This time of year always gets me a bit misty eyed. You start seeing crowds of 16 year olds hovering around outside schools trying desperately not to dislodge elaborate hair arrangements, or in awkwardly fitting suits looking like clouds of trainee estate agents.
It’s prom season, and the prom is a very different thing to your common or garden end of term party.
There have always been school discos and the like, but the prom only took root in the UK during the noughties. The prom is an altogether glitzier affair, with a lot more pageantry; think the Met Gala, if everyone at the Met Gala had been drinking warm Blossom Hill in a park beforehand and was relying on their mate’s mum for a lift home.
My own school prom was right in the first flush of prom-mania, having been demanded by a generation of teenagers who had gorged on American teen dramas One Tree Hill, The OC and High School Musical. The proms we’d seen on TV set the final seal on childhood, and usually ended with a teen boy with a big fringe looking at his girlfriend and saying something folksy like: “Hey, Aubrey/Peyton/Marissa/Summer… looks like we made it.” So, we knew what we wanted.
We wanted to dress up, and we wanted tastefully choreographed pro photographs of us in our finery. We wanted a spirit of wistful bonhomie. We wanted big, emotional outpourings. And ideally we wanted it all soundtracked by emo favourites Dashboard Confessional.
What we got was not that. I and 11 other boys got in our limos and, for 20 minutes at least, we felt like princelings. There was a weird fluffy carpet! An ancient TV which only showed BBC Two! A sporadically skipping copy of Now 66 on the tiny speakers in the ceiling! Truly, the Mersey estuary was ours.
Then we got to the prom itself. I’m not sure how deep into the lore of High School Musical you are, but – spoiler alert – Troy and Gabriella do not dance the night away at a Holiday Inn in Runcorn.
Glitz was thin on the ground. I dimly remember there was rock-hard chicken for dinner. My closest mates and I got our pictures taken and, even by the standards of 2008, we looked like absolute dorks. We were – and I really must emphasise this – very much in a Holiday Inn in Runcorn.
And yet when I look at the 16-year-old me in that official portrait, he is absolutely buzzing. When the DJ played the last song, Take That’s “Never Forget” – TT’s benign dictator Gary Barlow is a local boy, so it hit hard – that feeling of being in A Large Moment In My Life welled up.
Then we got to the after-party, where the most thoroughly teen movie stuff happened. Someone’s parents had gone out for the night and given their blessing to a few people coming round – about 50 of us turned up.
It turned into all our One Tree Hill fantasies: a couple who’d been tentatively edging toward each other for about a year finally got it together; in the small hours, we broke out some truly disgusting cigars which made one guy vomit; and, in time-honoured prom fashion, it ended in a fight which became the subject of extremely lurid retellings. One of my mates swore he’d seen one combatant’s eyeball literally pop out of its socket and go back in.
I’d missed all that; at the time I was wandering home as the sun came up. Three police cars went in the opposite direction just as I was passing our school. Yes, I thought. That was brilliant.
There are, of course, good reasons to be suspicious of the whole prom industry. It’s a big business these days. In 2019, the BBC reported that some parents were spending up to £1,000 on giving their kids the prom they wanted. Clearly, even a small proportion of that outlay is way too much for a lot of parents to stretch to. And there’s some sniffiness about the prom’s inherent Americanness, the way that it wildly overdramatises something which never used to be such a big deal.
But there is, I think, more to proms than just wanting to snatch at a little of that borrowed American glamour. And anyway, our prom turned out not to be the glossy send-off to our school years The OC said it would be. Nor are they just sentimental farewells to people you will, in all likelihood, bump into down the corner shop during the summer holidays. It was, though, a very handy initiation into the parties we’d spend the rest of our lives at.
The odd, angry-awkward tension of trying to get money back off mates for the limos was vital prep for many post-wedding Airbnb situations. I’d been completely ignorant of the need to cultivate a dancefloor strategy too. Eventually I nailed it down – take water breaks every 30 minutes, people, cannot stress that enough – but the prom night shock of realising that just standing in a circle wasn’t what you were meant to do was the beginning of the process.
I learned how to pace myself by watching my mate Sam have a massive attack of the hiccups after chinning Aftershock liqueur. And, more than anything, I learned that when the slimline Hamlets come out, it’s time to go home.
That was the real rite of passage we all went through on prom night. And, more than once, when I’ve been to weddings with mates from that time, I’ve looked around at where we all ended up and thought: “Hey – looks like we made it.”