Sally Ann Howes couldn't cry for toffees: Why have child actors got so much better?

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I watched the 1945 Ealing period drama Pink String and Sealing Wax the other day. In it, the always-wonderful Googie Withers entangles a young Gordon Jackson in her wiles, only to be defeated by his father Mervyn Johns.

It’s a striking film in that the major characters are all unsympathetic, and an unusual one for Ealing in that the Jackson and his siblings’ dreams of escape to a better life come to something. Usually at Ealing such escapes were strictly temporary, whether they were Alec Guinness’s technological breakthrough in The Man in the White Suit or the people of Pimlico’s Burgundian summer.

A more minor point struck me too. One of Jackson’s young sisters was played by Sally Ann Howe. She appeared in Ealing films throughout the Forties and grew up to be a star of Broadway and, of course, Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Yet when required to cry in Pink String and Sealing Wax her acting is wholly unconvincing.

And it’s not just her. Jon Whiteley made some really interesting films as a child in the 1950s, yet in an episode of The Adventures of Robin Hood, where he plays a boy whose pet goose had been stolen by the Sherriff of Nottingham, he can’t cry for toffees either.

By contrast, I have recently come across two examples of modern British filmmakers being astounded about what child actors can achieve. 

Here’s Garth Jennings talking about the two young leads in his delightful 2007 film Son of Rambow:

“They were self-confident, but still kids. They hadn’t been to any acting schools, they were still themselves. They were quite happy to play and if you wanted them to cry, they weren’t worried about not looking tough in front of anyone. 

“On the second day of shooting, we were shooting the end of the movie in the cinema. I thought, ‘This is going to be too much for little Will Poulter sitting there.’ I’m talking to him off-camera about what he’s looking at and there’s all these people sitting there in complete silence. He started to well up, tears start rolling down his face, and I was just thinking ‘Holy Jesus Christ, this kid is amazing! He has no idea, absolutely no idea how much he has just made my day!’”

And here’s Nick Holt, the director of Responsible Child, a BBC drama from 2019 that has just resurfaced on Netflix, talking about its 12-year-old star Billy Barratt in the Evening Standard:

“I was amazed with how much he let go, especially in the scenes we shot in the secure unit. These were some of our most traumatic set ups – but he realised them. He understood the darkness in the story but wasn’t intimidated or overwhelmed by it.”

Holt also said in an interview Drama Quarterly:

“With this story, not only do you have a young boy in every single scene, you have him in a story that’s incredibly raw and intense and involves a brutal murder. He needs to look quite adult and it’s difficult to find all that in the same place. 

“With Billy, as soon as we saw him he had those aspects. He’s incredibly mature for his age. There is a heart-wrenching scene I find difficult to watch even now. He was superb in that.”

Both Responsible Child (Best TV Movie/Mini-Series) and Billy Barratt (Best Actor) won International Emmys.

Involving children in such dramas, of course, raises ethical questions, but I know from my old day job how seriously production companies now take the safeguarding of young performers. And the networks wouldn’t risk touching them if the companies did anything else.

So why are child actors so good these days? The obvious answer is the growth of drama teaching in  both specialist and conventional schools. Will Poulter didn’t go to a stage school, but in interviews he often pays tribute to the drama classes at his school, while Billy Barratt attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School.

Will Poulter has gone on to a successful adult acting career, and Billy Barratt appears to have every chance of doing so, which suggests both are exceptionally talented, but then so was Sally Ann Howes. This suggests that child actors need teaching as well as natural talent.

Mention of Sylvia Young gives me an excuse to end with an anecdote from a Guardian profile of her published in 2022 (she died earlier this year):

Every year Young takes an assembly – the school has 220 full-time students, between the ages of 10 and 16, and 900 Saturday school attenders – and asks the children “what mustn’t we be?” she says, “and they all shout out ‘stage school brats!’”

Bring Her Back: A film about grief

I'm not a great one for horror films, but I was intrigued by what I'd heard of Bring Her Back. So I went to see it while I was in Shrewsbury.

I'd read enough reviews to know when the goriest scenes were coming and to know something about the ending. But really it's not a horror film so much as a film about grief and people's extreme reactions to it.

Sally Hawkins' performance as a deranged counsellor is simply extraordinary, and it's only the widespread sniffyness about genre films that makes me fear it won't win her the awards she deserves. Paddington is lucky he didn't run into her in this guise.

Bring Her Back has a small cast, and the other three leads were very young. In her first film, 14-year-old Sora Wong gives a spirited performance, and you hope 12-year-old Jonah Wren Phillips enjoyed playing a possessed child as much as he appeared to have done in all the interviews.

