Why on earth are we letting British teenagers succumb to the scam of American prom culture?

Kids are getting their parents to spend a fortune on gaudy dresses and helicopter rides. Instead of giving in to their increasingly lavish demands, why not chuck a dose of teenage-style emotional blackmail back at them by giving that money to charity instead?

For starters, kids, it’s not your ‘big night’ – it’s the end of term (Getty/iStock)

Hello, misery guts of south London here, having another moan at something that has nothing to do with me and doesn’t impact on my life whatsoever. Harrumph – which doesn’t mean to say I’m not going to stick my big nose in and have a pop at it anyway. My goat-getter, this week, is the teenage prom.

Just the word “prom” makes my hackles rise. I don’t really like proms under any guise, I can’t stand people in union jack waistcoats at the Albert hall bobbing up and down in unison to that hornpipe number – honestly, my skin is crawling as I type – but even worse than the musical proms is the British adoption of the American school prom.

Apparently, now is the season of this money-shredding Yankie abomination, with 16-year-old girls up and down the land getting into an Instagram lather about how they’re going to look on their “big night”.

OK, for starters, it’s not your “big night”, it’s the end of term. But sure, celebrate by all means, preferably in a park with a load of mates and a couple of bottles of cider, because all this nonsense about limos and long frocks needs nipping in the bud.

Your parents are bankrupting themselves, kids; they’re not taking the rest of the family on holiday because of your “big night”.

Seriously, dads are ringing helicopter services to see if it’s possible to land their precious darling on the netball court. How has this become normal?

Apparently, some girls have been planning their prom look for the past two years. I bet some of them have spent more time on their prom Pinterest boards than they ever did revising – and who can blame them? Given the chance at 16 to re-read A Handful of Dust or cut pictures out of a magazine to show how I’d like my dream hair to look, I know which one I’d have chosen.

But back in 1976 – yes, my O-levels coincided with the hottest summer on record, a fact I was poised to use as an excuse when my mediocre results came out – we didn’t have the option. Anyway, I went to an all-girls school and I’d already had my pickings from the boys’ school next door.

The escalation of the prom is what really bothers me; it’s been insidiously creeping onto the school curriculum over the past 10 years. My daughter is 30 and when she finished school post-A-levels, she and her mates organised a leavers’ do held in a dodgy nightclub in town. The school had nothing to do with it: they were 18, they were adults, there was a great deal of primping and preening and probably some crying over shoes, but there wasn’t any silliness over helicopters, there weren’t facials and hairdressing appointments and manicures.

Manicures, for heaven’s sake; I’m nearly 60 and I’ve never had a manicure in my life, I’m perfectly capable of wielding an emery board and I can paint my own nails thanks, even with my left hand (years of practice).

Apparently, it is costing some parents a grand to kit out their teenage prom queen, with parents of boys getting off a great deal more lightly.

What I don’t get about this whole fandango is that the schools seem to be complicit. In hosting the school prom, they are actively encouraging a culture of flashy vanity and vulgar displays of wealth, regardless of whether parents can afford it.

Obviously, it’s not just the schools, the parents are daft too, but then all parents are. We’ve all been brow-beaten into giving our kids something they don’t need because we don’t want them to be left out. Be that rollerblades worn once, or some sold-out Christmas toy that you ended up buying for 10 times the original price from a bloke standing in a layby off the M40.

I’ve done it myself, mostly out of maternal guilt for gigging away from home all the time. I once took a bunch of eight-year-olds in a limo to the Fashion Cafe for a birthday party – what was I thinking? Looking back, I want to give myself a smack, and yes, of course the food was terrible, even the eight-years-olds knew it.

You can’t trust parents to do what’s best for their children, especially not those with teenagers whose special power is the ability to wear down mum and dad, until eventually, in the name of love and exhaustion, they give in and allow mad things for a quiet life, even if that means paying for hair extensions that inevitably fall out and choke the hoover within a month.

Schools, it’s up to you: why not chuck a dose of teenage-style emotional blackmail back at them? Tell the kids all the funds that would normally go towards a prom are going to a charity of their choice and watch their faces contort into spasms of disappointment twinned with “woke” righteousness. You never know, it might catch on and “not having a prom” could soon be all the rage.