“I was in Paris recently […] a cooky, interesting girl suggests at about three in the morning that we all run up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe – and I guess telling you about that now sounds all exciting and fun but at the time I just thought ‘but why would we do that’ and then ‘what’s the point’ and ‘when we get there then what will we do with our lives’ […] We live [the other] way and it seems a long way to go. And everyone else is just not analysing; they’re just running. And I’m running as well because of the peer pressure, because I’m fun. And we’re all running and running and everyone else I think is just one with the moment. At one with joy. At one with the universe. And I’m there as I’m running thinking, ‘well, this will probably make a good memory’”
- Simon Amstell, Do Nothing Live (2010)
Over the last decade, this is how I have felt watching Skins.
It has been ten years since Skins first aired, to an absolutely incredible figure of 1.54 million viewers in the UK. I grew up with this, an indie show written by a relatively unknown father-and-son duo. In the beginning, the only thing Skins had going for it was Nicholas Hoult’s residual cuteness, leftover from About a Boy, and the possibility of being somewhat cool and edgy. Did anyone ever see anything blow up so unexpectedly as this odd little teenage tidbit on E4? Who before then ever heard the word “skins” and thought, “yeah that’s something I’ll watch.”
Channel 4 makes celebrating ten years of sex, drugs and drama sound a lot more fun than our teenage years actually were. Let’s look back at 2007. This was the year of social media. Apple launched the iPhone, precipitating a surge of instantaneous information at our fingertips. Amy Winehouse was still alive and reaching the crest of fame. The realities of her drug addiction were about to become peak paparazzi fodder. This same year, Britney Spears shaved her head; a video you can still watch online. For those of us who were watching these widely reported cases of social ruin from the comfort of our own homes, Myspace was the major social media site in Britain, and Bebo the Irish equivalent. Facebook was about to come along and send everything into the stratosphere. In comparison to today, the technology and society of 2007 seem rather quaint. But hey, it was 2007, Google didn’t even own Youtube yet. Kids were still using StumbleUpon to search the overwhelmingly extensive vistas of the internet. This was the climate of the first season of Skins.
The success of Skins came down to two major things: open auditions full of raw talent and a proudly reported average writing age of twenty-one. Teenagers missing their GCSE’s and A Level classes to gain industry experience writing TV they would actually want to watch? It was genuinely groundbreaking. It’s Skins you need to thank for discovering Dev Patel and supporting Josie Long and Daniel Kaluuya. It is also Skins you need to thank for hiring actors that were actually teenagers… to play teenagers. No more thirty year olds pretending it was their first time at prom in The OC. The kids in Skins had acne – real acne! They even came from the same timezone as me! It was gritty. It was real. The problem: they still didn’t represent me.
Everything that epitomised Skins culture was presented in the iconic 2006 promo clip, set to the thumping sound of ‘Standing in the Way of Control’ by Gossip. Promiscuous, attractive, drug-taking teens revealed how lame pre-teen me was – at least in comparison to these cool, hip, older kids. I liked scrapbooking and reading, but at ten years of age I thought that after puberty this was something I would inevitably become. This was reality, right? If I just roll around in some cream, stick on a Gossip CD and write “virgin” on my head, I could – would – look that pretty. After dipping in and out of the series while it aired on E4, I watched seasons one and two of Skins properly during the summer of my fourteenth birthday. I blame Skins for popularising the horrendously ugly bed clothes with naked bodies on them that made Tony’s room so edgy and iconic. I blame Chris’ drug fuelled experiments with his goldfish for the hot thought that plagued me every time I went on a school trip to the aquarium: what would shovelling a load of stimulants into a tank of lobsters do? I blame Skins for the drop-in-my-heart reminders of the second season finale brought on by hearing ‘Time to Pretend’ by MGMT. Remember when Anwar (Dev Patel) smuggled the gang’s drugs into Russia in an exceptionally uncomfortable yet suitably covert manner? Or when Tony and Sid stole the coffin of their dead friend as seen through the window of the unsuspecting household? When I describe Skins to people, I always feel like I’m eulogising a well-loved friend at a mates-only funeral.
I am a highly suggestible person. I am also a person with above average levels of anxiety. After attending many groups and therapy summits (being drunk on many occasions in large social settings) I am acutely aware that a vast majority of people feel the same way as I do. Similar to arguments around media honesty in an age where photoshop retouching and perfect instagrams are causing warped beauty standards, I just wish someone who understood my teenage neuroticism and fascination with perfection had sat me down and said, “this is drama, it is good drama – but it is not real.” Instead I placed myself in the echo chamber of those rallying against any conservative naysayer. I worshipped the words of Nicholas Hoult; holding them close to protect my open-minded opinion of Skins: “It is maybe heightened for entertainment but all of it is believable. I can think of someone I know who is like every character”. Of course Skins was realistic. I read that Tish Weinstock spoke of Chris (Joe Dempsie) recently as “a fucking legend […] the ultimate loller who’d smoke, shag, rob and snort anything he could get his paws on.” According to these wiser, older and obviously cooler kids, Chris and, by extension, Skins was cool. And I would listen to anyone who seemingly knew how to roll cigarettes from the womb.
