I sincerely hope you have never seen the television programme My Super Sweet 16. It's on MTV and although it's an American show - how could it not be? - it now exists in a xeroxed British version, called My Super Sweet 16 UK . If you haven't stumbled upon it, please don't seek it out unless you have a strong stomach. (If you do find it, please ensure you are not wearing shoes, as you may feel the urge to kick the television set in.)



Here's how it goes: a spoiled brat approaching their 16th birthday is corralled by the programme-makers into throwing a party to beat all previous parties. Now, who actually pays for all this is unclear. Certainly, the parents seem well off. The "narrative" of the show, which is typically murky for a "reality" format, involves the parents being ordered around by said brat, as preparations escalate, a dance routine is rehearsed and the centre of their universe becomes ever more demanding and appalling. If the programme is to be believed, 15-year-olds in America are all rich beyond their wildest dreams and interested only in designer labels, price tags and being "popular", a quality that can be bought with the aforementioned designer labels. Now, fair enough, most of us are pretty shallow at 15, caught between childish urges and creeping hormonal discomfort, but then most of us don't have access to blank cheques from daddy and an overinflated sense of our own importance. The Super Sweet 16 bash - heavily formulaic, if you watch more than one episode and you mustn't - always involves a "theme", a "performer" (ie. someone famous appearing to mime to a record and thus make the birthday boy/girl more popular with their squealing contemporaries), that dance routine, and a tantrum, when something fails to go right. Clearly, if you are going to organise a massive party, you don't leave stuff to the last minute, but they always do, in order for the programme to introduce some jeopardy where there really is none. Omigod, the snow machine isn't big enough! The Bollywood dance routine won't fit on the stage! They can't book Kayne West! (They all seem to want to book Kanye West.)

It's trash telly, but it's also deeply frightening that there are kids out there this materialistic and hollow, and parents out there so unable to provide love they substitute it with money, in the process creating a monster. I'm afraid I've seen a number of these things now, mostly the UK ones, and if someone told me that the whole thing was set up and that the parents and kids were played by actors, I wouldn't be surprised. Charlie Brooker, whose Screenwipe shamefully brought the show to my attention, called it "an Al-Qaeda recruitment film," and I can't top that for accuracy. You stagger away from watching it with the cast-iron certainty that we are all going to hell.

Of course, it can be watched for morbid fun. Midway through, the party-thrower is helicoptered or chauffeured to a photogenic location, there to hand out the invites to a scrum of schoolfriends (and I use the word "friends" in the social networking sense). It is here that "reality" comes unmoored from reality. If there really are kids like this out there in the country I live in, I want them removed from the gene pool. This may sound harsh, but if these 15 year olds grow up thinking that wealth is everything, what are their eventual offspring going to grow up thinking? (A dimwit from Essex who conspired with her "friends" not to invite any "losers" or "ugly people" to her James Bond-themed party, to which a mercenary Akon turned up to mime his song, was given a bracelet that cost as much as a car.)

As ever, I blame the parents. I am reluctant to criticise parenting, not being one myself, but the cowed, unthinking, credit-card-swiping fools on this programme (all "new money") have misunderstood what parenting actually is.

Labels: hell, kids, tv