Reflections: The Best One Direction TV Show That Never Graced Our Screens

The year is 2010 and the phone lines have been frozen. Millions of people gather around their TV screens all over Britain in great fear and anticipation. Eight year old me is amongst them. I feel sick, sinking my teeth into my knuckles and sweating profusely from my armpits. Dermot O’Leary is being a smug, power-tripping git and making me want to throw the remote at his face, as he milks his use of prolonged silences. He is supposed to be announcing the third place act, and therefore the next to leave the X-Factor. After what feels like ten years of tense drum beats and clips of Simon Cowell's face, he finally drops it: “One Direction.” 

“NOOOOO!” I scream at the TV, “What the hell!!!!”

“Language!” Both my parents snap, as my older brother Thomas tauntingly laughs, pushing me into further rage. I’m so done with this ridiculous TV show now. Clearly, it's rigged. It’s fixed. How ON EARTH could 1D lose? I sit down on the brown leather sofa next to my brother and I can feel his smirk filling up the whole room, like he’s blowing up a huge red balloon. Shrinking further into my sulk, I ponder the injustice of the world, and how much of a stupid, pea-brained IDIOT somebody has to be to vote for Matt Cardle. This was real betrayal, this was real disappointment. 

The next day, bravely, I still attended primary school, where me and my best friend Hannah mourned the news together. The playground was a cacophony of sighs and wails. Girls of all year groups disheartened, boys elated. The sky seemed greyer, the bell to end playtime sounded duller, and it rained. A lot. Even the teachers looked depressed, I knew the news must’ve hit them hard too. O, so much suffrage among us. 

However, the grief didn’t last very long as One Direction obviously still did very well. In their six year run, they sold over seventy million records worldwide. They won almost two hundred awards, including seven Brit Awards and twenty eight Teen Choice Awards. Most importantly, they gained a huge cult following that named themselves ‘Directioners’ They were a wildly dedicated fanbase of mostly pre-teen and teenage girls, and me and Hannah were a part of it. We were OBSESSED with all things One Direction. On one occasion, Sandra, Hannah’s mum, very kindly drove us an hour to Holmes Chapel to visit the bakery that Harry Styles had worked in before the X-Factor. Another time, we went to the cinema to watch the One Direction: This Is Us film together. We even went to their first tour, of their debut album Up All Night for our first concert. We collected merchandise for every birthday and Christmas - the notebooks, the creepy dolls, the bed sheets even. (Which did come back to haunt me ten years later, when I had to explain to a boyfriend why I had One Direction sheets on my bed.) But, definitely most notably, me and Hannah crafted what we believed to be a literary 1D masterpiece. All birthed from the fervent need to meet those five boys - Harry, Niall, Louis, Liam and Zayn. 

I was up late one night. Scribbling madly with a purple felt tip, buried under sheets of A4 paper. Lying there, on the beige carpet in my lilac bedroom, leaning on my One Direction unofficial annual, I composed a masterpiece to rival all contemporary screenwriters. Right at that moment, I devised the fault-proof plan for how me and Hannah would meet, and become adored by, One Direction. The pilot episode for: Reflections. A TV show starring me, Hannah, three incredibly lucky nepotism hires from our class and One Direction. I packed the document into my grey love heart satchel and submitted to a deep, hard-earned sleep, dreaming of cameras and microphones.

Phonics and geography the next morning seemed to drag on forever, for all I wanted to do was hear the sweet ring of the bell for break time so I could tell Hannah all about Reflections. When it finally rang, I grabbed her arm, insisted, “We need to have a private chat”, and sat down with her behind the blue P.E container at the edge of the playground.

“I know how to meet One Direction! I’ve written the first episode of a TV show where One Direction are our older brothers, and we’re their younger sisters!”

“OMG yes, amazing!” Hannah replied, raising two excited fists up to her face.

“I’m Harry's sister and you’re Niall’s because they’re our favourites. We’ll get our friends to be the other sisters, and then we can send it to the BBC and they’ll get it on telly.”

“Yeah, we should audition people for the other parts and we can send it to the BBC from my computer at home!” Brilliant suggestion. I always admired Hannah’s leadership skills. 

Now, you may be wondering why I didn’t write One Direction as our love interests, rather than siblings. Great question. Unfortunately, by this point we’d been saddened by the news from a credible source, tumblr account 1dcutethings, that "The youngest 1D would date is 14." So, devastatingly, at eight years old, we were aware that, romantically, we didn't have a chance. Although, there was the slight hope between us that when they actually met us, our natural charm and beauty would be too much not to fall in love with. 

Me and Hannah wrote several more sporadic scenes together over the next few days, during break times and after school. She was a great writer and came up with exciting plots, such as all ten characters going on a ghost train together and other scary situations. Anything that involved us getting to hug them as much as possible really. Genius. We even workshopped several other names ("Sisters and Brothers", "Another Direction"), but decided to keep Reflections, as it sounds like Direction. “As in One Direction. But it's Reflections, because we’re like reflections of them as their younger sisters” is how we’d explain it to classmates at the auditions. 

These auditions were held on the playground a few days later over morning and lunch break. They consisted of almost all of the girls in our class, and the other class, which was a great turnout for word of mouth marketing. In the auditions, me and Hannah would sit cross legged on the floor and read in the other parts from our crumpled, handwritten paper script. Meanwhile, the auditionee would read the part she was going for, from the "waking up after the sleepover" scene. Me and Hannah shared insights between auditions like, “I just don’t really see her as Louis’ sister, she’s not funny enough” or more, politically, “She didn’t invite me to her birthday so I don’t really want her in it, as revenge.” 

