Mad About Boys was a shortlived venture by Planet Three Publishing. Launched in January 2001 and edited by Maria Landolfi, its content wasn't substantially different from other titles on the market. They just made the mistake of being upfront about it. Cue media hysteria about children being sexualised leading to the magazine being banned from stores like Woolworths and W.H. Smith. Resulting poor sales meant it folded after four issues.
Carol Sarler wrote a piece on the ridiculous media circus for The Observer in February 2001:
The first 'fab' issue of Mad About Boys, complete with 'groovy' free photo frame, fell upon newsagents' counters last week to a thunderous cacophony of disapproval. Somebody got it into their head that the magazine, with its time-honoured mix of fashion and fellows, was aimed at nine-year-old girls - it's 11-to-13, in fact, but that doesn't have quite the same ring for outrage - and the nation went nuts.
Woolworths leapt first to the higher moral ground and banned it. W.H. Smith prevaricated, then followed suit, and Sainsbury is still thinking. In the meantime, any number of child-rearing experts have beaten a path to talk-show sofas and Mike Embley, on BBC's Newsroom South-East, provided perhaps the least temperate interview in television history, when he put it to the magazine's creative director that he is aiding and abetting paedophiles and is therefore a pimp.
All of this, no doubt, serves admirably to whet the appetite of potential readers; if, that is, they can find a copy and if they have a rather steep £1.50 to spare for 32 pages. In truth, once in hand, they might be disappointed. To read Mad About Boys is actually to take a walk on the mild side: the agony page directs the girls to London Zoo's animal adoption scheme, true confession involves some unpleasant epic about a squeezed zit, the obligatory 'make-over' includes pig-tails and the fashion page struts shocking pink fishnet... Bless.
As for the eponymous 'Boys', no doubt their mothers are very proud. Twelve of the pubescent darlings, well-scrubbed and clothed to the chin, have a full-page pin-up mug shot and 'info' caption - so, for instance, we learn that Marc is Aries, admires David Beckham and has a dog called Harry.
The fuss, set against the reality, is ludicrous - even as we remember that 'twas ever thus. Think back, if you will, to the creation of the teenager in the 1950s, followed swiftly by its per fectly targeted marketplace: clothes, music and then magazines. My own career, while still a teenager, began on one such called Petticoat . Goodness, how grown-ups loathed us. We were, apparently, sexually precocious, devoid of morality, subversive, insolent and seditious. From time to time, some old codger would introduce us as a Question In The House, occasions of which we were inordinately proud.
Neither we nor our readers, of course, actually did any of the things we vicariously bunged into the magazine; we couldn't afford it and, in any case, Mum would have thrown a fit. We just flaunted our separation from the poor old generation that loved us by our defiant possession of what was essentially a harmless little journal.
And so for Mad About Boys: some bright spark created the tweenager and once again there followed the clothes, the music and, now, the magazine. Just as with Petticoat, if this newly beleaguered organ does succeed, it will do so precisely because the grown-ups don't like it. The meanest part about the chasm between one generation and the next is that it is only those of us teetering on the older side of it who mind that it is there; the kids most surely do not. So if we define a magazine as unacceptable, we hand them the means to demonstrate their distance from us. Too young, we cry; old enough, they insist. And because nothing more sinister than a slab of attitude is actually going to come of it, we are both right.
Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Mad About Boys will ever attain daddy approval, for the simple reason that it suits the parental generation too well to hate the thing. They can deflect all the rage they feel about the world that threatens their babies on to a couple of sharp-eyed publishing entrepreneurs and a few sheets of glossy paper. These chaps' little enterprise allows parents to howl, with pious indignation, that their children are being robbed of their innocence. Which, all too grimly, they are. But not by Marc. Or his dog Harry.
For the average 11-to-13 year old - or, if you must, the average nine-year-old - innocence took a far bigger kicking on the day they learnt to spell Damilola.
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