Despite these gripes, the truth is that if a show like Skins was being produced in Ireland today I would want to write for it. I would be honoured and excited to. Skins was unarguably innovative and radical – a show that attempted to reveal an overlooked, gritty lower middle class subculture that did and still does exist. What would I change? The teenage tunnel vision. The fact that the majority of people watching weren’t as self assured as this tiny subsection reproduced for TV. Apart from the one or two group leaders we all aspired to at sixteen, the majority of us were just trying to look like we were having fun and make something we could call a good memory. What looks like a good memory? The promo of Skins. What doesn’t look like a good memory? The actual heart wrenching moments of the series that tackle bereavement and abandonment in a way that is as close to real life as one can get on television. What we needed was more of the latter. What the teenage and pre-teen population needed was Skins to be more self aware and focus less on being cool. We didn’t need another voice confirming to us that terrifying teenage stigma of being a virgin at sixteen. The fact that introverted characters like Jal and Sid were stereotypically corralled out of their shell through sex and drugs was two-dimensional and, in retrospect, far too ‘Sandy from Grease’.
It didn’t need to be didactic, but it needed to embrace what its even more successful sister show The Inbetweeners relied on; the knowledge that teenagers are inherently uncool and generally clueless. Skins introduced teenagers who seemed to know everything there was to know about sex and drugs; infallible characters that normal teenagers like those at home watching could aspire to. Instead of coming across as liberated and open minded, upon review, Skins simply projected a pathos-inducing societal image of unhealthy sex and drug use that may have not been soul-destroying, but is just a bit sad. There were better ways to reel in 21st Century viewers that didn’t pander to the same tropes. You can deny it, as fifteen year old me would have, but there was a ‘Skins effect’. People inspired by the fictional lives presented to them. The girls, including myself, on the bus on a Friday afternoon putting on makeup to go into town, talking about how the girl skipping class and smoking by the bus stop was so hot she looks like something “straight out of Skins”; “so Effy.” An image all too attainable.
Skins should have celebrated the introverted as much as they celebrated the hedonistic. What they should have said was “hey, if I don’t want to I actually don’t need to leave my shell; this is a perfectly reasonable way to be social and I can still engage in nefarious aspects of life as I choose”. Instead Skins crafted a particular exclusionary narrative that constantly requires teenagers to look like we’re having the greatest time and being our best most extroverted selves. We’re all Simon Amstell running down the Champs-Élysées. Who is actually having fun while silently over analysing what drugs and what sex they should partake in to obtain the ultimate level of edge and cool? Who can enjoy themselves while concentrating on every possible way they can look like they’re having fun?
For me, this is the legacy of Skins and what ten years of the series truly amounts to. Groundbreaking. Innovative. But not realistic. In the end, slightly damaging to fragile teenage self esteem. A great piece of entertainment. I highly recommend watching the entire box-set on 4od and finding the show at a much less suggestible and insecure age. It is truly an affecting and fantastic piece of television.
I’ll leave you with Tn2 contributor Dónal Cavan’s reflections on the legacy of the Second Generation (seasons 3 & 4), as epitomised by impulsive, loveable rogue James Cook:
“I am Cook” can only mean two things. For the majority, it’ll stand for the broken English heard through an open kitchen, a potential testament to the exotic credentials of your dish. However for myself and my generational clan it was interpreted as a rallying call. A rallying call for what, you ask? Well, I am not sure. Like William Wallace and his pals, we stood rallied in fields, but we were always too drunk off 2 litre cider to run and face our oppressors head on. Besides, the headshop drugs made it hard to fully comprehend who these oppressors were. We were pretty sure they were the ones with the ties though. “I am Cook” was the equivalent of a Latin motto for a school of thought that may as well have been called ‘how not to live your life – ism’, but usually referred to as Skins. We felt it would be wise if we were to follow its teachings as diligently as we could – even if we could never decide amongst ourselves who indeed was Cook. But as time went on we got tired, and we got ties. Yet those halcyon days of crushing insecurity that were reflected in our attempts to turn low budget fiction into reality will always remain in memory. Oh, and also those scars that would form every time a friend yelped ‘scatter’; those fuckers never leave you.”
