born on a space shuttle

I am phoning this in, rather. Everything is in crappy blue biro, the title is repeated three times for no apparent reason, and I seem to have dispensed with anything resembling a plot. OK, we have ‘five sixteen-year-old girls, one from each continent’. So far, so BBC Three documentary. But there doesn’t appear to be anything to connect them other than the fact that they are all sixteen-year-old girls.

I kind of love that ‘Californian’ is equivalent to ‘African’? Um, hello, neither of these are actual nationalities.  And I suspect that Maria Luisa is actually Colombian, unless she was born on a space shuttle.

I feel that having a character born on a space shuttle would have made this substantially more interesting.

Let us review. Naturally our representatives from South America, Asia and Africa live doomed lives of poverty and unrelenting misery. They are either knocked up, ‘coping’ with repressive regimes (it is so hard to be sixteen and not able to vote! oh, wait…) or homeless. Meanwhile, our girls in Europe and North America seem to be doing… not very much, to be honest. Poor Veronique hasn’t even been given a dilemma, while Lullaby (LULLABY) seems destined for an endless round of pointless plastic surgery.

(Your ‘first nose job’ should really be your last, if your surgeon knows what they are doing. Noses are not breasts. Glad we got that cleared up.)

There are times when I think these things were less a spontaneous overflow of my creative mind than a desperate attempt to avoid doing my maths homework.