HOW do we define success for young people these days? In olden times (pre-internet) it was about a good career, worthwhile skills, a nice house, maybe even a decent car.
Well, in modern times you simply have to be a show-off.
Or, if you wish to use the proper parlance, an internet influencer.
TikTok is a social media platform on which (mostly) young people post short videos of themselves performing or talking.
Or simply wearing make-up, and being pictured hair-flicking while a backing track plays.
The most successful – and many attract millions of followers – can earn hundreds of thousands of pounds in revenue.
This documentary TikTok Queen at Sixteen (BBC Scotland, Monday, 10.30pm) reveals that Scots are getting in on the act.
Kristen Scott from Braehead in Paisley, a likeable, charismatic teenager, isn’t leaving school to become a nurse, a lawyer or an engineer, she about to become a full-time social media influencer.
Already, Kristen has 728,000 TikTok followers, her posts ranging from silly dances to addressing more serious issues like mental health and body positivity.
The teenager, who began making videos for fun – her first involved pretending to crack a glass achieved 100k hits – is now wrapped up in legal contracts. And no wonder. Someone who can achieve more than half a million hits can make five grand – per post.
Yet, we learned there is a downside to having such a significant, if thin, public profile.
“I feel like you need to be thick skinned to do it, I’ve had to deal with a lot of horrible things since a young age because of social media.”
Indeed. She was hit with a rock one day. She has been verbally abused on countless occasions.
The programme doesn’t shy away from the sexualisation issue. Is standing in front of a camera wearing a sexy trench coat sending out the wrong signals?
Kristen’s dad defends his daughter, blaming the critics who don’t appreciate the work she’s doing.
Her mother is a little more circumspect. “A couple of outfits ...I thought ‘Oh, no, Kristen.’”
Yet, who’s to say that realising there is real money to be made in posting a moving version of a selfie isn’t a talent in itself?
The teenager can’t chop up a pepper, but she’s clever. “People say social media won’t last, but I can go to college at any time.”
Kristen Scott is confident. Assured. And she has a presence that suggests TV presentation or acting potential.
Who’s to say if the Pavilion panto opens again this year she won’t magically appear as a Fairy Princess?
One person who did have an entirely obvious and undeniable talent was Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011. But over the past ten years, have we learned all we need to know about the Back to Black star?
BBC 2 didn’t think so, and the result is Reclaiming Amy (Friday, 9pm). The programme claimed that via her closest family and friends, the truth about the music icon would be revealed.
Amy Winehouse’s mother Janis spoke “in depth” for the first time, and she described her strong and yet complex daughter.
But it was hard to see how the outlines of Amy’s life were coloured in more dramatically or definitively than other documentary efforts.
We’ve long known that Amy Winehouse had massive dependency issues, and we have often been told that she had extreme confidence issues, with incredibly low self-esteem.
It was easy to feel the pain Winehouse’s mother felt, the real tragedy and loss. And we did learn that the mental illness she suffered was more acute than imagined.
But this programme is strictly for the hardcore fans.
Television, however, doesn’t always have to leave us questioning themes of human frailty. Sometimes it’s just about nature. Sometimes it’s about a lone beaver who gets stuck in a sluice gate while looking for love and has to find a new home and a new partner.
That’s the case with Born To Be Wild (BBC Scotland, Monday, 8pm) where we look in on springtime at the Scottish SPCA Wildlife Rescue centre in Clackmannanshire – the place where orphaned and injured wild animals from all over Scotland find help from a dedicated team of vets and carers.
There’s something very calming about watching team leader April become ‘mum’ to a herd of tiny fawns, and frontline rescue officer Bob is called to an unusual rescue of a bat from a light fitting.
Narrated by Siobhan Redmond, we are gently reminded that the non-human world has its own problems to contend with.
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