by Lisa Gee
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.
We also talked about what she wanted to do when she grew up. Interviewers from both The Jewish News and The Jewish Chronicle had asked her whether she wanted to be an actress when she was older, and we’d discussed what her answer should be. Her first instinct was to say ‘Yes,’ or, ‘But I’m one now.’ But we talked about it and I pointed out that she was still only six years old, and she might find out about lots of other things she wanted to do when she was a bit older. I reminded her that only a year or so previously she had been certain that she wanted to be an astronaut (that was when she had been cross over how unfair it is that children aren’t allowed into space).
She listened. Next time someone asked her if she was famous, she wrinkled up her freckled little nose and said ‘no’. And the end of the Jewish News interview read, ‘Asked if she wanted to be an actress, Dora insisted: “I don’t know. I’m only six!”’
Maybe I shouldn’t have directed her and should have let them print her first, unconsidered, six-year-old’s response. Even though that would have been more natural, it felt wrong. I wanted to keep her feet on the ground. I don’t know what the healthiest and most robust idea of self is for a six-year-old, but I’m pretty sure it can’t be ‘I’m an actress’. It’s partly about the difference between doing and being. I was perfectly happy for her, even at her young age, to enjoy – and work hard at – her acting and singing and to do it at a professional level. That was an opportunity to stretch her wings and explore how high she could fly. I wasn’t, on the other hand, happy thinking of her – and for her to think of herself – as an actress. That might sound completely contradictory, but it isn’t. She might have been old enough to do a job, but as far as I was concerned, she wasn’t anywhere near old enough to define herself by it. Definitions – even high-status ones – create limits. If you’re an actress, you’re not something else. If you are a person who does some acting, you can do other things as well.
I also wonder whether, unless they’re specifically researching what children think about a particular topic, the national consumed-by-adults media should have direct access to small children. Grown-up performers in the public eye get advice and training in how to cope with the press. They have publicists helping them to manage their image and still, often, can’t. And shouldn’t one of the joys about childhood be – once you’ve ascertained that your school skirt is long enough to cover any holes in your regulation black tights and that Mummy’s used enough hairspray, hairnets and hairpins to prevent your bun unravelling during your ballet exam – freedom from the awareness that there might be such a thing as an ‘image’ to manage? Isn’t that part of what it means to be innocent?
Also, I didn’t want Dora to identify what she was doing now with what she would spend her adult life doing. I come from a family where several people have performed as children and then chosen to go off and do something completely different. And even though, as Tracy Lane – Emily’s mum and David Ian’s wife – is fond of saying about newspapers, ‘they’re just tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappings’, once you’ve put something down in print, it’s somehow more binding than just saying it. I didn’t want Dora to feel like she’d already made a decision about her adult life. If childhood should be about anything, it should be about possibilities as yet undreamt-of, about a sense that there are things out there to be discovered, a whole world to be explored. I want Dora to feel that the future is an open, uncharted place, not something that’s already mapped out for her. That being in The Sound of Music was just one of a whole host of exciting experiences that her life might hold – that although there might be more exciting acting and singing experiences ahead, she might also get just as big a buzz from a whole range of other activities – and I didn’t want her, at the age of six, to rule anything out. Although, believing that there’s some virtue in maintaining a degree of realism, I did point out that she was unlikely ever to make an Olympic sprinter.
A few months later, one of Molly-May’s older twin sisters, Emily, delivered a speech at school, as part of her GCSE coursework. Its title was ‘To Be Or Not To Be?’. Born into a showbusiness family – both her grandmothers run stage schools and both her parents performed as children, though neither does now – at the age of three Emily and her twin Laura watched their cousin on a TV commercial and announced, ‘We want to be in there’. Soon, they were. And on the stage at the Palladium in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Now, Emily isn’t sure whether she wants to continue to act as an adult. ‘If I was guaranteed good regular pay from theatre and television I would possibly be more inclined to try the profession,’ she said. She’s shocked by the statistic that ‘on any given day almost 95% of actors or actresses are out of work’. But ‘the buzz that I get when I am on stage is unlike any other feeling I have ever felt … the adrenaline rush that you feel is better than anything else I have ever experienced … I love knowing that you are making a difference to other people’s lives. I believe without music and drama, the world would be a place with no soul.’ There might be other jobs that she finds just as fulfilling, that come without ‘the fickleness of the business, the empty promises, exploitation and false hope of the dramatic world’, that pay the mortgage and fund holidays. On the other hand, ‘I could earn the most money in the world and be the most miserable person. Perhaps sacrificing lifestyle and a good income is worth it to be emotionally, spiritually and totally fulfilled.’
Now in her mid-teens, Emily still has plenty of time to
decide. Or to try one path and, if it doesn’t suit, to change course and try another. What’s important is that she understands the implications of making a particular choice. And that’s what I’d like Dora to grow up with: an understanding that it’s fine to choose a career that, in all likelihood, will pay diddly-squat and involve long periods of unemployment, as long as you’re willing to deal with the consequences.
At the time of writing, Dora says that when she grows up she wants to be an actress and – once reassured that she would be unlikely to get blown up if an experiment went disastrously wrong – a scientist. Or a horse-rider. Even though I couldn’t help pointing out that being a horse-rider was probably more dangerous than being a scientist, I’m happy with those three options. They seem like a balanced mix, especially as she seems keen on pursuing them concurrently, and are reasonable aspirations for a child of her age. Only one of the three is probably beyond the bounds of the possible. But there’s some virtue in maintaining a degree of unrealism, too. Especially when you’re under ten.
Meanwhile, the last word on celebrity went, unbeknownst to Dora, to her cousin Millie. One day, shortly after Dora’s stint on the show had finished, we were going over to my sister Nikki’s house for tea. Millie also had a school friend coming to play. In the car on the way home, Nikki overheard Millie telling her friend that Dora would also be there. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘my cousin. She used to be famous.’ On Sunday, 19 November, Jo sent me an email to say that Dora was ‘deviating from the blocking’, and asking if anyone had come to watch her in the show and had been ‘coaching’ her afterwards. Remembering Jo’s warning about a child she’d had to release from her contract because her mum had been telling her to upstage everyone else, I panicked and sent back a long email saying that no one had been contradicting the director’s instructions, and even if anyone had been, Dora wouldn’t listen to them. Especially if it was me doing the telling which, obviously, I would never have dared to do. I also explained that ‘Dora isn’t the sort of person to do something wrong in order to get a better audience reaction in ANY aspect of her life. She’s very serious about everything she does and always prefers being in the right to being popular, and can feel mortified by her own mistakes.’ Which is true. I asked her about where she’d been on stage and where she thought she ought to have been, and she definitely thought she’d been doing it right. In some cases she thought she’d been the only person getting it right and everyone else had been wrong. Gently I pointed out that as she was the youngest and that Sophie, who was playing Liesl, was a grown-up, maybe, just maybe, everyone else was getting it right and she was making a little, unimportant mistake or two. I also told her that it didn’t matter if she got it a bit wrong sometimes, as she was the youngest, but that she should ask children’s director Frank Thompson where she was going wrong and for help to get it right, because it was important to try.