Billy Barratt, who is now 17, was in many ways the heart of the film. He won an Emmy for his lead performance in the BBC film Responsible Child when he was 12, and I can report that he retains something of the aura of goodness and kindness he had in that role. No wonder directors want to make the characters he plays suffer.

Responsible Child: When the facts come before the drama

The success of the Netflix series Adolescence, and my doubts as to how far it reflects reality, has put me in mind of the BBC television play Responsible Child from 2019. This showed how the legal system deals with a 12-year-boy who has helped his older brother murder their abusive stepfather.

Responsible Child was the first play directed by the BAFTA-winning documentary maker Nick Holt, who was interviewed at the time by Deadline:

Tell me how Responsible Child came about.

I was up in Scotland making The Murder Trial, probably for about 18 months in total, looking at various cases, and it was whilst I was up there that I saw a very young child, and I asked one of the lawyers, “Was that a witness?” She was incredibly young to be in a courtroom. And the sister of the accused, said, “No, actually that’s the accused.” 

I was quite taken aback by that. This child doesn’t look older than 10. And then I was told that actually, yes, there are trials for children of 10. And they’re put on trial as adults and they’re put on trial in front of juries, and they’re not part of the youth courts.

Then Holt came across the case of  Jerome and Joshua Ellis, who were 14 and 23 when they killed their stepfather. The case was reported because the press overturned an injunction that banned them from naming either brother to protect the younger's anonymity:

And that’s what led me to being able to go to a trial and see one of these. It was extraordinary to see, and then I became very close to a legal team involved in that case, and started understanding all about what it’s like to work on these cases, what it’s like to work with young accused.

And he later says:

I’m no stranger to sitting through murder trials. I’ve sat through a great many in my time. But there was just something extraordinary seeing the focus of the entire room on a small child. There was just something so potent about the image of a child who could barely see over the witness stand, and subjected to examination, cross-examination.

And of course, you wonder about children, in general, is how much do they understand about what’s going on. How much of the case they understand, how much do they understand of what they’re saying, the consequences of what they’re saying, what’s being really asked for in what they’re saying? It’s an incredibly stressful situation and so, yes, it was extraordinary to see it first hand.

Holt also says that he told his story through a drama rather than a documentary because that's the only way you can bring one of these trials to the screen,

Responsible Child was screened just before Christmas 2019. It was widely praised and nominated for a BAFTA.

Then came the International Emmys. The play won its category and, remarkably, its young lead Billy Barratt* won Best Actor for a performance that was filmed just after this 12th birthday. But even this was not enough to win Responsible Child a repeat.

* Trivia fans will be pleased to learn that Billy Barratt is the grandson of Shakin' Stevens (whose real name is Michael Barratt).

Shakin' Stevens: All You Need is Greed

A friend sent me the link to this video saying "Shakey is now Johnny Cash meets the Manics," and he's right. This is really good.

But should we be so surprised? Shakin' Stevens was the UK's biggest-selling singles artist of the 1980s and has had 33 Top 40 hit singles, including four that reached number 1.

Though his band back home in South Wales had supported the Rolling Stones and been produced by Dave Edmunds, he first came to real prominence through appearing in the West End musical Elvis!, which ran for two years from 1977.

It's producer Jack Good realised he had a star on his hands and promoted him through his ITV music shows. The rest is history.

Shakey's real name is Michael Barratt, and three years ago his grandson Billy Barratt won the International Emmy for the best performance by a male actor. This was for his role in Responsible Child, which began shooting a couple of weeks after his twelfth birthday.

A talented family.

The Spectator tries to have fun with Liz Truss's Lib Dem past again, but she made more sense in those days

Liz Truss once suggested that "the age of criminal responsibility should come to us with the right to vote" in an article titled "So why can't kids have the vote?"

tweets James Heale, the editor of the Spectator's diary column.

He leads us to another gentle attempt to embarrass Truss over her Liberal Democat past. This time the item is mainly about an article she wrote for Free Radical - then the organ of the party's youth wing.

Maybe it will outrage Spectator readers and Conservative members, but this article (reposted here to annoy the Man) seems to me to make a perfectly arguable case.

Certainly, our current age of criminal responsibility (10) and voting age (18), both of which concern a young person's ability to navigate the adult world, are much too far apart.

Where you set the voting age is not just a reflection of what young people are like, but also of what you think they should be like. And I believe that, for the health of our democracy, young people should be interested in politics by the time they are 16 and that giving them the vote at that age will encourage this.

Meanwhile, we need to look at our age of criminal responsibility, which is high by international standards.

Remember, too, that if a child of 10 or more is charged with a serious crime then they will be tried before a jury in an adult court.

And, yes, at this point I am going to recommend again the BBC  Responsible Child, which looks at this issue. It won an International Emmy, as did its young lead Billy Barratt.

