Skins.....
I set on the sofa in my living room with a tea after the dinner and switched on the TV. As usual I started shuffling the more than 200 channels aimlessly, and this brought me to a hault,.....a new E4 drama set in Bristol about sex-crazed, dirty-mouthed feral teens staying up all night and getting stupefied on pills...
...young Tony sets the plotlines running as he tries to sort out a debut shag for speccy Sid before his forthcoming 17th birthday (failing which he will become an instant pariah), meanwhile sending him off to buy a bag of skunk on credit from a local psychopath ahead of that evening's party at a posh girl's house. The rest of the suitably variegated group are rounded up - beautiful Michelle, nutter Chris, dreamy Cassie with her eating disorders, and Anwar(ofcoz not me), interrupted on his mobile during prayers at the mosque ('Cheers, Tone - now my uncle wants to stone me to death'). They are easy to like as long as you're not the mum and dad arriving home from from the Maldives to find your living room remodelled by Moravian swineherds and your Range Rover in the river.( Bristol, Anwar, Maldives...!!!)
But it's is not all wild partying. One plot strand focuses on a girl struggling with an eating disorder in the face of useless adults, not to mention an overfriendly taxi driver old enough to be her dad...
Anyway. This is supposed to be a review of Skins, right? Except, when it comes to cultural reviews, the best time to write them is straight afterwards so you remember most of it; but I’ve procratinated on this review in the hope that I delete the entire memory from my mind, and because I didn’t take notes (who does?) I’ve forgotten half of what actually happened. Thankfully!
In any case, there is very little to recommend of Skins. I know most drama is supposed to be a flight of fancy, and that it’s just a story, but Skins claims that this is somewhat based upon real life, as if all teenagers handle unpaid for drugs and have the mafia on their backs, and it all ends in hilarious consequences. No, no it bloody well doesn’t. Don’t pay for drugs? You get shot, that’s what happens. As if white middle class teenagers would go near Mr Big; they’d probably just get on the phone to their deelah and would go nowhere near guns.
It was too much...
Look, if you don’t believe me (and I have a feeling that there will be many of my peers who will no doubt virulently disagree with me) check it out on Thursday nights, at 2200 on E4.



