Australian Article

THERE'S been a lot of palaver in the press lately about naughty teenagers, particularly irksome gimps in ladies' sunglasses who could use a firm smack on the bottom and a few weeks scrubbing out old people's toilets with a toothbrush. The daily rags are, as ever, asking po-faced and probing questions. Who's looking after the youth of today? Who's responsible for their wellbeing? What on earth do they get up to when we're not looking?
If the tabloid press and A Current Affair's Leila McKinnon are seeking answers (although let's be honest - they've most likely moved on to trying to hunt down someone who once served Heath Ledger a sandwich), they'll need to look no further than SBS' mind-jarringly brilliant new series Skins, which is languidly throwing its weight all over Monday-night viewing with its dirty, damp wantonness. Sitting through an hour of it is like being trapped in a 14-year-old girl's gym bag with a fork stuck in your ribs, and it's utterly stupendous.
This week's episode announced itself from the get-go, opening with a close-up of a rather aggressively taut teenage boner, straining against a pair of tight underpants. Following not far behind this vaguely confronting shot was an ecstasy-fuelled party, a young man urinating in his own face, a drug-dealing eight-year-old, an infant being dropped on its head, and an erection that had to be sellotaped to a poor gentleman's leg "for safety reasons".
I don't know how the producers get away with it. I once wrote an episode of television in which the characters weren't allowed to have a sip of wine when they were depressed lest they came across as desperate and haggard soaks numbing their woes with demon liquor.
How wonderfully far we've come.
Each episode of Skins - and there are sadly too few - is driven by a different cast member in the ensemble.
Monday was the abandoned wild-child Chris, who staggered through the episode with pupils like saucers and did some things with goldfish and Viagra that don't bear further discussion. Nicholas Hoult, once seen knocking about with Hugh Grant in About a Boy, plays Tony, who started the series with a cheery episode about pot dealing and crashing posh parties. Back in his anklebiter days he sported a bowl haircut and a diastema you could park a semi between. These days the only words appropriate for his cut-glass cocky cheekbones and rampant spreading of seed seem to be "my, how he's grown". I don't know whether to march him to the principal's office for a firm talking to or smother him in Nutella and instruct him to dance to Dr John.

Skins has heart, though. Look past the mildly startling moments and it's beautiful and sad and poignant and perfectly hurtful. One moment you're awash with tears over poor Chris being abandoned by his mad mother, the next you're hearing in lurid detail about the not uninteresting phenomenon of camel-toes while a roomful of surly adolescents in oversized denim pants knock back shots of tequila. It's drama that's edgy, funny and rude, and there should be a lot more of it made, particularly here in Australia. Do we really need another sea-police-in-space shouty commercial series involving furrow-browed Lisa McCunes striding about in jumpsuits?
For all that, I don't know if teenagers in real life watch Skins. I don't know if they should watch it. They're better off sitting on the couch eating Burger Rings and masturbating sullenly, or whatever it is young folk get up to when they're not downloading Grinspoon songs off iTunes. At best, they'd realise through the word-perfect portrayal of their lives and dealings that someone was on to them; at worst they'd find all sorts of Rather Inappropriate behaviour to emulate. It's a series for adults, particularly those who might have somewhat of a chequered moral past themselves.
Harmony Korine briefly explored the seamier side of adolescence when he wrote the film Kids (aged 19, the talented bastard). Now it's Britain's turn. Skins is bleak and rub-raw and so openly sexual you can practically hear the saliva being transferred from mouth to mouth by the zesty bucketload every time someone scores a pash. These teenagers are getting laid, and throwing outrageously irresponsible shindigs, and employing the sort of language that would get one asked rather firmly to leave a reputable dining establishment, and thusly I can't wait to watch next week.
It's either that or hang around the local high school trying to ingratiate myself with the kidlettes, and I fear the law enforcement officers have already warned me off that particular pastime with a series of increasing fines and one or two court appearances.
Look, Skins is simply the best thing I've seen on television in a very long time.
I can't say anything more than that. Watch it or go comb MySpace looking for reasons as to why your wayward teen invited 3000 of his closest pals over to drink your cabernet and wee in your golf bag.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/tv--radio/marieke-hardy/2008/01/29/1201369132138.html

Last Night's Television: Still crazy after all those beers - The Independent Article

Though it often feels as if all of television is aimed at people under the age of 21, in some respects the "youth" audience – a laughably prissy phrase – can feel with some justice that it's badly served.

