Across the country, photogenic blonde teenagers have been jumping into the air to celebrate their exam results, in a tale as old as time.
The less photogenic, less blonde teenagers have probably been getting results too (and possibly jumping) but who cares about them? They’re grubby, and probably smoke and smell of colleges and readymeals, and some of them don’t look like English Roses, so who gives a shit about them?
This year, the Sexy A-Levels tumblr has decided to call it a day. Its work is done, and the tropes are so well known now we can all recite them without a second thought. The mid-air suspension photo. The leaping girls. The “excitedly opening an evelope” photograph. The token boffin kid to try and convince you this isn’t all about 18-year-old cheesecake.
We know it off by heart. It’s one of those stories that is the same every time, dreaded by a swathe of journalists up and down the land. The same words, just in a slightly different order, but you could pretty much do it to a template: “students celebrated… blah de blah… results went up/down… blah de blah… someone from the government said… someone from somewhere else said… prodigy kid… someone who got a lot of A-levels…” and so on and so on.
It’s comfortable, familiar, a nice old pair of slippers. It’s like that day when temperatures are slightly warm and newspapers break out the graphics of a cartoon sun, wearing sunglasses, next to a thermometer showing the temperature in Fahrenheit and a picture of some random “beauties” on a beach somewhere.
One of the stories (if there is a story) to this year’s results is that boys have caught up with girls, so naturally we’re going to get loads of pictures of boys, right? Er, well, no. “Teenagers celebrate as they get A-level results” whooped the Mail Online, and it was a parody of what you’d imagine the Daily Mail to do.
There they were, the leaping Home Counties teenage girls, forever suspended in mid-air with a piece of paper and an envelope. No boys in sight, of course, ugh, who wants to see them? Or maybe it just so happened that every time a male walked into range of a camera lens, the shutter accidentally didn’t go off. We can’t say for certain.
It has just become a strange ritual, this yearly parade of young female flesh, a May Queen for the newspaper age. It doesn’t tell us anything about exams, or education, or anything like that. Of course, those debates are being covered, and covered very well – see the Telegraph or Guardian’s liveblogs. But elsewhere, the same tired old images dominate. It’s a bit old hat.
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