Who wants to crush a kid’s dreams? Not me. But what to say when asked by a teenager about a career in the media? With tens of thousands of media, journalism and other graduates crowding into the market every year, the chances of finding steady work, let alone stardom, are more remote than ever. There’s no advice I feel comfortable giving. Too often, I suck my teeth and tell them how hard it is, which surely invites them to wonder exactly how hard it can be if I’ve managed to pull it off. Fair point. But what’s the point encouraging them to chase something that probably isn’t there? Dispiriting.
Dispiriting too, when you encounter the opposite of a teenage dreamer: the teenage realist. A few years ago, I was being shown around a secondary school in the Black Country with various worthies. A venerable member of the Cadbury family was in our group. Tremendously tall, stooping to hear what was said, he was kind and attentive, but not of a breed recognisable to any of the kids around us. Undaunted, the head boy led our group with some aplomb. He was but 16 – the school didn’t have a sixth form. He talked to us about the school in a mature, intelligent manner, but without a trace of precocity. In his own quiet way, he was quite something. This young man will go far, I thought. With this in mind, I asked him what he wanted to go on to study. He said he was looking at doing drama at a local college.
“Oh, do you want to be an actor?”
“No, I’d like to be a drama teacher.”
I thought this was magnificent. A thousand other potential drama students of his age would have nothing short of stardom on their minds. But a sadness about it niggled away at me too. As someone in the group pointed out, if you can’t dream at the age of 16, then when can you dream?
I interviewed Michael Sheen last Saturday. It turns out that when he was 12 years old his talent for football was spotted. A tap on the shoulder from a football scout was something I yearned for at that age but, I’m sorry to report, no scout ever gave me a second look. It was Arsenal, no less, who were keen to recruit the young, football-obsessed Michael. The club wanted him, perhaps the whole family, to leave Port Talbot in Wales for London. This they didn’t want to do, which is something he was later grateful for, reasoning that his chance of making it would have been so slim. And so it was that instead he ended up shooting for success in that famously accessible and secure line of work – acting.
I must ask a bookmaker some time to give me the odds on a teenager making it in the fields of a) football b) acting and c) television presenting. Those odds will be long indeed, absurdly long. So long, in fact, that any young person making that bet on themselves is plainly mad and to be discouraged. But, talking to Michael, I had a couple of thoughts, not least that if I’d been at his school, with him excelling at football and acting and probably more besides, he’d have got right on my wick.
But it also struck me that our cultural lives would be nothing without those who were once teenage dreamers. When it comes down to it, the athletes, musicians, writers and actors we so admire are all people who once made absurdly speculative long-shot bets on themselves to succeed, ignoring any and all sensible advice to wise up, get real and look for proper jobs instead. So let us salute the dreamers, the deluded shooters for the stars. For without them, the world would be a bare place indeed.
