Jack Thorne addressing MPs on Tuesday and Owen Cooper in his Netflix series Adolescence

JACK Thorne was in a self-deprecating mode when he appeared in front of a parliamentary select committee on Monday.

“I’m a bald, skinny, weird-looking man,” the writer and creator of the Netflix series Adolescence told MPs as they explored how the series could further debate on toxic masculinity and tackle the messages being pumped into the heads of teenagers, particularly boys, via social media.

“And some people have made something of the fact that I’m a bald, skinny, weird-looking man and saying these things… that somehow my masculinity is the reason why I’ve questioned other people’s masculinity.”

He’s undeterred, explaining: “That’s the thing when I talk about boys feeling like they need to look a certain way. When I grew up, my role model was Jarvis Cocker and Jarvis Cocker made it OK to look like I do.”

It’s no spoiler to say that the drama starring Owen Cooper and Stephen Graham tells the story of a 13-year-old accused of killing a girl at his school.

We have been asked to suspend reality and believe that every MP in the country and the prime minister Sir Keir Starmer have watched it all – rather than read a cribsheet – but it certainly has made an impact.

Suddenly a dramatist is sharing his thoughts with the nation’s decision-makers. He did repeatedly say he was not an expert and talked persuasively about what he had learned telling the lead character Jamie’s story.

“If you’re being told constantly the only way that you can have any legitimacy is if you’ve got muscles, that’s hard for some boys,” he said.

“In terms of national level at government level, I do think we need to think about children’s access to social media and I do think that what Australia is doing in terms of age of consent is really exciting. It is the Wild West out there and boys – and girls – are hearing things which are really troubling and do affect them.”

Once again, robotic algorithms jump on any unhealthy view and show you, them, everyone more of the same.

Maybe one of Mr Thorne’s most interesting insights from the session was that, whenever this is discussed, the rush is always to talk about that macho kingpin Andrew Tate. But that’s not really what the young lads are watching.

“A couple of people talk about Andrew Tate. They’re the adults,” he said. “The kids don’t talk about Andrew Tate. If you’ve got Andrew Tate at the top of the waterfall, there are the people in the middle or the bottom. It was the 15 to 16-year- olds. It was the 13 to 14- year-olds talking to themselves, talking within the peer group. It is stuff from people that get 5,000, 6,000 hits on their stuff rather than 10 million but it was the stuff that was really troubling.”

He warned too many children go to bed with the phones and screens become their companions when they are alone and confused after waking up in the middle of the night.

All stirring stuff. Will the government ever really challenge the big tech firms making money out of all this? Things are usually made easier for them, rather than harder.