Nice? Wee?

There's a nice wee video on the BBC Scotland news website today. Not too long. Shows children and young people in the Glasgow Gaelic school staging a nice wee pantomime and singing nice wee songs in Gaelic, and all with a nice twee commentary by the usual patronising reporter.

(By the way, this isn't a moan about how Gaelic is treated in the media, although I could say - as I have often said before and no doubt will again - that Gaelic speakers would probably appreciate it if they could be treated not as special, different and slightly quaint but just as normal people. Some nice, a few not so nice. Some clever, a few pretty dense. Just people like the rest of us in Scotland except that they happen to speak Gaelic).

This is a moan about how adults in the media talk to young people, the under-18s. I hear these apparently educated people being awkward, chortling away at all the wrong moments, asking closed questions (instead of the ones that start 'Tell me about...') and I wonder: Do they have kids themselves, these folk? Is that how they talk to them? That might explain why so many young people in Scotland go through their dealings with the adult world rolling their eyes.

The awkwardness adults show in dealing with young people means that they all too often don't get seen and heard on TV or radio. Yes, they're there in audiences. But actually being seen and heard on, for example, political or educational or arts programmes actually giving their opinions? Not so much. They're on social media, of course, articulate, self-opinionated, cheeky, just like the adults there. But we don't hear about that on Mainstream Media.

The absence of young people and their views on TV and media allows adults to carry on with our distorted view of what young people are like: they're either innocent little moppets simpering away or they're overgrown hooligans destroying our towns and cities.

C4 has been running a series of news reports all through 2016 about how disabled people feel they are treated in the UK. It's been a great series. Government ministers and charities have been brought face to face with what the lives of severely disabled people are like: unable to work because they can't get their wheelchair on a bus. Dismissed as unemployable because they're autistic, although every fibre of their being (and mine) says: they could be employed if they were trained. Most of all, in need of support from a government in Westminster that seems hellbent on making their lives unbearable.

I feel very strongly that the under 18s need the same sort of TV exposure. The Scottish experience of the independence referendum in 2014 showed us a whole group of young people keen to be involved in their communities. Remember Mhairi Black was 19 in 2014, 20 when she became an MP.

Giving young people a voice on TV and radio strikes me as now being pretty urgent. More and more young people have opted out of MSM. TV and radio are now the domain of the elderly and the old. No wonder they're so dull.

Ironically, the one sector of the media where young people do have a voice is Gaelic broadcasting.