For Louis’ and Liam’s sisters, I faintly remember us casting two girls from the other class, Millie and Maddy. The memory of them is slightly fuzzy in my brain and their image now materialises as a blur of ginger and brunette pigtails, a hand gripping a gooey alien and lelly kelly school shoes. Their presence was pretty overshadowed by the fact that we landed what is equivalent to a celebrity casting. We cast Kate. Kate was the most popular girl in the year, after Gabriella, so we were buzzing that she auditioned. She was hilarious and smart and kind, and always had a main part in the Nativity. It was a no-brainer to cast her. Kate asked if her green Littlest Pet Shop frog teddy, Hamish, could feature in the show. Of course we said yes. However, we never predicted the world-altering effects this would have on Reflections. 

Kate was a natural born comedian, and her teddy Hamish took after her in this way. At first, this was highly beneficial, Hamish added a great comedic flare to the show that me and Hannah had blindly missed. Unprompted, he went off script to add in slapstick humour and rude ad libs. He was a kind of Alan Partridge character, which became a great asset. 

On the second day of rehearsal, at lunch time, me and Hannah gathered the whole cast by the bike sheds. Kate, Hamish, Millie, Maddy, and us. We had a wad of paper in our hands for each of them, consisting of what we viewed as prestigious industry contacts. “Tonight, please go home and use your parents computers to email all of these addresses. They are the telly people’s addresses. Send them the script and emphasise how good it is, or you’ll never be able to meet One Direction.” Hannah declared. (Note: I don’t think any of them apart from us actually cared about meeting them at all, and were just having a bit of fun. But unfortunately, we were intensely serious about it.) “It’s really important that none of us miss any of these addresses, because they must get loads of emails” I pointed out, believing myself to be highly perceptive for noting this. Me and Hannah had collated this list the evening before, it consisted of addresses like talent@itv.co.uk or careers@bbc.com, anything that came up after googling “get your script on telly”, and consequently “send script to BBC”. I’m unsure if any of them were actually legitimate. The cast members took the paper with disinterested nods. On third break, I was worried about the nonchalant attitudes of the cast, and confided in Hannah. “They don't seem driven enough, but this is our chance” I stressed. We were teetering around on the wooden assault course in our pinafores. “They need to take it seriously, or we’ll recast people who deserve to meet One Direction more” she decided.

But hold on, I know exactly what you’re thinking, "This show sounds like a household name, like Eastenders or Friends, why did it never reach our screens?"

The rehearsals went on that week. We could barely get through any of the script efficiently, as we had a problem cast member. Hamish. He refused to stick to the script. He spoke over almost everyone else's lines and therefore too much attention was taken from One Direction, the main characters! Hamish was, of course, hilarious and witty, but much more suited to his own spin off show. The production was a mess, we knew the people from the telly wouldn’t want to work in a chaotic environment such as this. For two more break times, this issue endured. Even after countless warnings. So me and Hannah had to call a meeting. We had to have THE conversation. 

"It can’t just become the Hamish show!!!" I said, hushed yet urgent, from the basketball hoop, in a short break during lunch rehearsal. "The most important thing here is meeting One Direction, the focus needs to be on them!" Hannah tutted. And there, the cutthroat decision was made. We returned to the cast, and delivered the news. Unfortunately, for the sake of the production, and the goal of meeting 1D, Hamish had to go. However, this started a domino effect. Kate had loyalties and so with Hamish, went Kate. With Kate, went Millie and Maddy, until it was just me and Hannah again. 

I think this may have been a heartbreaking loss for me and Hannah, if we were not distracted by the fact that Year Five had just started playing our favourite game again, British Bulldogs. British Bulldogs was banned by teachers for being too dangerous as it caused too many bumped heads. However, one miraculous prodigy in our class, Ben, had discovered that if we just changed the name, we could still play the game, and if a teacher asked what it was, we could avoid getting in trouble with the fake name, Wall Touch. Therefore, the whole of Year Five was having a great time playing British Bulldogs, and we joined in, feeling on top of the world as only that game can make you feel. Impressively, Year Five managed to get away with this for a whole two days. This was enough time to drown out the grief for Reflections, and it soon became forgotten about.

Until very recently. It came to mind when me and a friend were talking about the unwavering, unrelenting belief you have in yourself as a child. For example, me and Hannah never questioned the fact that Reflections would get picked up by the BBC or ITV or Channel 4, or that we would meet One Direction.  At that age, generally, there is no question about failing or not being good enough, no imposter syndrome, no anxiety. Somewhere along the way, amidst the pains of adolescence and adulthood, we lose that intense belief. That attitude of "This good thing that I want is going to happen to me, because I say it is" becomes viewed as naive and delusional. But what if it didn’t have to be? I think there is a lot we can learn from children, and our childhood selves. For me, at the moment, it is about self belief. I want to channel the unrelenting confidence I had. I recently decided I want a career in writing, and I’m pretending to be eight year old me by just deciding that I will accomplish it. And hopefully, with this attitude and the work I’m putting in, I’ll figure it out. I invite you to join me on this blog, where I’ll be sharing my writing, to see if this helps get me anywhere. And I also invite you to join me in channelling and triumphing your self assured childhood self, to help you achieve whatever seemingly unrealistic goals you also may be chasing. Lets do it together.