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 The kids of Skins will steal your heart.
A juvenile Queer As Folk? Not quite, but Skins will quickly reassure you that television drama doesn’t always succumb to cardboard cut-outs, clichés and safe choices. These kids are bound to forge the first cult of the 2008 TV year.
This nine-part UK series about a disparate bunch of Bristol adolescents (many of them played by first-time actors) comes from writer Bryan Elsley and the Shameless team - an excellent pedigree.
Nearly every teen drama tackles romance, peer group pressure, self esteem, sex and coming of age; but there’s something about British kids that makes them do it at hyper-speed. They compete to survive with a ferocity we never see on The OC or Home and Away.
The Skins gang includes the charismatic Tony (Nicholas Hoult), the anorexic Cassie, party animal Chris, drop-dead gorgeous Michelle and clarinet student Jal. Refreshingly, another is Muslim –tossed out on his ear after answering his phone while supposedly praying to Allah. Then there’s gay boy Maxxie (Mitch Hewer), who visits a ‘Big Gay Night Out’ with his two straight mates only to be bored stupid by a pair of 30-something blokes dancing to Lisa Stansfield.
Each episode focuses on a different character, allowing the viewer to get ‘under the skin’ of contrasting individuals.
In the first episode, Tony plans to get perennial virgin Sid laid at a local massage parlour, and have him land a drug deal at the same time. Nervously, Sid has to sweet-talk his way out of a sexual dalliance with a brazen working girl. Worse is to come when her gay, moustache-twirling pimp suggests amicable ways the young Sid can pay for Tony’s stuff.
Throw in Britain’s answer to a Schoolies party, booze, shagging, a buxom Polish girl who strips off at the drop of a hat (or someone’s pants), a stolen car and a girl overdosing, and you can see this isn’t run-of-the-mill teen fodder.
Through it all, these kids somehow rise above the impossible; their zest for life overcoming circumstances that would make an older, wiser adult shrink.
It’s this heart that makes Skins so magnetic. There’s no way in hell I would want this lot living next to me, but somehow I think I’m gonna fall in love with them all the same.
Skins premieres 10:00pm Monday on SBS.
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