Sweet Sixteen

Very impressed with the new BBC3 documentary series Sweet Sixteen so far. Tonight's was brilliant and yet rather sad - a documentary about a sixteen year old Turkish boy in London who was very clever but going off the rails; it showed his school and his sisters trying to steer him through his GCSEs, but having to combat the fact that he was absolutely obsessed with - not girls or gangs or drugs - with being famous.

He said he already thought of himself as a celebrity, and was bunking school to attend X-Factor auditions, appointments with modelling agencies. It quickly became apparent that he was neither talented nor anything approaching good looking enough to be a model. Neither of his parents engaged with him and spent most of their time in Turkey. Eventually he tracked his dad down (he thought he was working in a shop in Archway but it turned out he was in Istanbul) and convinced him to pay for him to have a (completely unnecessary) nose job.

He missed three weeks of school as a consequence and nearly missed his exams (although luckily he was intuitively bright enough to pass them in the end); then went back to all the agencies and drama schools that rejected him, confident that they'd say yes this time. Of course, none of them did. Awful.

Another really sad thing was that he was so obsessed with his career and used it as an excuse to keep saying "my mum and dad want me to get married but I've so much to do first that I'm not marrying 'til I'm 40". Couldn't help wondering if so much of his attraction to the world of drama was influenced by the fact that he seemed quite obviously to be gay, but of course in his traditional family couldn't probably even consider facing up to it.

It ended with one of those painful, defensive rants we're becoming so familiar with: "I will be famous, and everyone will be sorry - I'm totally unique, there's no-one like me, my name should be the first and last thing everyone says every day" etc... agh.