Hat’s entertainment

Teenagers trouble me, especially the male of the species. I have two of my own, and they veer from having to be forced to adopt any kind of personal hygiene routine (CC#3, 13 this coming week), to spending so long in the bathroom that you think that they must have evaporated in the steam (CC#2, just turned 17). This later stage always comes complete with an obsession with specific products. I was talking the other day to an editor at a TV listings magazine who turned out to have a teenage son the same age as CC#2. It didn’t take long to discover both of us hate the smell of Lynx.

I am once again in the throes of making a TV programme, hence the interest from the TV listings magazine. People ask if filming for TV is “fun”. There are lots of interesting things about TV production, and I like the people I work with very much, but I wouldn’t necessarily describe the process as fun.

Once again I am being asked to repeat a set of apparently simple tasks for the sake of some key section or other. For the last series I managed to make quite a hash of merely exiting a lift; this time I had to spend a day being filmed cycling for what, I am told, will be the “post-title sequence”. The director for the day was handsome, heterosexual and a he – in the world of TV all three of these things seem rarely concurrent. He had selected a particularly picturesque bridge for me to cycle over.

He had in mind capturing the bridge, the sky and the bike (and my orange Orvis hat, which is now a key prop), uncluttered by traffic. This is a very busy bridge, one-way and controlled by traffic lights at either end, so his vision was not easy to achieve. I had to wait for the traffic light to turn green, let all the other traffic go off and away, and then pedal like mad to get up the pre-bridge incline and over the bridge before the traffic started coming the other way. Several times I failed to make it, and had to dismount and finish on foot, then turn round and try again.

CC#3 may soon decide to raise the standards of his personal hygiene because, he tells me, he has a new girlfriend. On further investigation this seems to be a relationship brokered by some of the girls from the school next door to his who travel on the same bus as him each morning. Has he ever met the girl in question, I asked, or is it just a text relationship? He assures me he has met her, and indeed she called the house the other day to ask him to go to the cinema with her, offering him a choice of two dates.

I predict this girl will go far – brave enough to call the house, sensible enough to offer a range of dates. He accepted the earlier date but a few days later received another invitation for the same day from some boys in his year to go go-karting. He called the girl and bumped her to the second date offered. I told him that in a year’s time not only will he be washing more frequently, he will prefer girls to go-karting.

What qualifies as a “girlfriend”, anyway? CC#1 is seeing someone at university at the moment but doesn’t describe her as such. When do you get official status? One of my colleagues described her young man as an “almost-boyfriend” the other day. My financial controller has just told me that she has met someone who “might be a boyfriend”. Do they qualify as a boyfriend/girlfriend only if you are having regular sex with them? Or if you have introduced them to your parents? Or your boss?

Perhaps the true measure of how important someone is to you is when you absolutely have to use hair products before you can even contemplate seeing them. CC#2 could stock a high street chemist with the products in his bathroom, but the one thing he cannot manage without is VO5 hair styling gel. Which is owned by the same people as Lynx, I note, who presumably see teenagers as anything but troublesome.

mrsmoneypenny@ft.com

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