The people that know me best will be able to tell you that Skins, for me is a bittersweet issue to say the least. Now I am willing to admit that I quite contentedly watched the first two seasons of Skins, the 1st Generation if you will. But more than that I enjoyed the series, it was one of the few shows left that I actually looked forward to its broadcast. No one will deny it was a coarse, inaccurate and sensationalist view of teenage life. But beyond that the show was an intelligent and funny portrayal of the struggle of the teenage years. The learning curve between the arrogant, self-centred piss-weasel you once were into the relatively well adjusted adult you may become. Lead protagonist Tony Stonem suits this to a tee, spending much of the first season manipulating and abusing his closest friends only for them to reject him outright. It takes a bus to the face for Tony to learn humility and that’s exactly what happens. As you can imagine the characters are not totally likeable but it would take a saint to be their age and be totally likeable. Which is beside the point because the characters had depth to them, they were shallow and self-serving but also vulnerable, ambitious, lonely and in rare cases actually nice. But eventually season 2 came to a close and the characters we had come to love were leaving. For me this was where Skins ended, when all but one of the main cast moving on to uncharted horizons. Though I knew it wasn’t really the end, the show was to continue with an entirely new set of characters but I didn’t hold out much hope. To end it at the second season seemed the logical place, going out with a little dignity and anything more would have been beating a dead horse. But in the face of naysayers I kept a thread of hope that the 2nd Generation could hold its own. So when the day came I tentatively opened my laptop and clicked on the link to 4OD.
So how was my faith rewarded? Well basically the writers decided to shit on everything that made the show good and toss it out like a soggy tissue. And I’m not just talking about the characters here, but the wit, the visual montage. All that was replaced it with anything cheap and ostentatious to get the attention of anyone with the mental age of ten. These weren’t characters they were caricatures, there were no scenes just random events that culminated in all of nothing. And what’s worse many of the characters were despicable and manipulative, I know our protagonists are supposed to have flaws but these were people I wanted to see dead. Now some of you familiar with the series will recall that Tony was also a manipulative sociopath who behaved in a truly despicable manner. But he was the sole exception in the previous cast, the worst you could say about any of the 1st generation is that they were self-obsessed. None of them held any actual malice towards each other, Chris just wanted a good time, Michelle just wanted to be loved and Sid just wanted to get laid. There is nothing however which excuses the actions of these characters and if you don’t believe me look at the first few minutes of the third series, our introduction to the 2nd generation.
We start with Freddie, an unassuming young man, skateboarding down Park Street in Bristol. Now if you’ve ever been to Park Street you know it’s a near-vertical incline as well as an important part of Bristol’s traffic infrastructure. So by riding a fucking skateboard down in the middle of rush hour Freddie is likely to, at best land flat on his face or at worst cause a car accident. Instead Freddie flies past a police officer on a bike knocking his ice cream cone into his lap so that it looks like a cock. And then Sid James laughs lecherously before molesting Barbara Windsor, oh wait I’m sorry this isn’t a Carry On film, its just Skins now has all the humour of one. So the officer gives chase, because being annoying is apparently a crime, sure why not, and for his trouble he goes flying into a nearby garbage truck that Freddie was able to avoid. The camera now follows Freddie to spare us the image of the massive metal teeth of the truck compacting on the cop crushing him to a horrific, painful death. Seriously is there gonna be any continuity with this scene, like later in there series Freddie has to apologise to the officers family, that because he was being all cool and rebellious his children no longer has a father to support them? Probably not but it’s a nice thought. But anyway Freddie joins his mates Cook and J.J. (ugh we’ll get to him later) for a few pre-college drinks and drugs, which is perhaps the least reprehensible thing they actually do.
Cook swears and acts boisterously while J.J. analyses the benefits of drinking Carlsberg over eating a Snickers, it’s all so-so. However eventually the three spot the cops bike left in the middle of the road and sure enough a car crashes into it and swerves into a bollard. Who should get out of the car, why it’s Harry Enfield, patriarch of the Stonem household and all round buffoon, who shouts and swears at the situation. Jesus, didn’t we get past his character being this incompetent idiot in the second series, you know, where he proved himself to be an ultimately caring and loving father figure by nurturing Tony in his time of need. Well why have good character development when you can have cheap comedy? After some ranting Cook pretends to be an injured cyclist and cons Harry Enfield into buying him a new bike. And there you have it people, our central protagonists, the people we’re supposed to follow, relate to and eventually come to love. We’re barely five minutes in and they have already murdered a public servant, caused a near fatal traffic collision and then conned the victim.
