Channel 4’s The Family
OK, so now I’ve actually watched the first episode of Channel 4’s The Family – made by Firefly, the production company that brought us Jamie’s Fowl Dinners – and I think Fay Weldon is wrong, wrong, wrong (see below).
Wrong about how TV has coarsened our society and wrong to suggest the models for the family in this series have come out of TV.
Yes, the husband talks in a string of clichés – he even trotted out the tiredest line in adult/teenage arguments, something along the lines of “You treat this place like a hotel” but with something about never paying the bill in for good measure. And, of course, the whole family appear constantly self-conscious in front of the cameras which are recording them 24 hours a day in their own home.
But the cameras don’t follow the family outside the home – as viewers we only find out what they do when they’re not at home from the conversations they have with each other once inside again. And the family could not know, not really, how the programme would be edited and presented in the final analysis.
The first episode was all about the mother, Jane, turning 40 and the middle daughter Emily being a handful of a live-at-home 19-year-old, calling in sick to her job because she’s hungover after another night’s heavy clubbing and failing to do anything around the house, much less pay any rent. Weldon might have had a point if she’d wondered why the family in question let this situation develop and whether they only decided to tackle it once the cameras had been installed.
But there were plenty of tender moments, as when the gauche 14-year-old son and youngest member of the family pulls an outsize 40th birthday card from his bedroom drawer as the family prepare for mum’s big birthday bash. It was brief and nearly made me cry.
More obviously sentimental and possibly staged by the family was mother Jane and bad-daughter Emily’s brief kiss and make up session in which they sing the lyrics to Kate Nash’s Foundations together.
Putting personal snobbery aside – my mother would have swooped on the references to Canterbury and deduced that the family lived in a dreaded ‘Medway town’ – this does seem to be what it says on the tin: a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a more or less ordinary family who are materially comfortable but perhaps not individually the brightest of sparks. Just very, very ordinary.
And in that sense it’s great TV because we all love looking at other people, at other families because we all have a family whether they’re present or absent. We can mentally comparr the family to our own, gossip about them afterwards and either comfort ourselves that we’re nothing like them or completely the same.
It’s also nicely edited – not least in the way the cat is used as the sort of mute chorus to events. But it’s cleverer than that, which is why it’s good TV. If there were no narrative to each episode, if the sequence of events and our reactions as viewers weren’t manipulated by the programme makers it would simply be like watching your neighbours for 100 days continuously. Impossible and tedious.
Yes – to take on Weldon’s points – there was lots of shouting and not much Tanya Byronesque tolerance, openness and understanding. Perhaps Ms Byron should launch a TV series about living with teenagers. But people have written books and endless newspaper columns about life with teenagers and this first episode of The Family was about 40-something parents living with a teenager. So normal. So remarkable for being the stuff of life.
After watching episode two – and you’ll have to trust me that I’m writing this an hour later than the first part of this post – I like the series even more. Ep two is all about Charlotte, the youngest daughter but not the youngest child, who wants to leave school. There’s lots of shouting and tension again and less liberal-minded ‘let’s not rush to judge but hear what she’s got to say first’, although that does happen. But there’s lots of love, too.
The biggest criticism I would wield at this show – as with so many constructed reality TV programmes – is that a probably university-educated production and commissioning elite has chosen a family from a different milieu to star in this documentary. So we’re watching a family who actually have Cocoa Pops available for breakfast (I know!) and who have an apparently limitless supply of fake fur drapes and cushions to lounge around on.
But the central narrative of this episode – a teenager who wants to do one thing while her parents want her to do another – is one that’s repeated endlessly across families and cultures and has been for eons. This family may often talk to each while staring fixedly at one of the TVs in every room. But I bet other families have similar avoidance or semi-engagement strategies and have done since before the TV was invented. So Weldon is wrong. TV isn’t the only thing that’s changed society. It’s just a whole lot more complicated than that.