Hosts of a British TV program scolded the leader of the United Kingdom Conservative party on Thursday for not watching a show on Netflix about toxic masculinity.
“Have you watched ‘Adolescence’ yet,” Charlie Stayt, host on “BBC Breakfast,” asked Kemi Badenoch during a live interview.
Badenoch, the leader of the UK’s Conservative Party, and a member of Parliament for North West Essex, responded, “No, I haven’t. I probably won’t. It’s a film on Netflix and most of my time right now is spent visiting the country.”
“Adolescence” is a show on Netflix about a 13-year-old boy in the UK accused of fatally stabbing his female classmate and how his social media use may have contributed to the incident.
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BBC Breakfast host Naga Munchetty chimed in that “everyone is talking about it,” and the show is “prompting conversations about toxic masculinity, smartphone use, young men feeling that they’re being ignored, the idea of misogyny being increased in school.”
“Why would you not want to know what people are talking about?” Munchetty asked Badenoch.
“Well, I think that those are all important issues, and those were issues that I’ve been talking about for a long time,” Badenoch said. “But in the same way that I don’t need to watch ‘Casualty’ to know what’s going on at the [National Health Service], I don’t need to watch a specific Netflix drama to understand what’s going on. It’s a fictional — it’s a fictional series. It is not a documentary. What I’ve been talking about recently, for instance, is banning smartphones in schools.”
The Conservative leader said she has been visiting schools across the country, including one in Evesham, England, “talking to head teachers, talking to students, and they talk about the problems the phones are causing.”
But Munchetty pushed back, saying that the fictional series “has made much more of an impact than any politician has in terms of what people are talking about right now.”
“So it’s really confusing that you don’t want to know why — how this has made an impact, how parents are now saying, ‘We need to know more about smartphone use,’” Munchetty added.
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Badenoch replied, calling “Adolescence” a “fictional documentary” and saying that she was more concerned about “Labor telling us that they’re not going to be investigating the rape gang scandal, something which had happened all across the country.”
Stayt then interrupted Badenoch, who asked if she could finish her response, saying, “If I may finish, we have thousands of victims, female victims, there’s girls, young women and some boys too, I met the mother of a boy who killed himself after being a victim.”
She added that she would rather discuss what is “real,” instead of shows on TV.
Munchetty pushed back again, saying “Adolescence” has “made more of an impact than any politician has on parents and when it comes to the issue of smartphones and misogyny,” adding, “yet you are saying that despite that, you don’t need to know about that?”
Badenoch again said she’d rather talk about real life.
“Asking me to sit down and watch a television drama that lots of other people have seen, have written about… I think it is important, but it was also — it’s also fiction,” Badenoch said. “Let’s talk about what’s happening to real people.”
