A teenager now costs, on average, £9,000 a year to run. People must really like them. You could keep a horse for that and they're lovely. Or, with current interest rates, service the mortgage on a small chateau in Provence. But then nothing beats watching a young human attempt to surf a wave of fluctuating hormones and self-doubt. Whenever I want to cheer myself up, I remember that I'm not 15 any more and the best way of doing that is watching someone who is.
It's impossible to read this list of "necessities" without inwardly ageing, and the phrase "in my day" jostling its way to the front of your brain. I'm going to go with it. In my day, teenagers were expected to stay in, grimly getting on with their homework, shuddering at the prospect of human contact and meekly looking forward to the next series of Blackadder. That's what it was like for everyone, right?
I'm sure this spending power feels necessary to teenagers themselves but it isn't, and it's only peer pressure that makes it seem so. I realise the phrase "only peer pressure" will sound to teenage ears like "only an atom bomb" and I'm sorry. But the fact remains that if hardly any teenagers had flashy mobiles or expensive trainers, the rest wouldn't think they needed them.
But massive teenage spending has become the premise on which much of our economy, and popular culture, is based. Advertisers venerate youth. That's because fools and their money are soon parted and teenagers are the most foolish of age groups.
The teenage years are the time when most of us are at our most idiotic - terrified of harmless things, unafraid of the lethal, crushingly obsessed with acceptance by our fellow fools and in petulant denial of the future. These are all traits that recede with hairlines. Anyone who thinks they weren't more of an idiot when they were 17 is an idiot now.
One of the fastest growing areas in our economy in the years leading up to the crunch was the selling of crap to twats. Why waste a fortune expensively marketing carefully designed products to the thrifty middle-aged with long-established spending patterns when you can make a quick million pushing ringtones and cheese strings to kids? They've got nine grand each, largely courtesy of their parents, which they are not just willing, but desperate, to piss away on some manufactured craze.
I know I'm being harsh. Teenagers are not all or even mostly morons, but almost everyone is at their least prudent and reasonable at that age. What Sir Fred Goodwin must have been like when he was 16 is beyond imagining - I'm surprised he didn't destroy the world. But I'm particularly bitter about feckless teenage spending because of the disastrous effect it's had on television.
Television audiences are falling but not plummeting. Purely in terms of numbers, there's no need to panic. But they are plummeting among the young, who are deserting TV in favour of new media, and the advertisers and their money are following, leaving commercial broadcasters skint. Last week ITV announced job cuts and huge losses - it's unclear whether it will even remain a viable business in the long-term. Channel 4 is not much better off with a vast hole in its budget to fill. On the plus side, Five is also in trouble.Advertisers' obsession with youths and their money doesn't just cause financial problems. It also affects programming as TV executives cravenly try and tempt teenagers back. This has become BBC Three's raison d'être even though it's not even dependent on advertising revenue. It seems to want young viewers purely because they're sought after by its competitors. And the programmes that are produced by this demographic thinking are so often shit.
If you've ever wondered why there are now so many TV adverts for stairlifts, life insurance and incontinence pants, it's because advertisers have begun to target the next most susceptible group after teenagers: the nearly senile. The largest generation in history is reaching retirement age and will live longer than any of its predecessors. Decrepitude, not youth, is the future, and advertisers will have to find more ways of parting the elderly with their cash. At least they earned it.
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