{"id":294028,"date":"2026-02-12T10:37:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T10:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/294028\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T10:37:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T10:37:10","slug":"adolescence-writer-jack-thornes-experiment-in-free-range-parenting-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/294028\/","title":{"rendered":"Adolescence writer Jack Thorne\u2019s experiment in free-range parenting \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I believe that children are the future. As Marx<\/a> said, we need to teach them well and let them lead the way, show them all the beauty they possess inside. Maybe it was Hayek<\/a> who said that. <\/p>\n

One way or another, this sentiment is the basis of the BBC<\/a>\u2019s most recent social experiment, Lord of the Flies<\/a> (BBC One, Sunday), an attempt to build an all-child community on a remote island. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly worth a shot. It\u2019s an experiment in screen-free, free-range parenting. And it\u2019s quite idyllic, really: not a phone in sight, just young people living in the moment while being watched by judgmental insects and birds, and the occasional corpse of an adult.<\/p>\n

The hero is clearly Jack, an imperious young toff who arrives with a phalanx of strapping uniformed supporters. (They\u2019re part of a choir.) Jack understands that power is there for the taking and that it\u2019s in his very nature to rule. <\/p>\n

Look, who else is going to do it? A bunch of slack-jawed toddlers who are clearly meant to be a metaphor for the common man and who spend most of the time just loafing around the seaside?<\/p>\n

Yes, Jack will surely be crowned Lord of the Flies once the show comes to an end. (I\u2019m a little unsure of how the format works.) He has the vision thing and a commanding presence. He\u2019s not great on the fine detail, but, in fairness to him, that\u2019s all very boring.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the preserve of another character, called Piggy, who is constantly going on about how they should collect food and signal for help and ensure good sanitation and find water blah-blah-blah. You won\u2019t believe how much he goes on.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe important thing is we care for the littluns,\u201d he says at one point.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy should we care for the littluns?\u201d Jack replies, reasonably \u2013 and indeed it\u2019s clear to me, even from this distance, that some of the littluns have good eatin\u2019 on them and that Piggy should mind his own business and not get in the way of Jack\u2019s \u201clittluns farm\u201d or whatever else the market might have planned for them.<\/p>\n

At another point Piggy waffles on about how the pilot of their crashed plane, whose corpse they find atop a mountain, deserves a Christian burial. Jack has the body flung from the mountain instead. Jack gets things done and tells it like it is. He\u2019s the sort of child you can imagine having a pint with.<\/p>\n

Nor does Piggy understand that the form of centralised command economy he wants to establish died with the last century. Now is the time of thrusting entrepreneurs like Jack. If we bring Piggy\u2019s proposed reforms and regulations to the island (or indeed to this island) it will prevent growth and disincentivise wealth creators like Jack.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Patrick Freyne: The Beauty asks big questions. What if sexy people got so hot they exploded?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Oh, there\u2019s also a character called Ralph, who is a centrist. That\u2019s all you need to know about Ralph, really. He lives slap bang in the middle of the Overton window at all times, and he gets to pretend he\u2019s in charge because Jack (the army) and Piggy (the civil service) let him.<\/p>\n

His personality is what you get when you add Jack and Piggy\u2019s personalities together and split the difference. That\u2019s basically how centrism works. (At the start of each week, we members of Ireland\u2019s centrism planning committee split the difference between all sorts of positions and then distribute the results to the nation\u2019s pundits and policymakers.)<\/p>\n

Before long everyone is ferally chasing and trying to murder a baby pig (I thought fondly of my own nephews), and the littluns start spreading a rumour about a monster in the forest. (You can\u2019t prove there isn\u2019t a monster, so as a centrist I have to take this seriously.) <\/p>\n

By the end of the episode the boys are lighting a fire in order to attract the attention of passing rescuers. Piggy keeps saying they shouldn\u2019t be making the fire too big, because they\u2019re so near the tree-line, and that they shouldn\u2019t be using rotten branches, because they spark blah-blah. You know what he\u2019s like.<\/p>\n

Anyway, soon the whole forest is on fire through no fault of anyone\u2019s, and the bigger boys have to protect the littluns from the flames (which feels like interference in the market to me). <\/p>\n

Then Piggy starts obsessing over the fact that they can\u2019t find one of the littluns. He\u2019s certainly not going to win Lord of the Flies with that attitude. He should be focusing on the positive, on all the littluns who didn\u2019t disappear. He needs to stop talking down the island\u2019s burgeoning economy. The market is, in fact, on fire right now.<\/p>\n

I have just realised that, from another perspective, Lord of the Flies is not a scripted reality social experiment at all but a Jack Thorne<\/a> drama adapted from William Golding<\/a>\u2019s dystopian novel about marooned schoolboys. <\/p>\n

Thorne, who wrote Adolescence<\/a>, is once more exploring the boundaries between civilisation and chaos, and Marc Munden, the series\u2019 director, marshals a very talented young cast and a gorgeous location. The storytelling is slow and lyrical and the cinematography is beautiful. <\/p>\n

On reflection, it\u2019s possible that socially conscious, kind, working-class Piggy is the hero of this story not cold, aristocratic, grasping Jack, who is, I now see, ruining everything with his entitlement and greed. They don\u2019t really write allegorical stories like this so much any more. It feels a bit painfully on the nose, to be honest.<\/p>\n

Speaking of aristocrats on strange islands, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor<\/a>\u2019s less famous brother Charles<\/a>, a king by trade, has a documentary on Prime Video<\/a>. It\u2019s called Finding Harmony: A King\u2019s Vision, and it\u2019s all about the British monarch\u2019s ongoing interest in environmental issues. It\u2019s the latest in a wave of documentaries controlled by their subjects, so it has all the energy of a beautifully produced corporate video. The documentary team quite literally stan a king.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0What do the women want? Nice frocks, good sex and, as Nicola Coughlan knows, one more key elementOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Narrated by Kate Winslet<\/a>, it examines Charles\u2019 forays into ecological activism and organic farming from Dumfries to Afghanistan. These are all worthwhile projects that closely involve local communities, but it\u2019s hard to shake the whiff of top-down noblesse oblige from the whole endeavour. <\/p>\n

Charles\u2019 alternative to capitalism\u2019s wanton destruction seems to be a form of benign feudalism and not, for example, an autonomous workers\u2019 collective. This shouldn\u2019t be surprising. He is a king. And as far as I know he hasn\u2019t yet gifted the land he owns to the people living on it. <\/p>\n

In fact, on some level I suspect he cares about the environment exactly because he owns so much of it. I also suspect that a few more compelling documentaries about Charles\u2019 family are in the works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I believe that children are the future. As Marx said, we need to teach them well and let…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1578,93,140278,61,60,111682,45806,68795,7428,13393,39033,11184,140279],"class_list":["post-294028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-bbc","tag-entertainment","tag-friedrich-hayek","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jack-thorne","tag-karl-marx","tag-kate-winslet","tag-king-charles","tag-patrick-freyne","tag-prime-tv","tag-prince-andrew","tag-william-golding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}