@p0ly 461611 wrote:
what do you mean that they have to educate the actors or what?
yep.
Every reasonably developed country in the world (certainly every nation developed enough to have one or more TV stations making specialist shows for children) has a law that children from age 5-18 should have education. The exact start and end ages vary (BTW the term “High School” comes from Britain and the Scots invented the concept).
as a kid I had to sing this in school..
The ink is black, the page is white
Together we learn to read and write
Read and write
And now a child can understand
This is the law in all the land
All the land
The ink is black, the page is white
Together we learn to read and write
Read and write
And the later verses pointed out that we also can also be black or white but should all be able to go to the same school (which wasn’t always the case in the USA in the 1960s!) This song crossed the Atlantic as schoolteachers in my days were often hippies. In modern British English both “secondary school” and “high school” is used – for instance in London and the SE it was called “secondary school” whilst in East Anglia 11-18 education is called “high school”.
Interestingly whilst years 12/13 (6th form) in UK are optional, in the USA it seems that education until age 18/19 (Grade 12) is compulsory.
So if someone is making a TV show about kids of school age using actual schoolchildren, they are legally obliged to provide them with the same level of schooling they would get in their country. A lot of the former Grange Hill actors mention this, and how they had to juggle their acting work with studying for o-levels/GCSEs (bear in mind most also played bit parts as young criminals in “The Bill” or similar in Eastenders, especially when they got too “old looking” to play “kids” parts). I think the BBC managed it partly because of the license fee but also they did deals with nearby schools both for locations and to get real teachers for the actors – even then it was expensive and the rebranding of CBBC for those below 12 (leaving Radio 1 and BBC3? for teens/young adults) eventually did for it in about 2007.
In the USA, perhaps because 6th form is compulsory as well this would make the cost of such a show prohibitive (they built a new 6th form centre on the edge of my estate and it cost fuckloads, so building a school for a load of teenage actors won’t be very cheap either, especially as you would need it for the entire series run which could be decades) hence the use of much older actors.
PS: @Androwski – in the UK we have to pay a license fee for our televisions and this funds the BBC (which is a bit like NPR in the USA). Many other European nations have similar arrangements even today. “Grange Hill” was a long running series about a British high school which ran from 1978 to 2008 and covered some very controversial subjects include drugs (complete with a awful song warning my generation against them, which totally failed in its aims) :wink:, bullying, teenage domestic violence and rape, and even had the whole school catch on fire at least once.
