Skins

With Love Island until recently taking up an hour of viewing time each night (apart from Saturdays when there’s no new episode worth watching), I’m struggling to complete any new boxsets.  Luckily that show is over (as I’ve just turned down my invitation to the final waaaah), but I’m raiding the archives again this week.  Let’s talk about Skins.  It’s often there in the Trending Now part of your Netflix.  Nostalgia sees me hover over it every time, curious to see if it’s as I remember.  But then, I remember not liking it all that much, so it can’t be nostalgia for the show that’s driving this.  I still watched nearly the whole bloody thing, desperate that at some point I would love it like I was supposed to.  Therefore, my urge to sit through it all again must come from nostalgia for my life at the time when it first aired, back in January 2007.  I was finishing my final year at university.  Before long I would be renting the first in a long line of dodgy flats in London while pretending to play careers with other real adults.  I had a lot more energy.  I was a bright young thing.  Now, I’ve recently fulfilled my lifelong ambition of owning my own home (and not having to share it with people who can’t shower without creating a body hair-strewn tsunami).  Instead of being young and fun I’ve spent the weekend cleaning the bathrooms, on the phone to John Lewis about ordering the wrong ironing board and feeling guilty about not buying any more furniture for my flat.  No wonder I’m tempted to relive a part of my long-lost youth.

Busting out on its spiritual home of e4, Skins promised to expose the real truth about being a teen in a way that no other drama had dared to do.  Its first two series followed an initial generation of friends, each beset by their own psychological traumas, external pressures, hormonal urges and web of relationships across the group.  A key premise was that all adults (played by a variety of household names having inordinate fun with their cameos) would be flawed so obviously that we were naturally to conclude that it was no wonder these children were struggling with modern life.  The results of all this bad parenting were lots of sex, drugs, partying, inadvisable behaviour and, to my academic geek sensibilities, not a lot of schoolwork going on!  But whereas this should have provided ample drama and entertainment to the viewer, each episode drew itself out so painfully that I would tut in frustration at its luxuriation over every hard-laboured point (a bit like my prose here…).

The pace was glacial.  It was as if every actor had been told that long pauses between lines equal dramatic scenes.  They didn’t – it just made everything take ages.  Sure, I talk fast in real life, but I don’t expect this of all TV characters.  I just like them to get a wriggle on occasionally so some momentum can develop in order to charge us through to the climax.  Each instalment focused on a different character which also irritated me.  Rather than progressing the group narrative, we would dwell on introducing all these incidental people in that person’s life, delaying things further.  Nevertheless, its attempts at honesty were original, but it tripped into cliché on its way there, developing its own classic trope of each character crying on the floor, swigging from a bottle of neat spirits while claiming “Everything is so f***ed up” as if nobody’s ever had a bad day before.  Having done teenage life myself, I can attest that it’s not actually that bad (especially from the perspective of my mid-thirties).

Despite all this, I persisted, as I wanted it to give me what it had promised.  Besides, we all wanted to see what puberty had done to the About A Boy boy’s eyebrows.  Nowadays, Nicholas Hoult is one of our smashingest actors and, indeed, the class of 2007 have enacted their contractual clause of no future quality entertainment being made without them.  Whether it’s Joe Dempsie and Hannah Murray in Game Of Thrones (which I promise I will eventually cover here), Dev Patel in Slumdog Millionaire and beyond or Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out and Black Panther (no longer pigeonholed as Posh Kenneth), the talent was clearly there.  Maybe it was just practising.

All this said, though, the second series finishes superbly, and the way is paved for the next generation.  Tony Stonem’s younger sister, Effy, played by Kaya Scodelario fulfils that classic British destiny of following in sibling footsteps at school and becomes the alpha of the new crop.  Her love interest, Cook, steals the attention from her though, thanks to Jack O’Connell’s red-raw performance, something he has taken through to everything he has done since (seriously, watch everything he has done right now).  There’s also Luke Pasqualino who’s in lots of things these days, but I only remember him from an obscure scene in Miranda.  Either way, the themes of relationships, sexuality, excess, trust and good old fashioned growing up are investigated further.  By this point, I was more acclimatised to Skins’ sluggish rhythm and more susceptible to its melodrama.  So much so, in fact, that by the time the third generation arrived, I just couldn’t be arsed getting into it all over again.  They just didn’t interest me and I bailed out, cherishing what I had witnessed so far, despite all my frustrations.

Certain scenes still occur to me now and then, whether it’s Cassie’s distressing demonstration of how someone with an eating disorder convinces others she’s eating by rearranging food on her plate, or the moment she whispers “Wow, f*** you, Sid” at a lad who always wore glasses and a beanie.  I still call a wild night a Skins party, after the Gossip-soundtracked promo trail.  For every Jal’s clarinet, there was Cook bouncing off brick walls with the intensity of it all.  For every overuse of effing and jeffing until it lost all its impact, there was heart and truth struggling to get through.  Skins was a step in an evolution of British confidence in its own youth drama, only coming to fruition in more recent times with the likes of Fleabag and The End Of The F***ing World.  So yeah, when I’m wondering what’s going to tempt me from the Netflix algorithm, Skins will always tempt me.  But I’m going to eschew the repeat view in favour of the memory.  You can’t turn back time, but you can do better things with your adult life than watching old things (and cleaning the bathroom).