Youth culture as a whole works by antithesis, setting itself against an older generation's idea of fun; but youth TV rarely has the nerve to do that. It has advertisers to please, licence-fee payers to avoid offending, watchdogs and editorial boards with their own axes to grind; and so it ends up trying to broaden its appeal, to show that young folk are as human as anybody else, which I'm not entirely convinced is the case. Proper youth programming, which dares to reject and even insult the values of parents, is a real rarity: a show such as Janet Street-Porter's Network 7, for example, back in the late Eighties, settled for being irritating (stupid camera angles, unnecessarily scrappy editing) instead of genuinely rejectionist.

So there's this much to be said for Skins, the smart soap about Bristol sixth-formers: it really doesn't seem to care how much it hacks parents off. For this third series, all the original stars have been shucked off to university and jobs, leaving the way clear for a new generation of bright young things. The only one I recognise from before is Effy (Kaya Scodelario), younger sister of the ineffably cool but brain-damaged Tony, who has now moved centre-stage. Last week showed her arrival at sixth-form college, to meet an assortment of more or less stereotypical characters: the boys include cool, nice-looking but mildly insecure Freddie, insanely hedonistic Cook and geeky JJ; the main girls are slutty Katy, who goes out with a Bristol Rovers reserves footballer, her wallflower identical twin, Emily, mouthy, self-possessed Naomi and ditzy Pandora.

As before, it is slickly made, but I remember the earlier series being more nuanced. What was striking about last week's opening episode was the absolute inadequacy of every single adult character, their complete subordination to comic business. Though the central characters were disappointingly two-dimensional, the adults were barely even points on a map; nobody over the age of 17 was granted anything approaching an inner life, a point of view, sympathy.

This week, things developed a little further. Cook (Jack O'Connell) turned 17 and held a party at his uncle's pub, apparently convinced that the combination of girls, alcohol and lots of shouting were enough to satisfy anybody – the dawning of the realisation that this was actually pretty tedious was the first sign so far that teenagers might have any objectives in life beyond getting a) laid and b) high. It was a bit of a shame that the realisation wasn't put to better use. Instead, the characters ended up trying to score drugs, alcohol and sex at an engagement party that turned out be full of local gangsters, and things descended into watchable but derivative farce (someone fell into a cake, a fight started, et cetera). A later plot segment saw Cook and a reluctant JJ visiting a brothel and discovering the chief gangster (Mackenzie Crook – his scrawny, undernourished physiognomy adding a worrying authenticity) chained up by a dominatrix. Unable to resist the temptation, Cook first humiliated then assaulted the gangster, only realising afterwards that this was probably not good policy.

The impression you got was that this was supposed to be some sort of morality tale, Cook wising up to his crazy ways, learning that there is always a morning after; but the randomness of events and the absence of noticeable motivation made it hard to take it as anything but a comedy trying a tad too hard to show how tough it was. Still, as I say, I'm not its target audience, and it's arguable that if Skins did make sense to me, it wouldn't be doing its job.

Teenage hedonism looked decidedly less glamorous in Vodka, Homework and Me, a documentary about three underage drinkers that was, puzzlingly, broadcast as part of a season called Born Survivors. Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought not drinking at the age of 11 was a survival skill, and drinking was the opposite. The most obviously worrying case was Reece, who is 11, and, according to the commentary, "has been drinking since he was 10" (put that way, it sounded strangely unimpressive). Charlie, 15, was the closest the film got to an episode of Skins: early on, she was seen reeling around drunk, and bubbling over with good cheer, verging on an advert for the mellowing effects of spirits. The two of them were sent off to the Glaciere Project, which tackles drinking through a programme of tall-ship sailing and scuba diving. This is undoubtedly a good thing, but the concentration on positive outcomes rather diluted the programme's shock value, and I think shock is probably a necessary component of any discussion of 11-year-olds regularly going on the piss.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/last-nights-television-still-crazy-after-all-those-beers-1520132.html