ARIANA Grande is just getting going when a youthful voice decides to interrupt. “Hey Google, that’s a wee lassie’s song. Next song.”

Weans’ World, Audrey Gillan’s sound portrait of kids at play in Shettleston on Tuesday (Radio 4), offered an impressionistic deep dive into contemporary Glasgow childhood.

To do so, Gillan, who grew up in Glasgow’s East End herself, returned to her home city and started listening to the children she met. Really listen, not just say, ‘That’s nice,’ while reading the paper as our kids tell us about their current obsession. (Come on, I wasn’t the only one. Was I?)

Shettleston may be an area of deprivation, in which nearly half the children are living in poverty, but you wouldn’t know that from the kids Gillan met. They talked about their hobbies and their lives with no sense of grievance.

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Instead, they played ukulele, indulged in “dummy fighting,” dyed their hair, or showed the broadcaster their pets.

Some of what Gillan found was not so very far removed from her own memories of childhood. “These children and their pure cheek are so familiar to me,” she says at one point.

But technology and society have changed childhood in the East End. The kids she met had Polish friends and were obsessed WWE wrestling, TikTok and their mobile phones.

“In February we called each other 298 times, Alicja, an 11-year-old Polish girl, says, counting the calls she made to her best friend. It has only been 116 times in March so far, she adds. But then, she points out, “It’s only been four days.”

Listen Out For: Adventures with the Painted People, Radio 3, tomorrow, 7.30pm

Originally commissioned by the Pitlochry Festival, this two-handed play by David Greig, above, has been adapted for radio as part of BBC Art’s Culture in Quarantine initiative.