Before I worked at Croud, I worked at the BBC. I would have started my job there about nine years ago. The building I worked in had a big area of one floor dedicated to the Future. Actually, the division of The Corporation that I worked in when I first started was itself called Future Media, which tells you something about how far from it - most of the division actually was. Later on, it was renamed BBC Digital, but I don’t know if this was because the future had arrived or because the BBC had reached it. Or because someone had noticed that a neverending drive towards the unattainable was like so 1980s grandad.

Just as much as they do now, at that time the BBC understood the threat posed to Great British content by American streaming services. One exhibit within that big area dedicated to the Future was a teenager’s bedroom. All you could do really was step into it, and look around. It was done in quite a lot of detail: a bunk bed, unmade. A chair, a small desk strewn with school books and half-finished homework. Clothes thrown around. A laptop computer. No TV, no radio.

I’ll tell you what the point was. A messy teenager’s bedroom is where the next most important audience is growing up. I don’t mean the second most important audience, I mean the audience that will be the most important audience after the current most important audience isn’t that anymore, which - depending on what division of The Corporation you work in - might actually therefore be the audience that you say is today’s most important audience while deliberately not recognising that it’s their parents that pay the licence fee that probably won’t exist by the time the most important audience is the most important audience.

The teenager’s bedroom was designed to help us understand the reality of YouTube. Even in 2012, the youngest age groups were spending nearly as much time watching YouTube - not on a TV - as they were watching anything else. More recently in 2022, the whole-UK audience on average spent 47% of its video viewing time watching Live TV. For 16 to 24 year olds - so that’s quite grown up, some 24 year-olds even have a proper job - for 16 to 24 year olds, the figure for Live TV was just 17%, and streaming video services including YouTube was 56%. Most of the rest a 16 to 24-year-old’s viewing time is spent playing computer games, on watching a category of video on their phones that Ofcom labels, “Other.”

In 2012, I accepted the numbers about YouTube; but it’s only now that I have kids of my own that I’ve come to understand what they really mean. My daughter is five years old, and she picks up the TV remote, switches it on, and she can watch Netflix, and even Disney+ (for now) or of course BBC iPlayer. But she never chooses any of those. I’m really surprised about how Netflix has fallen out of favour because the kids’ content is almost completely just dopamine-stimulating superficial nonsense. Instead, always, now, she watches YouTube.

So you’d think it must be good, the kind of stuff you get on YouTube. Over thirty years since I was her age, stuff on YouTube must be a lot better than Thundercats was. Willo the Wisp. The Trap Door. He Man. Count Duckula. Super Ted. Banana Man. Danger Mouse. Inspector Gadget. Even compared with these great works of art and morality, whatever our children today watch on YouTube, you’d have thought it must be better.

My daughter watches videos of hamsters on obstacle courses. Sometimes it’s a gerbil. The camera is quite closely framed on the path the rodent is taking through an elaborately designed cardboard maze. Sometimes the obstacles and the dressing of the set is themed, like the hamster is battling to reach the control room of a spaceship; or playing the role of Super Mario, trying to get to the end of the level; or it’s breaking out of prison and escaping from the roof in a hot air balloon. The prison ones are good, I’ve seen the hot air balloon one twice.

I’ll be trying to eat my breakfast or to do something important like update the firmware on a radiator valve and I’ll hear shouting from the living room: “Come on jump! Just jump, now!” I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the expression on the face of a gerbil that’s managed to escape from prison.

Of course it’s all fake. I saw a hamster recently take a dive off the edge of the platform, and - you won’t believe this - they’d just cut and edited the video with a change of angle to hide it. When Eric eats a banana, he doesn’t become Banana Man. We knew that. But now it’s all stage-managed, supposedly “reality,” TV. It has at least given me something to talk to my daughter about. “Go back, play… THERE. Okay go back, play… THERE. See, it went off the platform! Imogen, it didn’t break out of prison. It’s fake.”

Whatever the future holds, it will definitely be different.

Have a good weekend.