Society makes me really depressed – it’s the kids fault

It’s true. I live in London, and whenever I am out and about now all I see and hear are the kids bossing the parents about and taking charge. Is this the new freedom? Or is this what the book 1984 predicted? It’s got so bad that I only leave the house when I am about to die from lack of fresh air. I used to love to visit parks, galleries and cafes but now they are teaming with loud obnoxious families, or single mums with prams that are bigger than cars, that carry around around their offspring that are shouting their constant demands. 

I know I sound like a grumpy old bugger, but I really feel like my time here is over, I no longer enjoy the world and the people in it, I’m not saying they’re bad people, but they are not ‘enjoyable’. Life is just a hard job now. 

TV is no better, there is a very popular series here that apparently depicts middle class family life perfectly (so the ratings and critics would say) and I was appalled when I watched it.  Outnumbered (BBC1). “Twenty-nine!” yells nine-year-old Ben from the upper deck of an open-topped sightseeing bus. The middle-class Brockman family is having an educational day out, and Ben’s decided he wants to play “spot the chav”, shouting his tally out every time he sees a new one. Clearly, the correct response from his father, played by Hugh Dennis, would be to give the lad a damn good thrashing – for using a term that is sneery and offensive (as well as about five years out of date), and for mocking the less fortunate. Unfortunately, thrashing – in public anyway – is not in fashion as a parenting tool. Well, give him a bloody good talking to then, the hair-drier treatment. Does he? Does he hell. Mr Brockman whimpers an idle threat, so idle that a few minutes later Ben is shouting: “Thirty!”

Ben’s siblings are equally horrid. There’s seven-year-old smartypants Karen, and 14-year-old bag-of-bolsh Jake. You know those parasitic wasps that develop inside the bodies of caterpillars, slowly killing them by feeding off their flesh? Well, the Brockman children remind me of those, their parents being the caterpillars of course (I know it doesn’t quite work, because the caterpillars are a different species, but you know what I mean).

The really depressing thing about Outnumbered is that I think it’s pretty spot on, as a portrait of a typical middle-class London family. Some of it is even improvised: they’re just being themselves, it’s practically a documentary. I know lots of families like this. And these are exactly the people who are watching it, and laughing and saying: “Oh, they’re just like us, isn’t it funny?” Look again, though: yes, they are just like you, and isn’t it appalling?

Does the fact it’s so true to life, so well observed, make Outnumbered good? Well, yes, I suppose it does. But I still find watching it an excruciating experience, and spend most of the time with my hands over my ears. Shut up, will you? I’d wallop the lot of you, or at least send you to bed with no tea. Oh, “supper” is it? Well, I don’t care what you call it, but there isn’t any. And no, I don’t have any myself (children, not tea, which I have plenty of, thank you). How did you guess?

Here, in How the Other Half Live (Channel 4), are a couple of kids who have pretty much everything. Eight-year-old Rebecca and 13-year-old George show us round the dirty great pile they live in, with the parents, in Gloucestershire. This is Daddy’s best car, an Aston Martin; here’s our billiards room, and all our other rooms; these are our acres of rolling Cotswolds, our ponies and our deer; that’s where Princess Anne lives, and Zara Phillips went to our school (“Yes, George, we all know that,” says Rebecca).

The Cotswolds is definitely where it’s at. “Princess Anne lives in the Cotswolds,” George reminds us. “Jeremy Clarkson? Cotswolds. Richard Hammond? Cotswolds. James May? Cotswolds.” It’s pretty much paradise, in other words.

So what do you give to children who have everything and live in heaven? A poor family to play with, that’s what. So the Abingdons sponsor the Buffreys: single mum Cal, who used to be a traveller and now wants to be a barrister; and lovely little Iris. The Buffreys live just up the road from the Abingdons; they must be the only two people in the whole of the Cotswolds who have nothing to do with either the royal family or Top Gear.

It’s a brilliant arrangement. The Abingdon parents, both of whom had humble starts in life themselves, get to put something back, and to feel better about themselves. As well as getting a peek at the real world, George and Rebecca get a new toy – a real-life poor child, who, apart from being a bit smaller and a bit less sure of herself, isn’t really all that different to them. And Iris gets a new guitar. Perfect. Well done everyone.

Rant over, I’m off to study suicide methods.