What follows represents the opinion of none but myself. It does not, as far as I’m aware, reflect the opinion of anyone associated with Bromley Theatre Guild, nor with any of the Drama Societies with which I am involved. Just me.
Anyway.
I’m a matron. Really. I’ve got a laminated card that says so. As is often the case, it has a picture on it of someone you wouldn’t trust to keep an eye on a team of rugby players, never mind your children. That’s photo-booths for you. Next Autumn, it expires, and they’ll want me to pop along with a new photo, in case I’ve shaved or started wearing glasses in the interim. I’m not bothering, and I’d like to explain why.
Those who know me anything more than slightly will dismiss this as being entirely of a piece with my generally bolshie outlook, but I do have more thought-out reasons as well, and it’s those I’d like to explain.
To keep the tone light, at least to begin with, let’s look at this from the point-of-view of the ‘Law of Unintended Consequences’. Regulations that were drawn up in the sixties to guard against exploitation of young performers on the professional stage and in film and tv, and that were never meant to apply to amateur societies have been dusted down and applied to them anyway, to be on the safe side. Rules that might make a modicum of sense in the labyrinths of a West-End theatre are now applied to theatres the size of a decent suburban semi. At the one where I’ve recently been standing guard, the rules call for one chaperone for each gender and one to see the kids safely along the twenty-five paces it takes to get to the stage. (Twenty-six if you take for the bend in the stairs). To fulfill my part in this operation, and owing to the layout of the building, I could either position myself outside the toilet, or if that seemed a touch irregular, I could stand directly opposite the constantly opening door to the girls’ changing room. Brilliant.
My wife, who was recently directing children, could not be considered to be chaperoning, even her own child, as her attention was considered to be on her other duties. In fact, her attention was mostly on trying to deal with a snow-drift of forms, birth-certificates, consent forms, health declarations, passport photos, and for all I know, tarot-readings; actual directing didn’t get much of a look-in.
The wing-space, at best comparable to a reasonably-sized broom cupboard, is now cluttered with concerned-looking adults, poised to leap into action at the first sign of, well, whatever it is we’re supposed to be on the lookout for. Hopefully we’ll know it when we see it.
And of course, at ten o’clock an imaginary whistle blows, and all the children turn back into pumpkins or something. Or more likely, go home to their sky+ boxes to catch up on all the tv they’ve missed while onstage.
I note en passant that the small print suggests I keep a weather eye for the youngsters’ ‘moral welfare’. I can’t wait to see what happens when I storm onstage during a Shakespeare tragedy and drag my charges off in a headlock, announcing that I’m saving them from years of therapy.
So far, so facetious, and I’m well aware that making fun of the well-meaning clods who run our regulatory bodies is shooting fish in a barrel. It’s always a shame when a heart of gold is teamed with a brain of cheese-dip, but then these people have to be seen to be doing something, however pointless, and they can’t entirely be blamed for the fact that they’ve no idea what they’re about.
Where any sympathy I may have had dries up completely is in what they do actually intend, rather than in what they didn’t, and the serious point is this: they genuinely believe that children will be safer if they are taught to treat everyone with suspicion, that all adults represent a threat, that any adult is considered guilty of being at the very least a potential abuser until they have ‘proved’ that they aren’t. And not only ‘proved’ it, but ‘proved’ it time after time. Ad infinitum.
The family atmosphere that was there for years and years, in which the adults naturally and without prompting, took care of the youngsters in the cast, watching out for them and helping them along, and which, by the way, was a situation in which it was infinitely more likely that anything untoward would quickly come to light, is now considered to have been dangerously unregulated and slapdash, and far from being allowed to help out, the older cast-members are now ordered to keep their distance. How much better to deputise half the adults as a sort of Stasi-lite to keep a wary eye on the other half.
Say what you like about children today, and believe me, I do, they’re no mugs. They know exactly why all of a sudden there are irrelevant grown-ups on every landing, and guess what was the subject of most of the witty banter during the coming and going on my staircase? Yup, paedophiles. Seriously, you couldn’t make it up.
It is worth mentioning, incidentally, that among the currently young, ‘paedo’ is the term of abuse de choix, (alongside ‘gay’, the little darlings), tossed around with abandon. It would be reassuring to know the walls don’t really have ears when that one is flying about.
Anecdotal evidence suggest that some societies are already starting to decide that the thing’s not worth the candle, although this cuts little ice at HQ. When this was put to our own local Council drone, she replied, rather sniffily I thought, that she had yet to see any diminution in her workload. My sympathy was fulsome.
The problem is that regulations like this are easy to dream up and set in train, but very difficult to get rid of. It is no bother at all for a councillor or minister who hasn’t had a good headline in ages to declare themselves to be fighting against child abuse; as opposed, one takes it, to the rest of us, who are for it. To come out in opposition to these ideas without sounding like a member of the Gary Glitter Defense Committee is a bit of a challenge. What we have to make clear is that it is the many and wonderfully varied interpretations that different ’stakeholders’ are putting on the regulations that are causing the grief. The best we can hope for is to trump their expertise with our expertise. We’ve been successfully running drama groups since the time of the Attlee Government; they have been attempting to implement a bunch of silly regulations dumped upon them unasked from above for a few months now. The truth of the matter is that a system that has worked without serious problems for decades is being distorted for well-meant reasons, by people who haven’t troubled themselves to learn about our circumstances, but whom it may still be possible to convince that we are in a better position, to say nothing of better motivated, to police our own situation than they are. It can’t hurt to try.
And what I would say to any parent wary of leaving their brood in our care is this: join the group, get to know us, get a feel for the way the group functions, and when you feel like you and your kids are among friends, when you’re confident that we’ll take care of them because we’re like that, and not because of the secret police behind the skirting-board, then let them go onstage with us. They’ll be fine.
Among the other fun stuff I do for a living, I photograph a lot of school plays, so I’ll continue to be reliant on my regular CRB checks, although the teachers I’ve spoken to have privately suggested that they realise there’s not much I can get up to from the fifth row of the stalls, but that’s quite enough for me. For the rest, it’s a deliberately-created atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust that I’m not interested in being part of.
You’ll just have to trust me.
yours ever,
Tim Hinchliffe.
St Mark’s & Keston Players: CONFIRMED