When I was growing up, teenagers were given a bag of flour to raise as their baby. It looks odd written down. But these were the days of Tamagotchis and dolls that pissed fake urine advertised on Sunday morning telly, and sex education was largely banana-focused. The flour project was an attempt to teach kids the amount of care it takes to look after a baby, thereby potentially reducing rates of teen pregnancies. Today, American schools provide uncanny dolls instead which cry until held, and wake their pubescent parents up in the night, but back then flour would do. Sometimes it was a bag of sugar. Sometimes it was an egg. Typically the egg baby would crack within a day, sometimes an hour. The flour babies would spring a leak by lunchtime, trailing powder through the gym. The sugar would caramelise in the rain.
Even then I could see the project was flawed. Even then, when I was a closer thing to a baby myself than the bag of flour could ever hope to be, it was clear there was something lacking in the experiment, the idea that this could be a simulation of parenthood. Was it love? Was it vomit? Was it the great unknowable crisis where identities slip overnight into the sea and suddenly you will die for a literal baby? This week I was gripped by a TV show – semi-reality, semi-comedy, verging by the end on semi-horror – called The Rehearsal. The premise is this: comedian Nathan Fielder hires actors and builds elaborate sets in order to anticipate and prepare for real people’s complicated interactions. What if we had infinite chances to get it right? What if we could control our own futures?
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