21 Up New Generation
BBC One
****
Jamie’s Comfort Food
Channel 4
***
The label “Millennial” sounds rather sci-fi, doesn’t it? Conjure up a picture of the generation born around the year 2000, and you might instantly imagine a colony of youths, fuelling themselves on drip feeds of social media and narcissism. The research (and YouTube, just as importantly) suggests a more nuanced result — of young adults who can be feckless and self-obsessed, but also serious and social-minded.
So what insights would we glean from 21 Up New Generation, the latest of the 7 Up reboot, following kids we first met at seven in AD 2000? What emerged here — to the film’s credit — was not so much a portrait of a generation, as a portrait of what a 21-year-old is: a person emerging from someone else’s framework into their own.
When we last met Asif, from Glasgow, in 2007 his Muslim life deprived him of the usual vices of teenage lads: drinking, smoking, discos, girls. At 21 he was finding himself, still praying but not to such a strict structure, and making up for those teen years. “I will make my mistakes,” he said, “but I want them to be my mistakes, not anyone else’s.” The “mistakes” including being a lovely young chap who was studying law and a bit scared of dogs.
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As for Orala, from London: her life at 7, 14, 21 years was a document of growing emotional intelligence. At 7, she parroted the words of her mother about having Nigerian “blood” (“I don’t know what that means”); and she didn’t know her father. At 14, she met him in Nigeria and described him as “a man in a room”. At 21 — the reunion didn’t last — he was “just like a parasite that kind of sucked all the life and everything out of my family.” These were indeed a serious-minded, emotionally eloquent lot. Incredibly serious-minded when it came to privately-educated Alexandra, who, now in Paris and still wore the intensity of her 7-year-old self.
As questions of individuals’ religion, identity and ambition bobbed around, there were some insights too into how society has progressed, and how it hasn’t. Belfast-born Jamie, for example, vividly unpacked the imprint that sectarianism still makes on Northern Ireland, as he canvassed for further change. Tonight we meet another six 21-year-olds. Perhaps herein will lie the torment, the dysfunction. Otherwise, the future looks in rather safe shape.
In Jamie’s Comfort Food, Jamie Oliver showed us just how privileged we’ve become when it comes to culinary treats. A simple pavlova is now a meringue stuffed with home-made marshmallow; a macaroni cheese now something that contains lobster head juice, presented with the line: “If you’re not confident on how to kill a lobster . . . ” And filmed with sequences in soft-focus glow, so we know it’s a bit naughty. I worry for our waistlines, for our bank balances . . . and also for our adulterers. The burger he cooked — massaged thoroughly, painted lovingly with layers of mustard wash, wrapped in sauces including a Bourbon splash – completely subverted that age-old anti-adultery slogan: “Why go out for a hamburger when you can get steak at home?” It seems that that moral compass needs to be re-tuned, now that burgers are high-end wares you could happily spend a night in a hotel room with.