Admittedly I am a bit late with this. So forgive me! Sometimes my life away from the box keeps me from watchin
g everything I want to, when I want. Thankfully there is the great inventions of the digital recorder and the Internet to keep me up to date, but I am not here to talk technology. I am here to express my pure and utter joy that The Inbetweeners is back for another series.
For those of you unfortunate enough never to have seen this wonderful teen comedy then I cannot recommend enough for you to pop over to the 4OD Catch-up service and check it out immediately. You will be so happy that you took the time to catch-up with Will, Jay, Simon and Neil, that I am sure you will come back here and thank me with a free coupon for chocolate!
Those in need of cheering up could have done far worse than switch over to E4, where the second series of The Inbetweeners was starting up. A rollicking teen comedy, the show revolves around Will and his gang of geeky friends. Will’s basically an (even) shorter David Mitchell: posh, calamity-stricken and with a tendency to lodge his foot somewhere in the vicinity of his tonsils. He – for those who skipped the first series – used to be educated privately, but is currently roughing it in a comprehensive thanks to his mum who, he said ,”hasn’t scraped enough money together to send him to his old, frankly better school”. I know, I know: what a nob, right? Well, yes – except for the fact that he’s rather likeable – likeable to the audience, at any rate, if not to the female population of his school. In last night’s episode, the class got sent off on a geography trip. Cue lots of Jolly-Boys-style misdemeanors and school-level smut.
Bit by bit, the series has plenty to recommend it. The acting’s strong, especially from half-dozen or so main players. And it’s properly funny, too. But – well, what to say? – it’s just not Skins. There’s no sex (aside from a failed attempt at fumbling from their teacher “paedo Kennedy”), no drugs (just a half-bottle of vodka that Will seems to think can be shared between – get this – the whole class). And, crucially, there’s none of that knuckle-gnawing self-importance that characterises most teen show. Which, perhaps, is the problem: instead of laughing with the characters, we’re laughing at them, at their naiveté, their youth. In fact, it’s almost impossible to avoid the feeling that it has been written for adults, or, if not for adults, then by adults without much memory of adolescence. Most teenagers don’t view themselves as quite the humorous bundle of awkwardness and charm that they seem here. That’s something you develop later, a convenient way off shrugging of your own humiliating youth. Or maybe not, perhaps retrospect, like padded bras and pregnancy, arrives earlier with each generation. But for the moment, my teenage companion wasn’t impressed. “It’s rubbish,” she grunted. “Not at all like Gossip Girl.”
