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The Best...teen drama |
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TV's always had a difficult relationship with teenagers. They're too easily made the butt of unkind jokes (Adrian Mole), exploited as glossy sex objects (Hollyoaks), or stereotyped as precocious young fogeys (Dawson's Creek).
But those years are such an intense, confusing, amusing time - it should be possible to make a rollicking good show out of them. E4's Skins, a comedy drama about a bunch of Bristol 17-year-olds, is that show.
Skins was billed as being written by rookie writers, which sparked fears that it would be a juvenile mess - and the carnal riot in the original trailer made it look like an STD warning film. Yet it's a warm, thoughtful piece of work.
The believable characters and neat plotting must be partly thanks to the chief writer actually being 45-year-old Bryan Elsley (The Crow Road, Rose and Maloney). But Elsley's second-in-command is his 21-year-old son Jamie Brittain, and their decision to have every script scrutinised by a gang of very young writers has resulted in a show totally free of patronising cliché.
The big thing Skins gets right is the thrilling, terrifying loss of control its characters are feeling. It's a giddy whirl of parties, japes, halting relationships, fond friendships and soberingly adult problems - all dealt with by people who have no idea what they're doing, but are loving having a go. Mostly it's about discovering love and sex without necessarily recognising the difference.
I imagine it feels real to 17-year-old viewers; to this 28-year-old, who can smile about it now even if at the time it was terrible, it feels very real.
But it's real in terms of evoking a mood, without boring us by being realistic: in the main it's a laugh-out-loud romp, peppered with "what the…?!" moments, from trippy party montages and the notorious female teachers' shower-room scene to the unforgettable sight of one of the lads urinating into his own face after a failed experiment with Viagra.
Many of the laughs stem from the neat trick of casting big-name comic actors (Harry Enfield, Peter Capaldi, Arabella Weir) as parents, underlining that mum and dad are distant, ridiculous cartoon figures who have no idea what their kids are up to.
Getting the viewers on side like this lets Skins legitimately have its cake and eat it by mixing naughty fantasy with proper emotional drama. In a recent episode the kids were on a school trip to a Russian glue factory, engaging in bed-swapping farce.
But the best episode so far focused on anorexic Cassie and her long, lonely battle with herself: it was elliptical, almost dreamlike and unspeakably sad. Skins has dealt with anorexia, homosexuality, religion, infidelity, divorce, mental illness and death, without turning them into Issues with a preachy capital "I".
Skins is challenging and entertaining for its target audience, and fresh and adventurous just as a piece of television. It's that rare thing: a show for young people that feels youthful itself.
Jack Seale
Now check out our Skins programme guide
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