One afternoon in 1995, I paid a visit, accompanied by my four-year-old son, to a museum of toys and childhood ephemera. As we approached the entrance, a young man flourishing a clipboard suddenly appeared in front of us. He explained that he was doing market research on behalf of the museum and he wanted just a few seconds of my time.
As he asked me how many times I used the museum and what were my feelings about the opening hours, I happened to glance over his shoulder and saw he had ticked the box marked "single parent - male". I said to him: "But I'm not a single parent - why have you ticked that box?" He was unfazed. "We are going by visual identification today," he told me confidently. "You are here alone with your son, so I have ticked the appropriate box. For the purposes of the questionnaire, you are single."
I explained my wife was usually with me when I visited the museum, and that surely it would be more useful to his research if he understood that she was the driving force that had got me to use the museum. I picked up the questionnaire and tried to tick the "married" box to reclassify myself. He snatched it back and said that I absolutely could not do that.
"You are a single parent for the purpose of today" he said very slowly and loudly, with something approaching fury. "What you are on other days doesn't matter. Can't you understand that?" And with that he waved me on so briskly that I decided it was best not to pursue the point. My last image of him was his narrow face staring after me in astonishment, his head shaking at my idiotic attempt to complicate his process.
For weeks afterwards I was haunted by the encounter. The mid-1990s was the time when market research started to be everywhere. People rang the doorbell clutching surveys, stopped you in the street, phoned you out of the blue at home.
I began to wonder what the implications would be if all this research was as flawed as the young man's survey. For if the majority of market research was wrong - if there was no real science to it, if all the extrapolations were based on omissions, tiny lies and inaccuracies - the conclusion must be that we were heading for a world that absolutely nobody wanted.
My newfound curiosity in market testing was given a powerful boost a few weeks later. I was having dinner with a distant acquaintance who told me, totally unprompted, a fascinating anecdote about market research.
He outlined to me how BritishTelecom, his old employer, had commissioned a great deal of consumer research into the size of the potential mobile phone market in the early 1980s. After a period of exhaustive enquiry, BT found the total market for mobile phones would never be more than a few thousand people in the UK. The product's use would be confined to captains of industry, television executives, rock stars and senior civil servants.
Similar research undertaken by AT&T in the US had come to the same conclusion, and so BT promptly sold its mobile phone business. How could such thorough research have led to such a catastrophic mistake?
The answer was that the consumer had lied. BT's research had asked such questions as: "If you were on a bus, and the bus was delayed and you had a phone small enough to fit in your pocket, would you find it useful to be able to phone home and say you were going to be late?" Nearly every single respondent said they would never want to use the phone like that, and they would never buy one even if they became very cheap. This was because they didn't want to be perceived as foolish or extravagant by strangers. So even if market researchers were skilful and imaginative enough to ask the right questions, the respondent was capable of giving an untrue answer.
I emerged from that dinner absolutely galvanised; the seeds of Sweet Panic had been sown. I knew I wanted to write a play about the adult world trying to remain in control at a time when technological progress was accelerating at an amazing rate. The world had become intensely competitive in so many areas, and people wanted to pay experts and specialists to help them remain ahead of the competition.
This applied equally whether you were the chief executive of a giant corporation or simply a housewife with one child to bring up. But I knew I didn't want to write a play about a group of market researchers or gullible captains of industry, because that is a world that is very difficult to animate and humanise.
This was brought home to me whenever I told my mobile phone anecdote to anybody who worked in broadcasting. Instead of acknowledging the flaws of market research, they would testily swat the story away, saying it demonstrated only people's inability to imagine themselves as part of any scenario set in the future - even the very near future.
They maintained that market research was invaluable in telling you what people thought about the present day. This was despite the fact that several of the BBC's most popular hits of the 1990s were rejected by focus groups when the shows were first tried out on them.
In Sweet Panic, the certainty of the world of the professional, in this case a child psychologist, is challenged by an eccentric and unpredictable middle-class mother and housewife, Mrs Trevel. She proves to be an obsessive collector of newspaper cuttings and of items she sees on the media, such as confident predictions about the future that she fully expects to be proved wrong. In the spring of 1995 I found myself behaving in a very similar way, collecting examples from broadsheet newspapers and TV of anything that seemed to suggest a loss of collective intelligence. A few of these nuggets found themselves into the play. The Guardian cover story on the day Robert Black, the serial murderer of several children, was sentenced made for one of the most desolate and upsetting front pages of a newspaper I could ever remember.
