The unveiling of the third generation of the SKINS cast last Thursday got me thinking about the TV industry.
That show is one of the most original things to be commissioned in the last decade. It might not reflect real life for all college-age kids – at least I hope not – but it is at least realistic. Soaps, with their continuing sagas of people marrying each other, having affairs with each other, divorcing and killing each other, are now going to new heights of ridicule to attract audiences. CORONATION STREET has become a pantomime of nonsense and camp Northern accents. The problem is that after fifty years, what is there to do that’s completely original? New writers come along who, unsurprisingly, haven’t watched every single episode, and so they repeat things and make it stale.
Back to the teenagers of Bristol – it might be over-dramatic but it feels real, and is proof there is writing talent in the UK, especially young writing talent. When you compare it with, say, COMING OF AGE, (BBC Three’s “comedy” presumably aimed at teens) the former destroys anything good the Beeb’s offering might have going for it. The dialogue is littered with bad cultural references, sexual innuendo and poor-taste jokes. The acting is so over the top to the point of absurdity. The characters are inhabiting the same world that the cardboard cut-out characters in programmes like THE LIFE OF RILEY and MY FAMILY have been living in for years – where children come out with witty one-liners and where episodes change the game before everything reverts to normal for the next time. Scripted television programmes are not real but they should have a semblance of reality for people to relate to them, watch them and enjoy them. Think of the awkwardness of watching David Brent in THE OFFICE – good awkwardness, we’ve-all-been-there awkwardness. This sort of tripe is bad awkwardness – nobody watching has ever experienced any such situation.
Tonight is the final episode of SHERLOCK, the three-part updated adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels and written by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. This has been perfect TV viewing for the last two Sundays and it is this quality of writing, production and acting which has to be encouraged and recommissioned – not more series of COMING OF AGE (a third series is due for 2011).