Alice Douglas's children have spent much of the year competing in high-profile television talent shows. They say they have benefited from the experience but, she asks, was she right to expose them to the glare of celebrity at such a young age?
One day in May this year, Hero, my 11-year-old daughter ? a budding musician ? decided to do a quick internet search for music competitions she could enter. Little did I know that within a matter of months this would lead to both Hero and her younger brother Tybalt appearing in separate television series before millions of people and immersing the whole family in the dizzying world of television talent shows.
Hero went on to become a nightly fixture on Sky's Must be the Music, performing alongside Dizzee Rascal, Sharleen Spiteri and Jamie Cullum in front of 13,000 people at Wembley Arena and a TV audience of millions, while Tybalt won the BBC series My Genius Idea with a device he invented after a friend from school was killed by a car while on his bike. The device warns car drivers on rural roads if there is a bike, horse or broken-down car round the next bend.
That afternoon on the computer, Hero didn't just launch herself into living rooms all over the country ? she took us with her.
My children aren't classroom-clever or particularly motivated by schoolwork but at an early age have found what they want to do as a career. Hero writes songs and accompanies herself on the harp and piano, and has no doubt music is her future. Tybalt invents gadgets and is always fiddling with electrical circuits or dismantling my car engine or, to my horror, making mini bombs.
He has even designed a mummy thermometer for me to wear to tell him how cross I'm getting. He gave it to me as a present and it fits neatly into my iPod armband. When I press a button, it illuminates a series of red lights to show if I'm getting angry. One light is a bit cross and five means I am furious. He said to me: "At least I have some warning before your head pops off and you start screaming like a banshee." It also has a green section, which I light up if he's being exceptionally good. Five green lights means extra pocket money for perfect behaviour.
The family's foray into television started when Hero decided she wanted to find an outlet to perform her own music. She's been writing songs at a prodigious rate for a few years and had become a fixture performing in local folk clubs and festivals but wanted to find a bigger stage. She had always competed in eisteddfods and had just won the under-14 and under-11 girls solos at the Chester music festival, but wanted to go further.
The first email Hero sent off when she embarked on this search was to Sky 1's Must be the Music and, to be honest, I knew that if she was seen she stood a good chance of getting on the show.
Obviously it's hard not to be amazed by your child's talent, but it seems hers is obvious to other people. A top casting director once rushed up to me after Hero had sung in a cathedral in the south of France insisting that she hadn't seen that quality since casting a young Kate Winslet. More recently, when Hero was recording some solos for a CD of hymns, a music producer who won an Ivor Novello award and has worked with many children, including Charlotte Church, told me that Hero was the most talented and professional child he had ever worked with.
So I was hopeful when it came to the first round of auditions for Must be the Music. And I was proved right: the judges' jaws dropped when they heard her perform. Although her place on the show wasn't confirmed for a month, I felt pretty certain it would happen.
What took things to another level for the family was that, in the meantime, she had kept up her online searches, and discovered that CBBC were doing a series about young inventors, and excitedly told her brother there was an opening for him on telly. She printed off an application form, but Tybalt wasn't much interested. He said he wanted to invent, not be on telly ? but his sister persuaded him that if he wanted to succeed as an inventor he had to get his ideas out there. Tybalt eventually decided the day before the deadline to fill in the application form, with help from his sister, as his writing is so messy. I had mixed feelings. I knew he stood a good chance of an interview because I thought there couldn't be that many 10-year-old inventors. He had already won the design and technology section of the eisteddfod with a universal seatbelt that you can keep in your bag and use to clip on in vehicles without belts, such as the school bus. However, I wasn't sure he would make it through the audition because he isn't very tolerant of processes. When a producer rang to speak to him he had to be cajoled into chatting. He was nonplussed and said: "Why should I talk to her? She can see my inventions, look at the prototypes and see that they work and then she should make a decision." He thought his work should be judged, not him.
After his initial resistance Tybalt quite enjoyed the talking, once he had got used to it, and so he was selected for the show.
I know I might be criticised for allowing my children so much public exposure so young but it wasn't pre-planned. They both sort of stumbled into television projects that offered fantastic platforms for their interests. Its not as if I allowed them to go on some freak kids' version of Big Brother, where talent is irrelevant and a desire for celebrity pushes them to desperate acts. Both have talents that they are keen to pursue as proper careers in their individual areas of music and inventing.
Tybalt certainly doesn't want to be famous. The idea horrifies him. He wants to be a rich inventor and businessman and already earns a few thousand pounds a year running a jam-making business from my B&B. The only use Tybalt has for the media is in the hope that he might find investors for his ideas and also because he wants to get his inventions out to a wider market.
