Last night's Child Genius on Channel 4 promised to be the first part of a series that will revisit 10 'gifted' children every two years to monitor their progress in life--a sort of Seven Up! for the 21st Century. And with extremely intelligent children. But the programme stood up well as a one-off documentary showing what life is like for these children and their parents, despite it's hour and a half running time. No irritating pre ad break trails of what was to come, nor reminders of what you'd just seen three minutes ago. This was how all documentaries should be made. It was modern, clear, and insightful. Totally unpatronising to both audience and participants, Child Geniuswas such a refreshing thing to see on TV, especially on the increasingly tabloid Channel 4.
It would be so easy to hate the kids featured in the programme. They're freaks. They can do things many adults will never be able to do, and that can make people jealous. But the beauty of Wall to Wall's film was that it avoided the temptaion to portray them as mere robots, or the product of overly pushy parents. The parents were pushy, it's true, but you couldn't blame most of them. What else could they do you do but encourage and stimulate their children when they discovered they had amazing abilities to do maths, play the piano, cook, write, etc? Anything other approach would risk condemning them to years of boredome and frustration.
The film introduced us to a variety of gifted children, each with a very different personality and set of skills. The participants ranged from the completely freakish family whose hothousing of all of their offspring looked nothing short of child abuse (the mother had decided it was her duty to produce doctors for the world. Tha father was barely allowed to speak at all), to the charmingly endearing parents who were totally uninterested in their son's IQ score, but instead wanted to know how to help him live a happy life despite his heavy burden of being a wonderful thinker with an extraordinary outlook on the world. This child, Dante, perhaps provided the most touching moments of the programme. His depression seemed totally understandable, and we shared his frustration with having the mental abilities of a very sensitive adult whilst being trapped in the reality of being a child. He strived for perfection in a world where perfection is impossible--a summary of the human condition that most adults on TV would have difficulty expressing as clearly and simply as he did.
At no time did the programme makers give in to the pressure to make any of the parents look better or worse than they probably were. They were real people in a state of genuine confusion over how to react to their unusual children. They were caring, harsh, encouraging, and flawed, all at the same time, and it is no easy thing to put that accross in a film. Only the Addams Family-like doctor and spiritual leader breeders came over as cruel and insane, and it was hard to see that as anyone's fault but their own. The programme was brave to show their peculiarities in full, too.
If there were more challenging, intelligently made programmes like this one on our screens, perhaps TV would be helping to bring up a generation of thinkers and doers like those we saw in Child Genius. Instead we seem to be breeding overweight, lazy, superstitious drones to be future participants for Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, and Fat Club. Lazy, rubbish programmes help make lazy rubbish children.
Link to Child Genius promo
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