BEWARE: Lord of the Flies is soon to air on the BBC!

I’m showing my age but at 51, we studied Lord of the Flies at school. As a spoiler-alert, for anyone who has not read it, a group of boys get marooned on a desert island, without any adults present. They soon revert to type, in that they spiral into violence and murder.

At school, we were taught it as a lesson in how boys would genuinely end up behaving if there were no parameters or guidelines. It’s fair enough, right? Because that predator/animal is in all of us males.

Lord of the Flies is coming very soon to the BBC and guess who adapted and directed it? Only Jack Thorne, who co-wrote the totally flawed plot for Adolescence.

Lord of the Flies will no doubt provoke comments in the media about boys out of control, violence and toxic masculinity (as Adolescence did) but before you believe the hype, here are a few things to remember about Lord of the Flies:

1. The author was William Golding, a known Nazi sympathiser, alcoholic and pessimist. Inevitably, any story he wrote, would have had a bleak outlook in its judgement about human nature.

2. Lord of the flies is a fictional story based on hot air alone and the imagination of a very negative man. There is no truth to it - it’s not based on a real-life story.

3. The only time in recorded history where boys were marooned on a deserted island without any adults and lived to tell the story was in the 1960s, in the middle of the Pacific ocean. The boys were marooned for a year before they were miraculously found and they had indeed reverted to type: they’d looked after one another!

There was no violence. They were found to be in remarkably good physical and mental health. They’d arrived as best as friends and left one year later as best of friends.

• As humans, we’re better than we often think we are.
• Masculinity is beautiful and rich with opportunity: it’s not toxic
• Lord of the flies is just a story - don’t forget that when you watch it on the BBC or when you read media columns about the lessons to draw from the series.

There are no lessons to draw from the story in fact. It’s just a story, written by a man with a negative outlook on life!