Television
Teenage dreams, so hard to meet
Published 29 January 2007
Channel 4's latest attempt to shock patronises its younger audience
Skins E4
Long before Shameless, I asked a friend who worked in television why no one had made a drama about the British underclass. He replied that the resulting programme would be just too grim. Paul Abbott's genius was to make Shameless the jolliest romp around, although whether it is truthful, as is claimed, to his own childhood experiences or, in fact, a kind of lie about them, I am never too sure. Now the producers of Shameless are ready to delight us by looking under another distinctly unprepossessing stone, teenagers.
The tone is lighter than the subject would seem to admit: the teenagers in Skins (10pm, Thursdays) are alcohol abusers and skunk smokers. One suffers from anorexia nervosa. Another is being pursued by a drug dealer for money. Yet the worst thing that happens, in episode one at least, is that a mansion gets trashed and a posh car falls into a pond. Bobbing to the surface, one of its pubescent passengers, whom we have previously assumed to be dying from an overdose, observes, "That could have been a lot worse." Indeed, it could. In Shameless the camaraderie of the feckless classes precludes tragedy; in Skins, which is set in middle-class Bristol, parental incomes underpin the comedic tone.
The cast is led by Nicholas Hoult, who was only yesterday starring, aged 12, in About a Boy. As Tony, he is a 17-year-old master of the universe, running rings round his parents, twitting his teachers and promising that his luckless Sancho Panza, Sid, can and will lose his cherry if, in return, he closes a deal with the local drug baron, a madman called, with Dickensian subtlety, Madison Twatter. Tony is a nasty piece of work unjustly glamourised in the pilot, and I was glad, on peeping at the second episode (1 February), to see that not everyone wants to be in his gang.
The opening episode introduced the rest of Tony's mob at frenetic pace. They divide along traditional sitcom lines. The boys, including a hip Muslim and a gay tap dancer, are randy and confident. The girls, especially Tony's girlfriend, Michelle, are randy but sensible. The two exceptions are Sid (Mike Bailey in a promisingly lugubrious performance), who is not yet invincible because he is still a virgin, and the anorexic Cassie, who suffers the handicaps of being both posh and ditzy (Hannah Murray captures these elements well, and adds a note of desperation). The second episode explores their relationship quite touchingly, in a Nick Hornby sort of way.
Whatever the failings of the youngsters, however, they are dwarfed by those of the adults. The grown-ups are, with one exception - and he is a lowly cab driver - idiots. They are even played by actors who got famous playing idiots. Tony's father is none other than Harry Enfield and Cassie's is Neil Morrissey, both of whom starred in the original ITV series of Men Behaving Badly. The Enfield character here is a foul-mouthed dimwit dad with anger issues that are cynically exploited by his cool son. Morrissey's is a horny artist who, when not making babies with his wife, is committing her breasts to canvas. No wonder (we are meant to think) that poor, neglected Cassie is anorexic.
The humiliations to which the plots subject the grown-ups know no limits. Perhaps they should. I was particularly worried about the young psychology teacher Angie, shown not merely as an emotional wreck from an affair with a PE teacher, but, in episode two, naked in the showers, observed by a bunch of leering yet superior boys. Come to think of it, I have not seen so much female nudity in a Channel 4 production for a time, and while it would be hypocritical for me to lament its return, I do wonder who changed the rules.
According to the Channel 4 sales office, the programme's intended demographic is 16- to 34-year-olds. Perhaps Skins is doing a little too much to curry favour with the younger end of it: not just nudity and stupid parents, but episodes that can be viewed on MySpace and interactive website competitions. Were I aged 17, I'd suspect I was being patronised. Though the writers are conversant with most youth slang, like "safe" for "good", they use "gay" strictly in the glad-to-be sense. You might not think so after Celebrity Big Brother, but it seems there's only so much reality Channel 4 can bear.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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