Adolescence - Netflix: I spotted something in Stephen Graham’s Adolescence that every parent should know about

Much has already been said and written about how this four-part future classic has been filmed: in short, incredibly, one continuous shot per episode, enabling what happens to extrapolate in real time. It is a naturalist approach and in this case provides a device that gives the story-tellers a ratchet that only cranks in one chronological direction, ever-tightening viewers’ attention in the harrowing clasp of Adolescence.

Graham describes the filming technique as being akin to performing a play, live on stage to a theatre audience, where the fiery jeopardy of a misstep in and of itself creates energy; a tension between the players exposed up on the boards and the expectant audience in the auditorium. The technique is called a one-shot take for a reason: you only get one shot at it, and it is that which has haunted me to the point of writing about it.

I’m a dad without a handbook, busking his way through parenthood, with one boy fast-heading for adolescence and another not far behind, and, it occurred to me, like the actors in each episode of Adolescence, I’ve only got one shot at fatherhood.

Just as does Jamie Miller, the 13-year-old schoolboy in Adolescence, played by Owen Cooper, accused of and arrested for the murder of Katie, his classmate, my boys live tech-filled lives. Their homework requires a device: spelling practice is done on a platform called EdShed; maths is honed using TTRS (Times Tables Rock Stars), they can exchange messages with classmates on something called Stars Messenger and when it’s not all work and no play for them, it’s an hour here and there on their Playstations.

But unlike Call of Duty or Fortnite or whatever the latest gaming craze is, as we come to learn about Katie, there is no opportunity to respawn and go again once you’re killed in the theatre of life. In life there are consequences; in life there is death.

And before you judge me, of course we fill their lives with other things; we take them to parks, football, holidays. We buy them books and read with them. We pay for music lessons and coding clubs, tennis lessons and cricket. We tell them we love them every night and tear out our hair at the number of times we have to tell them to brush their teeth. But it isn’t all lollipops and rainbows in our house, either. We’re not The Waltons.

What dad can put his hand up and say he’s never raised his voice? Never slammed a door or said something he instantly regrets? To that end, Adolescence is as much about Graham’s character Eddie, Jamie’s dad, as it is Jamie. It’s as much about me, you and the next dad who doesn’t know if he’s getting being a dad right or not. In truth, it’s a story about us all and the roles we play in the proverbial village, each charged with bringing up a child whether we’re a parent or not.

As the series comes to an end, Eddie tells us his dad used to thrash the living daylights out of him, and because of that trauma vowed never to lay a finger on his own children. He says he made that promise to himself because he wanted to be better. But then he asks: “Am I any better?”

Perched on the end of the marital bed, perhaps the place where together Eddie and Manda, Jamie’s mum, might have made Jamie, the two of them ask one another whether or not they failed? Failed Jamie. Failed as parents. You, as a viewer in that moment, have the harrowing kaleidoscope of what has just happened to Jamie: arrested at gunpoint in his little boys’ bed, held prisoner in a detention centre submerged in a cacophony of sub-human sounds, subjected to interrogation and isolation – a boy thrust by his own soft-skinned hand into a world you just know will consume him and his childhood forever. One pearlescent fragment in that kaleidoscope that I saw more clearly than everything else was me; what if I’m getting it wrong and, like Eddie and Manda, don’t realise? What more can I do to ensure this can never be me? Arrrrrgh!

‘We kept him indoors with us, in his room, because we knew he was safe,’ they say. I know parents myself who simply will not allow their 10/11 year olds out to a quiet village park alone, for fear of what might happen to them and yet the truth is that these days our kids are even more vulnerable in their own bedrooms, where an internet connection and a computer, intended to enrich their minds and their character through school work and creativity, can, in a heartbeat, become a portal to exploitation and radicalisation that ultimately, in this story at least, leads to murder and incarceration.

As the series signs off with Graham capping off a performance for the ages, crumpled in the bed of his now lost boy, the viscerally raw grief that Graham exudes scarified the conscience of my parenting, leaving in its wake bagfuls of thatch for me to ponder.

It will yours, too.

Every dad should watch Adolescence.