Old before their time

I should imagine that an intelligent and world-weary frog, if it had a moment in the day when it was not on the hop, might look back on its early years and be very glad it was not a tadpole any more. This was certainly the feeling I had on watching Mini Me: Kids Who Have It All (Five), a documentary in which children got to boast about being adult before their time. If I thought for a moment that I was like any of this lot, I would have been looking for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the youngest suicide in history. The problem is that I'm a bit like this lot.

The pick of the bunch of miniature entrepreneurs and models and disc jockeys was Jade, who wanted to be an It girl. When I was a youngster, an It girl would have been a young lady with a passion to join the underground press, of which the International Times (It) and Oz were the leading lights. Now, it signifies a young lady who wishes to marry a person of some wealth, preferably a royal.

Jade has her eye on one of the young princes. There is no passion in this wish - Jade, after all, is not old enough for real passion - rather a desire for the ultimate trinket. Jade is not helped by the fact that her mother, who is a Joanna Lumley not-quite-look-alike, had her christened in Stringfellows nightclub. I have nothing whatsoever against Stringfellows, but I was christened in St Martin-in-the-Fields just down the road, and I know which is the best of the two places for christenings. It's a lap of the God thing.

Jostling Jade for attention was Lizzie, who was described, and I can scarcely bear to type this word, as a fashionista. When political unrest with a genuine cause is hijacked by the makers of frayed frocks then we are in trouble. Lizzie's worldview would not include South American politics, because her reading is entirely confined to Vogue magazine-which tells her all she needs to know about what she wants to know about. Like Jade, Lizzie has a mother for whom having the baby in the first place was only the beginning of a lifetime's supporting role. Heather was a model and Lizzie will also therefore save the world by wearing leopardskin.

Helpfully, the makers of the film informed us that one can buy a suitable jacket for a protocatwalker from DKNY for as little as £320. The southern extremities of the fashionable anatomy can be clad in Moschino boots for an extremely agreeable £145 - as long as you are nine years old. A dog is also essential if one wants to be noticed. Somehow, this doesn't surprise me, as the similarity between fashion shows and Crufts has always been most obvious. The dog here was called Papaya. It was a whippet. Even whippets don't deserve that sort of treatment.

The unspoken and chilling truth about Mini Me was that it was a glimpse of the not-too-distant future. We no longer have the innocent luxury of mucking about with pots and pans and water flowing from unlikely sources when we are little. What is important is to become grown-up as quickly as possible. Lizzie sat around with her unbearable friends in a poncey restaurant - the bill for three came to £60, and one assumes that the total included whining but not wine - and talked about boyfriends. Lizzie and her friends knew as much about boys as a parrot knows about the English language: she does it by rote. The putative boyfriend has to be rich. He has to be thin. He has to be kind. He really does not have to be poor. If only Papaya was a bloke, she would do nicely.

The sad fact is that if we carry on like this, life will be effectively over by the time we are 15 years old. The urge to be child women and child men appears to be uncontrollable. Nothing can be left for later. Of course, the hothouse maturity personified by Jade and Lizzie and the rest is operative only on the consumer front. There is a saying that transcends cliche concerning those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is the generation that we are now nurturing, the flat-screen, plasma children who will inherit the Earth.

In the future, we will all have to stay indoors because the child people will have taken all the best tables. They will roam the streets guarded by dogs named after exotic fruits. The word precocious will cease to have any perjorative meaning. Everyone will be precocious and they will be proud of it. We will all be christened in Stringfellows, and go dancing in St Martin-in-the-Field. Whatever.