never Miss a beat

WTF Skins. If Monday’s episode is anything to go by, according to your (loose) moral code these are the steps that lead to you getting raped by your boyfriend:

1. Find a dodgy guy on holiday in Morocco (a 16-year-old holidaying in Morocco?) who happens to live round your area back in Bristol (two 16-year-olds holidaying in Morocco?)
2. Don’t get any tangible information about how to ever find said guy again (why would you?) just retain his set of matches from an equally dodgy pool bar (do these exist in Bristol?)
3. Go to that dodgy pool bar months later (it’s still open?) having found the set of matches (how did you get them on the flight?) and happen upon the guy (why are you doing this again?)
4. Have crazy sex with the dodgy guy who keeps looking at you like it’s 4am at Glastonbury, you’re a cheese burrito and he wants to eat you (whatever turns you on but you don’t look that desperate). “You make my brain cum and my prick hard,” says dodgy guy, like a regular Shakespeare.
5. Go on a PCP binge (are we in the ‘90s?) and beat the crap out of other kids for no apparent reason other than maybe you’ve been re-cast in a UK version of Battle Royale (you haven’t, that film’s Japanese and the humour wouldn’t translate well)
6. Get really turned on by your bloodied face and his bloodied face (why is nobody going to a hospital for stitches?) and take things to the bedroom
7. Decide you’re not so game because you’ve realised your new boyfriend’s Travis Bickle, except it’s too late. Now he’s raping you and you don’t fight him off, even though (five minutes ago) you happily destroyed a huge dude by hitting him with a crowbar.*

Skins, what you are saying here is as follows: in your capacity as “teen drama” this is all an extreme situation. Nevertheless it is an extreme situation that is technically plausible. REALLY?

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Please momentarily suspend belief that I’m a person of superior taste. Approximately three and a bit series after Skins essentially OD’d on itself, I’m still watching it. I recall the early brilliance of a programme that launched the career of Dev Patel and the face of Nicholas Hoult, presented teen drama in a way that wasn’t patronising and once concluded a series with the Adrian Mole-esque Sid singing his own version of Cat Stevens’ Wild World as his entire universe crashed around him. It was a “cool” show, not vacuously “cool” but properly “cool”. It had something to say about young people. It was bold in the way it portrayed kids. It definitely wasn’t as bold as shows like Queer As Folk but it had a similar modus operandi in that it sought to glorify exciting, taboo behaviour that could be happening in your neighbourhood, albeit in a slightly (very) exaggerated way. It was properly “cool”. IT HAD DANNY DYER IN IT FOR CHRIST’S SAKE. Yes, I recall that early brilliance and I pray that co-creators Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain will also recall it. But as Monday night’s episode of shambolic, over-the-top, ASBO porn proves, they won’t.

Once Skins became aware of how properly “cool” it was, it started to get vacuously “cool” by proceeding to eat itself; common teen mental issues such as Cassie’s anorexia turned into the extreme borderline psychosis of Effie, the randiness of popular boy Tony who cheats on his girlfriend became the near nymphomania of Cook who doesn’t even say “hello” to Effie before obliterating her on a classroom table, the unrequited love that homosexual Maxxie has for his best friend Anwar morphed into the full girl-on-girl, bicurious, love triangle shitshow of Naomi and Emily.

The leap from “First Generation” Skins to “Second Generation” Skins was one from exaggerated reality to unimaginable fantasy. The “Third Generation” have now taken that unimaginable fantasy and come up with some unnecessary, hackneyed trite. And that’s before we get on to the increasing deaths of random kids, the move from houseparties to industrial illegal raves, the GTA-level “random” violence and don’t get me started on the soundtrack (which once allowed for a very early play of Florence And The Machine’s Dog Days on national TV and now accommodates Florence only if remixed by Oh Ye Mighty One of the blogosphere, The Weeknd). The soundtrack has become so pleased with itself over the “Generations”; if I had a pound for every time I’ve heard an early promo CD in the office or soundcloud on Pitchfork and accurately predicted that “This is a Song That Will Be Used On Skins” I’d be watching Skins on Sky Plus on a 3D television feeding Persian cats bags of premium cocaine.

Where Skins was once rooted in plausible stories that were embellished upon with drugs, sex and lewd behaviour, it’s now rooted in drugs, sex and lewd behaviour without any foundation of basic, tangible reality. It seems the only point of constant normalcy is the fact that at 16, these kids are (mostly) all still at school; a school where the principal is practically retarded, the common room is the size of a sports hall, and most students are clinically insane. It’s the Lady Gaga of TV: a show that’s covered all its ground so has resorted to topping itself each season with ever-escalating attempts at the “shock” factor. Unlike Gaga, it “shocks” for the sake of shocking, making no other point than “Hey, shock time!”, and thereby not shocking anyone at all. It has failed miserably to keep us interested. This fourth instalment of series 6 was as attention-seeking and crazed as an episode of Jeremy Kyle featuring schizophrenic, gak-dependent martians from Space. And frankly, that sounds more insightful than anything Skins could possibly have left to say. 

*Between points 1 and 2 a friend died because you met the dodgy guy and your school made you get counseling to deal with it which involved talking to a fake Pingu and pretending it was your dead friend… and still after all that you proceeded with the other points.