However, as a musician, Hero is aware that she needs an audience but she wants people to watch her because she is talented. Now she has tentatively dipped her toe in the fame market, I worry enormously as a mother about the horrendous nature of celebrity and the bad experiences so many people have when they become famous.
It is incredibly scary when there are YouTube clips of your 11-year-old daughter with horribly sexually explicit comments on them. I tried to get YouTube to remove one particular comment but that was a brick wall. I rang the police but it's not illegal and so I contacted the government's online protection agency but it was outside their remit. I felt really scared about the path my children were embarking on. Should I have allowed them to make decisions at such a young age? Was it my responsibility to protect them? I discussed with Hero the implications of being on television and suggested she quit the show. She decided she wanted to remove some of the stuff we have put online about her, but said she didn't want to lose this opportunity.
I wouldn't have let the kids appear on a programme such as the House of Tiny Tearaways where flaws are what make the programme compelling. I didn't have any reason for them to be on television other than to showcase their talents.
I have a professional background in television, and so has my mother, as have many members of my family and so the children weren't particularly anxious about being on TV. And filming seemed pretty normal to them as they have often been on film sets or hung around backstage. Hero's earliest memory is of falling asleep in a dressing room at the Assembly Rooms during the Edinburgh festival when I was directing her father in a show. We'd have to rock Hero to sleep before the curtain went up so I could operate the lights. I'd nip back stage between cues to check she was still snoozing.
All the filming might have been hard work for both children, but it was also pretty idyllic. Tybalt got to hang out with the champion racing cyclist Chris Boardman at a velodrome while discussing aerodynamics. No one could have planned a more thrilling way to entertain him; the only drawback was holding fire on the questions until the cameras were rolling. Hero got to chill backstage with Fearne Cotton and go to costume fittings with a vast array of dresses that were better than any dressing-up box.
I mistakenly imagined I would be fantastically well equipped to help them negotiate the shark-infested waters of television having been there and done it myself, but I was out of touch and more of a hindrance than a help, and when it came to crunch time I was a liability. Tybalt had to give a presentation to Tom Lawton, the inventor and judge on his show, in front of an invited audience. I felt he should prepare a speech and typed one up for him. He refused to look at it, let alone learn it, and we reached loggerheads. I left it up to him, huffily expecting him to fall at the last hurdle. He felt he could only cope by saying what was in his head and that I was making it too complicated. He was right and simply and confidently sold his idea through his presentation. The other competitor had created a speech that was too complex to give off the cuff and stumbled through it. I realised that Tybalt knew what he was capable of and that's what enabled him to win the competition.
Hero was much more susceptible to my guidance and once again I proved a dud steer. She had decided on Swept Away, a song she wrote for the semi-final of the show. The five acts all played live and were critiqued by the judges, then it was opened to a public phone vote. Hero was voted through to the final. We had five minutes, post-show, of euphoria and watching her song climb into the iTunes chart before being closeted away backstage to discuss with the production company what she would record the next day. It had to be decided, as the final at Wembley was in a week's time and the song needed to be recorded in the morning for immediate delivery to iTunes.
The producers wanted her to do a cover of either Fields of Gold or Angel, which they had asked her to learn a month before. They said a cover was the best way of securing votes. Hero was adamant that she wanted to perform one of her own songs but was strongly advised not to. She looked at me pleadingly and asked what to do. I said I thought the producers knew best, and as she was a little unsure of reaching the low notes on Fields of Gold it was agreed she'd do Angel; a song about an addict giving into death. This was hard for a child whose dad is an addict and who had recently lost someone in the family to suicide. "The words mean too much," she said.
The following Sunday she was on stage in front of a few million people and performed Angel beautifully but two of the judges then told her they didn't like the song and she lost out on the chance of winning the �100,000 top prize. It was an epic moment for an 11-year-old standing in front of 13,000 people. She kept it together, but came off stage pleading with me to find a corridor where she could cry without anyone watching. I found a space that was out of the way and listened while tears rolled down her cheeks as she tried to grasp why they had chosen a song that the judges didn't like.
We sat on a speaker huddled together and her formidable spirit came through as she decided to focus on the achievement of making the final. She gave a tearful smile and reminded me that I had told her she would have to be thick-skinned if she wanted a career in music. She flashed a grin and skipped off to give her final interview.
I had been worried that letting the kids compete in front of such a large audience might be emotionally detrimental, but it has reassured me that they are strong enough to survive the ups and downs in life.
We've come a long way since May.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/18/television-talent-children-alice-douglas
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