses to sex offences retain anonymity. Also on ensuring that celebrities’ children can be protected from the attention their parents attract. You could argue that the celebritisation of a child per se affects their welfare, but then all that’s required is a parent or guardian’s consent before this takes place, and it’s oh-so-easy to be seduced by the glamour and flattery of it all into making bad decisions where the media are concerned. And none of us whose kids are likely to be on the receiving end of that kind of press attention are overly sensitive about privacy. If we were, we would never have let our children go on the stage in the first place. We are the kind of people who tend to say ‘yes’ where others might not, and to say it with big, eager grins.
It wasn’t so bad for Dora. Although her picture appeared in several newspapers, and clips of her performance were shown on lots
of
television programmes, she was always in character and never named. She did do a couple of little interviews with
The Jewish News
and
The Jewish Chronicle
, the former by email, the latter over the phone, during which she rolled around on the floor, hummed and cheerfully answered ‘dunno’ to every question. But we didn’t have to deal with anything that felt intrusive, thank goodness. The tidying up would have killed me.
On Friday, 17 November, I delivered Dora to the BBC, where she met up with her friends in Geese team and off they went, with Russ chaperoning them, to pre-record ‘Do-Re-Mi’ with Connie for that evening’s
Children in Need
broadcast. I left happily, looking forward to watching them on telly and also looking forward to not having to travel to the Palladium until I picked her up after that night’s show. It wasn’t that I resented all the schlepping: I didn’t. Yet. But it was nice to have the time free to try and find the floor underneath all the stuff that, to my new husband’s understandable dismay, I’d just been dropping carelessly on to it.
That evening, Laurie and I settled down in front of the TV to watch (and video)
Children in Need
. I knew they’d be on sometime fairly early in the evening, probably between 8.30 and 9.00 p.m. I was all fidgety waiting, video recorder recording, while I watched the show, not daring to quit the sofa for the loo in case I missed them. And then, at around nine, there they were. The sofa from the set had been transplanted to Television Centre, and they performed their routine with customary gusto. I hadn’t seen that team perform before and it was always fun to see the small idiosyncrasies that each person playing a role brought to it. I rewound and watched again. Several times.
When I went to collect Dora from the Palladium, she excitedly showed me the cuddly Pudsey bear that she had been given at the show, and told me that she kept falling over while they were filming. There’s a bit during the ‘Do-Re-Mi’ sequence when the Gretls have to stand on one leg, and I’d noticed that she was a tad on the wobbly
side.
During one take she’d keeled over. During another, while they were running round the sofa, she’d skidded on the slippery floor and ended up on it. She was, she said, glad they were filmed and not live on the show.
As this was her first performance after opening night, she wasn’t only clutching Pudsey, but also a carrier bag of gifts and cards from the cast and production team. There was a pair of pretty and snuggly warm woollen mittens from Connie, some fruit-shaped scented soaps from Poppy, the Louisa in Kettles, enough chocolate to induce a year-long sugar rush (can’t eat all those herself, I thought greedily) and one shiny little silver box, tied up with string and marked ‘Dora, love Arlene’. It was filled with sparkly artificial snow and little pink, red and white foam hearts, one of which had the number ‘10’ written on it. It took me a while to puzzle out that the 10 was a top
Strictly Come Dancing
score, but once I’d got there I was hugely touched that someone so busy and high profile had gone to the trouble of making rather than buying.
In fact a lot of the cards that the
Sound of Music
people gave each other were homemade. Ian Gelder (‘Uncle’ Max Detweiler) had Photoshopped a picture of his face on to the body of a dirndled figure with its arms outstretched on a gently rural backdrop, and captioned it, in yellow, ‘The hills are alive with the sound of Maxschtick’. Molly-May had carefully drawn a beautiful and intricate picture of all the von Trapp children in their sailor suits, along with the captain, Maria and Franz the butler, all introducing themselves, which had been copied on to shiny photo paper. Adrianna and her family had printed the
Sound of Music
poster image on to beautiful quality cream card with ‘Good Luck’ in curly gold script on the front and Adrianna’s neat pink handwriting inside. Amanda Goldthorpe-Hall (playing Frau Zeller, wife of the Nazi Gauleiter) produced something truly spectacular: a card with two stand-uppable pictures of snowcapped mountains – a BONSAI MOUNTAIN KIT (contemporary Tiroler edition), which came with the following ‘Care Instructions:
Plant
your mountains in a south-facing granite and limestone outcrop, and prune regularly. Guaranteed to become one of your favourite things …’ This all went slightly over Dora’s head. ‘Uh?’ she said, scratching her scalp Stan Laurel-style as I fell about laughing and tried and failed to explain a) what a bonsai tree was and b) why the idea of a bonsai mountain was so funny. She finally got the joke when, making sure that she was happy with what I had written about her, and that I hadn’t left out anything significant, we read through this book together in manuscript.
When Dora returned to school the following Monday, a lot of her fellow pupils had seen her on the programme. ‘I saw you on telly!’ they yelled at her in the playground. She wasn’t sure how to react, so mostly just smiled and nodded. ‘Are you famous?’ several of them asked. Dora wasn’t sure about that either, so she looked at me questioningly. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re not.’
‘Yes she is,’ a couple of children chorused back.
‘Am I a little bit?’ she asked. I conceded that she might, in fact, at that precise moment in time be just a little bit famous, but that it would pass and that she didn’t really want to be famous anyway. ‘Don’t I?’ she asked. ‘No, you don’t,’ I said.
After six-year-old Connie Talbot didn’t win the final of
Britain’s Got Talent
(she has since gone on to record and release a CD), writer Andrew O’Hagan – the author of
Personality
, a novel based on the life of Lena Zavaroni – wrote an impassioned and sensible feature in the
Telegraph
. Under the headline ‘Celebrity is the death of childhood,’ he wrote, ‘What a mercy Connie Talbot, aged six, was not allowed to win … It would have made a lot of people happy for five minutes, and a little girl sad for the rest of her life.’ It’s a sentiment that the US organisation A Minor Concern, led by people who were famous TV stars as children, would echo. Childhood fame is rarely a precursor to a happy adult life.
Earlier in the article, O’Hagan described how, when doing some background research for
Personality
, he went into a classroom full of
girls
and asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. The girls responded very differently from how girls of his generation – the same as mine – would have done: ‘Ordinary girls once wanted to be nurses or hairdressers or, heaven forbid, that glamour job of the 1970s, an air hostess, but the point was they wanted jobs. Three quarters of the girls I gave the paper to just wrote a single word: “famous”.’
After school, and over the next few months that she was performing in
The Sound of Music
, I discussed the down side of fame with Dora whenever the subject came up. I talked with her about how, if you were really famous, you could never go anywhere without someone wanting to take a picture of you, even when you didn’t want to have your picture taken. About how people you didn’t know would know things about you that you didn’t want them to know. I balanced this by telling her that it was all right for people to know that you were good at something, and to be respected for that. It was nice for some people to write, as they had on the internet, for instance, about how good she was at being Gretl and how well she could sing. But that was different from writing about her as a person and about her life.