Oh well, sorry to open up a can of worms after Zoe's tried to get it
dead and buried (blast - am I mixing my metaphors again and didn't
notice it?)...Tiddler's age. Interesting one, that. A few years ago
I had the good fortune to meet Steven Moffatt and the age of the PG
characters came up in the discussion. He *said* that the idea was
that all the characters were supposed to be a year younger than the
actors playing them, but the problem with that is that it doesn't
really work - from what I recall both Dexter Fletcher and Julia
Sawalha were born in the late '60s, and yet were playing characters
who were presumably in their last year of A-levels in 1989...and
also, if you buy into the Steve Lyons theory of timescale with
relevance to the Junior Gazette, Lynda was possibly a year younger
than the others. The case with Tiddler is just as complicated -
Joanna Dukes' birthday is sometime in 1972, but she would appear to
be playing a character who is younger than sixteen. Still she
gets away with it by being so young looking (the problem with that is
that she doesn't manage to convince as her "older" self in "Day
Dreams"). Anyway, back to the point of the debate - she's definitely
older than eleven, as she's at Norbridge HIGH school; she claims to
be top in (all her subjects? I can't remember, as it's such a long
time since I last watched "One Easy Lesson") the lower school - so
where exactly does the lower school end and the upper school start?
The most obvious bridge would be at the point where pupils start to
study subjects specifically for GCSE (after the first three years, I
believe - someone more knowledgeable than me please correct me if
I''m wrong), putting Tiddler somewhere between about 11 and 14. I
don't think it'd be a problem for her to be in the upper range of
that age bracket - okay, the junior page is for pre-teens, but I
guess it would make sense for someone *slightly* older to be actually
editing the relevant page. Certainly she needs to be reasonably old
to make sense of her line to Lynda - "by the time you're to old for
this kind of paper I'll be about the right age to be the new
editor..." Actually, that would kind of imply that she might be in
the last year of GCSEs herself (is there a case to be made for the
"lower school" including this?) but I think that would be unfeasibly
old for editing the junior page, and anyway she definitely dresses
like someone of about the thirteen/fourteen age.
Anyone else want to have a go?
David (with serious apologies for the length of my messages).
--
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