Believing a 10-year-old can understand such proceedings and meaningfully instruct counsel seems to me rather sillier than suggesting they should be given the vote.

Liz Truss's idea of a consistent age of majority at 16 was a creditable attempt to sort out the mess we have made of things and one to which we Lib Dems might return.

Hammer House of Podcast on The Nanny

The scariest things I watched on television when I was young were Don Taylor's television play The Exorcism, a cross between folk horror and a Marxist Play for the Day, and Tinker being measured for his coffin while he was still alive in Sexton Blake.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet I can tell you that I was twelve when I saw The Exorcism and only seven when I saw Sexton Blake. The Scarred for Life generation had it easy.

The first X-rated film I can remember seeing was Hammer's The Nanny, starring Bette Davis. That must have been when I was 13 - and on a school night too.

It didn't scare me, but it's a film I can still watch with pleasure today. You can see the original trailer above.

I once described Billy Barratt's acting in Responsible Child as "the best performance by a child actor I have ever seen".

I'm happy to stand by that judgement, but in The Nanny young William Dix goes toe to toe with  Davis and doesn't give an inch.

Many people who see the film come away talking about "that awful kid," which is surely a tribute to his acting. And they should think more about why Master Joey behaves as he does.

The reason for this post is that I've finally come across a podcast that does The Nanny justice. (I've listened to several that don't.)

It's made me think anew about the film, particularly how the clumsily tacked on happy ending isn't really happy at all.

So hurry over to Hammer House of Podcast. Tell them I sent you.

Billy Barratt wins an International Emmy

I have blogged several times about the BBC television play Responsible Child, which looked at the way the British legal system deals with children accused of serious crimes.

In one of those posts I said that its young star Billy Barratt gave "the best performance by a child actor I have ever seen".

It seems I was not alone in estimating it so highly. In November 2020 Barratt won an International Emmy for the best TV performance by an actor that year.

This is a big deal. Recent winners of this award include Kenneth Branagh and Dustin Hoffman.

Responsible Child itself won the International Emmy for the best TV movie of mini-series and you can still watch it on the BBC iPlayer.

Commons justice committee calls for review of age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales

The Commons Justice Committee has called on the government to review the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales.

In its report Children and Young People in Custody (Part 1): Entry into the youth justice system, published last week, the committee says:

The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is a contentious issue with substantial arguments in favour both of the status quo age of 10 and an increase in that age. We are not persuaded that it should be immediately increased, but given the arguments in favour of raising it and the fact that the age in England and Wales is lower than in broadly comparable countries, we consider there is a case for reviewing the age of criminal responsibility.

We recommend that the Ministry review the age of criminal responsibility, considering the data available from Scotland and from broadly comparable European and other jurisdictions in which the age is higher than 10 at which it stands in England and Wales. 

We recommend that the Ministry report on the implications of raising the age in England and Wales to 12 and to 14, including the likely effect on reducing the number of children in custody and alternative methods of disposing of children beneath those ages who have committed serious offences. 

We recommend that if it concludes that 10 should remain the age of criminal responsibility, the Ministry set out the evidence and reasoning to justify an approach the Minister of State recognises as one that differs from the average.

As the Guardian says, the committee also draws attention to the fact that a disproportionate number of children in custody are from a minority ethnic background.

Our low age of criminal responsibility, and in particular the practice of trying children facing serious charges in adult courts, was dramatised in the BBC2 play Responsible Child, shown just before Christmas last year.

Both Responsible Child and its young lead Billy Barratt have been shortlisted for International Emmys. In the video above one of its producers, Karen Wilson, talks about the making of the play.

Lord Dholakia's campaign to raise the age of criminal responsibility

The BBC play Responsible Child, shown just before Christmas, questioned the low age of criminal responsibility in Britain and in particular our practice of trying children as young as 10 in front of a jury as though they were adults.

This is a cause the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Dholakia has long been fighting. Before the general election was called he had succeeded in taking a bill through the Lords to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12 and he has promised to continue this campaign.

Here he is moving the second reading of his bill in September 2017 and talking about the trial of the killers of James Bulger:

Most foreign commentators were amazed that children of that age should be tried in an adult Crown Court. They questioned whether such young children could really understand the complexities of a lengthy criminal prosecution and trial; whether they should have appeared in the full glare of media coverage; whether they understood all the issues and the language of the trial; whether they could give sensible instructions to their lawyers; and whether their decision not to give evidence was simply because they were frightened of speaking in such a setting. 

Even though some changes have been made to court processes involving children since then, it remains true that exposing such young children to a criminal trial is no way to achieve justice. 

