Exam revision - the search continues

Sir David Attenborough has been given one of his most difficult assignments - to capture on film for the first time a teenager in the act of revising for his A-level examinations.

His team (for Attenborough relies on other people to do the camera work) called the Donkins of Woking in early January to arrange a stakeout. A cameraman called Rod, set up his hide in the bedroom wardrobe of our 17-year-old son, George.

The first week passed uneventfully as Rod recorded hour upon hour of George, leaning back in front of his X-Box 360 playing Call of Duty. Sometimes he was joined by an older brother and they alternated play while one sat out the downtime on George's bed.

More footage was recorded of George on Facebook, George on YouTube, George instant-messaging friends, George texting messages on his mobile phone and George eating cereal piled high in bowls.

There was occasional film of George involved in angry exchanges with a parent, and George stamping around his room, pleading, often without success, for use of the car.

But footage of the revision remains elusive. After two weeks Rod has been relieved by another cameraman, Ron who seems equally dedicated to the cause.

Teams of studio producers have been scrutinising hours and days of footage for the slightest sign - there was a squeal of excitement when George was seen to log on to his school web site (checking the school closure notice after heavy snow), but so far, nothing.....

A call to arms

Earlier this week, on the day that we remembered the last of the generation that fought in the First World War, a new video game was released: Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2 that sold 4.7m copies on the first day of its release. I cannot be alone in detecting some irony here. Young men still love war.

I was no different as a youngster but instead of video games my lust for warfare was satiated through Airfix models and small plastic soldiers at two shillings a box (or two weeks' spending money). I must have had almost every box in the series apart from the civilian set. The bloke on the scooter was not bad but the rest was rubbish. I had no use for women sitting talking on a bench.

Of course, had I known much at the time about the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima or the air raids on Dresden and Tokyo I might have been able to use my civilians in a more realistic war game but I was naive enough as a child to believe that wars were about opposing armies. Besides bombing plastic people with plastic aeroplanes would have been a disgraceful thing to do, just as it was in reality.

Blowing up tanks and mowing down troops, on the other hand, was perfectly acceptable. I had a green rug by my bed which made a perfect battlefield. While my armies were capable of inflicting serious casualties on each other it was nothing to the mayhem my mother could reek with her feet as she made the bed. Whole regiments lined up in neat battle order could be scythed down in one careless kick of a carpet slipper.

I had friends who would mix up their Airfix soldiers so that a Confederate infantryman could find himself fighting one of Robin Hood's merry men. The very idea of such indifference I found appalling. No, my foreign legionnaires only fought Arabs. My red Indians (no-one had coined the term "native American" in the mid-1960s) were manufactured in rusty red plastic so that we might not be confused, and they fought either cowboys or the wagon train.

Painting them was a daunting task. Just painting one was inefficient so if you decided to do it you were committed to the whole box, painting legs, faces and arms in flesh tones, then uniforms and finally the equipment. The paint soon started flaking off during play so it was hardly worth the effort.

I still have the soldiers in the loft but the plastic has grown brittle now so their play value is limited. Today video has overtaken the habit of playing with soldiers but I wouldn't have swapped my childhood war games for anything on a screen. Airfix rocked.