Professional Documents
Culture Documents
along with the aforementioned subjects, caused quite a stir amongst the
hegemony. Grange Hill went against Hebdiges theory of youth are shown
as either trouble or fun, there is no inbetween, as it showed characters
that could be both or neither of these things, and gave the viewing public
an almost real-life look at comprehensive schools at the time.
Byker Grove, first aired in 1989, is another youth culture drama that
proved controversial to the views of the hegemony through its complex
representation of a youth club in Byker, Newcastle. In this TV show, the
characters were working class youths, and like Grange Hill issues such as
drugs, violence, sex and even sexual violence were explored. Both these
shows caused a Moral Panic, in line with Cohens theory. These shows
were among the first that were specifically for young people, and so
therefore did not contain the simple representations of youth culture that
served to alienate young people as can be seen in earlier shows.
The complexity of media representations in contemporary youth drama is
much less than the historical counterparts, however the volume of content
available to and specifically for young people is higher than it has ever
been. Every TV network wants a piece of this lucrative market, and
channels such as E4 and BBC3 cater almost specifically for the young
people.
However, there is solid evidence that although the number of shows has
drastically increased, the complexity of the representations is decreasing
steadily. This can be seen in the BBC3 show Some Girls. This show is a
perfect example of Hebdiges theory that I mentioned before, as the
characters are all extremely stereotypical in a way that shows how the
characters have been crafted to be relatable to as many different people
as possible. The reason that they can be relatable is that the characters
are so simple they together they have basic qualities that everyone have.
Their characters never go beyond the clever one, the angry one, the
stupid one and the sarcastic one. This representation of youth is very
much trapped within a closed box, and the characters are not able to
explore different traits that create a real-life personality.
Even shows that are realistic such as E4s Youngers follow this trend to
some extent. Although the characters are vastly more sophisticated than
that of Some Girls, we can still see that Jay is trouble and Yemi is
serious. This again follows Hebdiges theory of the representation of
young people, and the fact that these two shows demonstrate this is an
example of Girouxs theory of adults not understanding the true
complexity of young people. The makers of these shows are adults, and