On the back page of the same edition of the newspaper, there was a cheerful headline, a trailer for a feature: "Had enough of serial killer chic?" Of course, it takes an obsessive character like Mrs Trevel to remember examples like that and keep them; most of us just let them wash past. To write the play, however, I had begun to turn into Mrs Trevel.
A small interview with a BBC executive of the period also burned itself into my consciousness (and found itself reflected in the play). This male executive had just been appointed to oversee some aspects of young people's programmes and was challenged by the interviewer to explain how an Oxbridge-educated chap like himself could connect with the young. The executive explained that he shared one thing with them above all: he was completely incapable of watching any television programme, no matter what it was, all the way through to the end.
This celebration of gormless inattention by an executive of the BBC was shocking to me. But this was a widely held assumption by people in the media in the 1990s: that young people could no longer concentrate on anything unless it was in short bursts. (And maybe even that was too tough unless it had an information bar running along the bottom of the screen at the same time.)
This was the climate in which my own young children were growing up, and I wanted to find a way of writing about it. All around me I could see examples of parental anxiety. Suddenly our children were being tested all the time; state schools in London appeared full of drugs and violence, and seemed obstinately to stay right at the bottom of league tables.
When a popular teacher suddenly left one of my children's schools, there was an outbreak of shock, almost mourning, among the parents as they began to worry about their children's future. And when the time came for our children to leave primary school, we parents moved in an anxious flock from school open day to school open day. I remember turning around as we were being addressed by one head teacher to see the parents' faces almost shaking with tension. They were thinking: "Where do we send our children?"
In Sweet Panic, Mrs Trevel sees the world her son George is growing up in as a society hurtling towards a future pre-ordained by market research, where the prevailing culture celebrates exams and tests and is very intolerant of original thinking. Clare, the child psychologist who has to cope with Mrs Trevel's assault, has a much more measured view of the present and the future. She knows from her experience that her young clients, the children, are able to concentrate for just as long as children in any era if they are truly interested in something. (The great length of more recent movies such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, interestingly, have proved her right.)
Clare's view is that people have not fundamentally changed in their imaginative capabilities, despite the colossal quantity of pre-packaged visual entertainment that bombards young minds. She also challenges Mrs Trevel's belief that it was so much safer for children when they were young, that the past was a more golden and welcoming place for young people as they strolled, free from danger, down leafy lanes controlled by rotund bobbies and cheery lollipop ladies.
Her belief that orderly, unforced progress is still possible for children, that their imaginations can play a crucial role in their educational development, that there is plenty of space for their minds to daydream and go on eccentric tangents, is very close to my own. But so is some of Mrs Trevel's thinking.
All through my career, I have written about people rebelling against the assumptions made in the marketplace, especially in the way that market-led thinking dominates the world of education, entertainment and politics. Mrs Trevel is expressing some of this exasperation and rebellion.
She is a middle-class parent full of fury at the professionals that have let her down. She is encouraged by Clare to believe that her son has time to develop in his own way. But she looks around at society and sees what is really happening. When we first meet Mrs Trevel in the play, she seems an irrational person, but she is gradually revealed as a lucid thinker who is capable of unsettling insights.
Through the collision of these two highly intelligent women, I wanted to create a story that expressed and examined some of the anxieties that all parents feel as they watch their children grow up. Above all, Mrs Trevel realises that the adult world, the professional world, the business world, is outwardly trying to seem in control of its destiny while underneath it has never been more fearful and uncertain about the future. The challenge she offers Clare is that if we admit to this uncertainty to our children, this is a far more healthy state of affairs than if we try to disguise it.
Looking at the way the world has gone since that moment I encountered the market researcher outside the toy museum in 1995, I can't help feeling that Mrs Trevel's basic contention is more true now than when I first wrote the play.
· Sweet Panic opens at the Duke of York's Theatre, London WC2, on November 12. Box office: 020-7369 1791.