Now I’ll admit J.J. has not done any of this, he’s just recited a set of statistics and facts in an eloquent manner. It’s all fairly interesting but for all it serves the story he might as well be repeating ‘I’m Autistic, I’m Autistic’ like a broken fucking record. Obviously J.J is meant to represent the kinds of social minorities the writers like to use to cover a broad range of teenage issues. Much like Maxxie and Anwar, being Gay and a Muslim respectively, the difference being while those were a key aspect of their characters they weren’t the only aspect. Maxxie and Anwar were never defined solely by their sexuality or their religion, they were people. With J.J however there’s no such depth, almost all of his character traits are linked to him having Asperger’s Syndrome. Oh and before you go throwing accusations around, let me make one thing clear. I can recognise that J.J. has Asperger’s not because I myself have it, not because friends of mine have it or even because I’ve studied the disorder academically. I recognise this for the simple reason that I’m not a fucking moron. In fact, as if to make it even more blatant later in the episode when asked to introduce himself he outright states that he has a higher intellectual capacity but a reduced social skills. Which if I recall is the…oh what is it again…oh yeah, the dictionary definition of Asperger’s. Good Lord J.J. I know they’re just trying to write you as the oddball, comic relief, but to me you come off like the worst kind of scum.
As much as I hate to contradict myself I’ve got to give the writers credit in constructing Freddie’s character, who on the whole manages to display his personal idiosyncrasies with a subtlety that the others lack. He comes across as collected, happy-go-lucky and unassuming and is obviously not written to be the psycho anarchist his actions imply. What’s more is that he shows the writers ability to craft an effective trio which each of them symbolising the fundamental aspects of a person. The body (Cook), the mind (J.J.) and the soul (Freddie). We can see these three struggling without each other but when together they become a functional unit. It is for this reason that we can accept such radically different people being friends. However there is no such excuse for Cook who is the perfect example of the writers thought process: Flawed Character = Amoral Cunt, and I apologise for the language but there’s no better word to describe him. Cook the cock it seems will literally kick, spit, swear and screw whatever he feels like with no sign of remorse. It’s not hard to see how he came about as a character, the writers clearly noticed that in earlier series that Tony remained popular among viewers despite being wholly unlikeable as a person. So following the same formula they created a protagonist who was utterly reprehensible. The problem is that while Tony was a sociopath who manipulated people for his amusement he never went out of his way to physically hurt people and showed genuine regret when his actions caused the suffering of others. With Cook there is no such contrition nor do people reject him for his violent tendencies. In fact as well as being the most violent of any of the characters he is also the most well-laid, having been balls deep in two of the main cast. Yeah great message to be sending to the impressionable youth of today, beating people up is what gets you the pussy.
Oh and as it happens the one who becomes Cooks most regular fuck-rag is Effy. You remember Effy, the cool, enigmatic, master pupetteer who spent the last series chewing up arrogant piss-weasels like Cook? Well she’s back and thoroughly neutered. Far from the confident, intelligent hedonist who successfully pushed all the previous characters into resolving their differences. She’s now playing silly games, being torn between men/idiots and stating bluntly what the old Effy could tell us with the flicker of her eyes. What’s worse is that most of the conflict in series three comes from Effy’s fragile status as ‘Queen Bee’ of the group, as if her character was torn right out of Mean Girls. Remember this is a girl who subtly manipulated her brother and many others for their own good and did she want an ounce of recognition for her efforts? Did she fuck, she was just happy that the people she loved were bending to her will. Whether for their own good or just her amusement, this displayed a level of intelligence unequalled by any other character and yet is completely absent in the new series. Which pretty much summed up the direction the show was going; the writers had sacrificed intelligence and subtlety for cheap laughs and shock value. The protagonists were only ever one-dimensional and for the most part irritating. Skins had been reduced from a smart, broad dramedy to what everyone first said it was, coarse, sensationalist teen programming. Channel 4’s love letter to the ASBO generation. Was it ever anything else? I do not know, but it was not the show I once fell in love with and I would return to it only one more time to see where it had gone from here.
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