The scene from Responsible Child above - click on the image to go to a video on Twitter - conveys well the absurdity of pretending that a traumatised child can participate meaningfully in his own trial.

It is also reminds us how good the performance by the young lead, Billy Barratt, was. Judging by Twitter, his emotional scenes towards the end of the play made the nation cry, but here he is beautifully understated.

If you read Lord Dholakia's speech in full - the whole debate is worth reading - you will find that he says:

A 30 year-old with the mental age of a 10 year-old child would probably be regarded as unfit to plead, so why do we see a child of 10 as capable of participating in the criminal justice process?

I suspect he and the writer of Responsible Child had spoken to the same experts.

Responsible Child and moves to raise the age of criminal responsibility

If the test of a good drama is that you find yourself thinking about it days later then Responsible Child passes that test.

It is quite the saddest play I can remember seeing - like a version of Oliver Twist with no Mr Brownlow.

And I really think that Billy Barratt's depiction of Ray is the best performance by a child actor I have ever seen.

In an interview the director of Responsible Child, Nick Holt, said he wants to highlight Britain's low age of criminal responsibility and start a discussion: :

I think it’s interesting that very few people know that the criminal age is 10. I think that even fewer know that this is from a piece of law since 1963. If you or I had a mental age of a 10-year-old, we’d be deemed unfit to try. It’s an extraordinary, extraordinary hangover from a very old piece of law.

Twenty-five years ago everyone knew the age of criminal responsibility was 10 because of the murder of James Bulger and demanded that it should remain so.

In any new debate the images from that trial may prove stronger than those of poor, wronged Ray, but there are signs of movement on the issue.

A report in The Times (£) last Friday said a paper from the Youth Justice Board is calling for a review of the age of criminal responsibility in the hope that it will be raised from 10 to at least 12.

It also wants responsibility for children who get into trouble with the police to be passed from the Ministry of Justice to the Department for Education.

The same issue of the paper carried a letter (£) from two consultant psychiatrists, a professor of psychology of cognitive neuroscience, and the crossbench peer the Earl of Listowel.

It says of a child of 10 charged in an adult court:

his extreme youth, continued brain and cognitive development and likely adverse childhood experiences mean that he is unlikely to be truly fit to plead to the charges and to conduct his own defence in line with his human right to a fair trial. 

It goes on to say that such a child defendant may show the 'blanked out' traumatised presentation depicted in Responsible Child.

The writers of the letter ground their case for change in neuroscience and how the brain development of a 10- or 12-year-old differs from that of an adult.

Will England and Wales be able to have a civilised debate and raise the age of criminal responsibility to at least 12?

I hope so, though what happens to young offenders under any new regime will need to be scrutinised.

Responsible Child and moral philosophy

Lord Bonkers' Well-Behaved Orphans were originally a bit of a joke against myself.

Because of an unhappy period in my own childhood, I used to be overfond of Oliver Twist and other tales of wronged children.

I have largely cured myself of that taste, but still watched Responsible Child this week.

There is no doubt where the play's sympathies lay, but as Jasper Rees said in the Telegraph:

there was no one making the case for trying children in adult courts. Perhaps that’s because there isn’t a good one to make.

Another Telegraph article, this one behind its paywall, reveals:

Lord Navnit Dholakia, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats in the Lords, has campaigned for a Private Members’ Bill that would see 11 and 12-year-olds tried in a new court “specially designated for young people” to help them understand what is going on. 

“Psychologists and others have found that [children below 12] are not capable of understanding the seriousness of what they’ve done, it passes beyond them,” he says. “I’m very keen that there is a rehabilitative process.”

The play was inspired in part by the case of 14-year-old Jerome Ellis, who was sentenced to six years in detention for his part in the killing of his stepfather.

The writers do not seem to have strayed far from the facts of that case. A report this week in the Sun said the boy's teachers:

gave witness statements which revealed Jerome was often hungry and that he was a young carer for his mother and his siblings.

By making Raphael - or Ray - only 12 in Responsible Child they tipped the scales a little, but that change may have been made because they found such an extraordinary actor of that age - Billy Barratt - to cast.

You could also mention that, like Oliver Twist himself, Ray sometimes appeared to be from a higher social class than those around him.

One thing that interested me is that the play raised an issue in moral philosophy that has always troubled me.

Altruism is sometimes presented as the greatest good, but to me it is not necessarily a good thing. In the play, Ray took part in the killing of his stepfather out of love and concern for his older brother.

It turns out that one can do wrong out of love for others just as much as one can do wrong out of self-love.

I usually attribute that insight to Joseph Butler, though I have no idea where he said it.

Finally, a Trivial Fact of the Day. As has been widely reported, Billy Barratt is the grandson of Shakin' Stevens.