Skins — Roll up article and smoke for maximum effect.
How Skins, a show written for kids by kids, became the voice of noughties British youth
BRYAN ELSLEY NEVER expected Skins to become a phenomenon. Instead, he saw the raucous teen show he co-created with son Jamie Brittain as “a little experiment”. “It was going to be a year of fun making a TV show which no one seemed to care about. There was always this sense that everything was happening under the radar.”
Elsley came up with the idea for Skins after a conversation with his son Jamie in 2005. “He was at university and he told me that my ideas for TV dramas were rubbish and that there was a hole in the market for teen drama. I said, ‘Teens don’t watch teen dramas any more’. From there it took us half an hour to work out what the series could be.”
In truth, British youngsters did watch teen dramas in the early noughties, but mostly they were tuning into glossy American hits such as The O.C. or Dawson’s Creek. There was nothing trying to show what it felt like to be young in the UK. That’s where Skins came in.
These days in the attention-grabbing era of Sex Education, Euphoria and The End Of The F***ing World, it’s hard to imagine the impact Elsley’s teen drama had when it aired on E4 in back in 2007.
The nine-part first series, which pulled in over 1.8 million viewers — making it E4’s most successful homegrown commission at the time — was a breath of fresh air. Here were British teenagers shown in their natural habitat: attending raucous house parties, swearing, smoking copious amounts of weed, fighting, keeping secrets, coming together and falling apart. All of this while talking the way teenagers actually talked, with the intention of philosophical point, Dawson’s-style.
Small wonder teens began throwing their own Skins parties and building a fervent fanbase around the show. For where series such as The O.C. and Gossip Girl (which started the same year as Skins) relied on polish and melodrama to keep their young audiences’ attention, Skins preferred, in the beginning at least, to keep things real.
Sometimes the plots were exaggerated — did any teen ever score drugs quite as smoothly as Nicholas Hoult’s Tony? — but in the first two series they were always an enjoyable mix of the amusingly absurd and the bleakly believable.
Crucially, alongside a quicksilver inventiveness ran a welcome warmth and wit, the influence of which can be seen in shows as diverse as My Mad Fat Diary, Misfits and Fresh Meat. Yet while Skins
clearly paved a path for those shows, and for broader comedies such as The Inbetweeners,
it stands apart — if only because no other teen drama has quite captured its addictive meld of mayhem and morality.
“There is a moral element to the show which was perhaps unusual,” Elsley agrees. “These were kids who did have a code and one which was formed by the fact that they were growing up surrounded by parents [who in an inspired decision were largely played by television icons including Harry Enfield, Peter Capaldi, Josie Lawrence and Bill Bailey] other adults and even teachers who had been compromised and often acted idiotically.”
Elsley was helped in creating this palpable sense of us vs them by his absurdly talented writing room, which was largely composed of teenagers and twentysomethings and included the likes of Jack Thorne, Lucy Kirkwood and Daniel Kaluuya, who was only 18 when he joined the writing team, in addition to playing recurring character Posh Kenneth.
The show also commissioned episodes from 23-year-old Ben Schiffer, who went on to write for US drama Ransom, as well as a young Simon Amstell, fresh off presenting Popworld, and Elsley’s then-teenage daughter Jess, the writer of dark university thriller Clique.
“It didn’t feel like we were doing something ground-breaking,. It was more like a bunch of raggedy people in a horrible, scruffy room,” says Elsley, adding it came together because “I knew that if I was writing a show about young people then I’d better find some or else no-one would believe it.”
That sense of no holds being barred applied to the young cast as well. While arrogant alpha male Tony was played by former child star Hoult, the rest of the cast, which included Dev Patel, Joe Dempsie, Hannah Murray and Kaya Scodelario, were largely unknown. Later series featured eye-catching turns from Jack O’connell, Luke Pasqualino and Aimee-ffion Edwards, earning Skins a reputation as a show prepared to take a chance on raw talent.
“Looking back, it is a bit of a mystery how we cast so many super-talented teenagers in one show,” admits Elsley. “It was largely unplanned, but if you look back now you’d think that couldn’t be the case because it worked out so well.”
And when things didn’t pan out as expected, the crew had an easy solution. “They were energetic young kids who didn’t give a fuck, which meant the shoot was always fun. And when it wasn’t fun then we just went to a restaurant and fed them, because I soon realised that the way to make teenagers happy was to give them food.”
While Elsley and Brittain were keen that the show tackled issues that spoke to teenagers — Cassie’s eating disorder, Maxxie’s experiences as an out gay teen, Chris’ difficult home life — they were determined it would never do so in a preachy way. It was a decision that resonated strongly with the show’s younger viewers, who were relieved not to be patronised by
‘very special episodes’ in which smoking one joint would lead to instant death.
Instead, Skins preferred to depict teenage life in all its messy intensity, juxtaposing the highs and lows to create a show that was equal parts raw emotion and snarky pissing around. It was an unusual tone for a teen drama at the time, and one that was at its most powerful in the moving series two finale, when the pregnant Jal (Larissa Wilson) delivered a tear-stained eulogy for her boyfriend Chris “who said yes to everything, loved everyone and was the bravest boy I knew”, before the gang released fireworks. Both wildly exhilarating and devastatingly sad, it was the perfect conclusion to the show’s first two seasons.
Subsequent years brought in new faces as the show dealt with the challenge faced by every teen drama whose original cast are clearly aging out of school. Skins answered that age-old dilemma by replacing the cast every two years as a new group of students passed through the college doors.
It was a smart decision and one that brought with it such memorable stories as the ever-shifting dynamics between Cook (O’connell); Freddie (Pasqualino) and Effy (Scodelario); the relationship between Naomi (Lily Loveless) and Emily (Kathryn Prescott); and the touching meeting of minds between metalhead Rich (Alexander Arnold) and ballet dancer Grace (Jessica Sula).
Yet even then Elsley admits there were “one or two missteps” and it’s hard to escape the feeling that as each series progressed so Skins floated further from reality. Certainly by series three the plots were already growing more outlandish, with Cook facing off against Mackenzie Crook’s wild-eyed gangster, the sex ramped up to almost ridiculous levels and manic pixie dream girl Effy going through so many character transplants Scodelario must have had whiplash trying to keep up.
By the time Freddie was murdered by Effy’s psychiatrist in series four, leading Cook to extract violent retribution in the finale, the drama had moved far from its origins, morphing into exactly the kind of bleak soap opera its creators had once been desperate to avoid.
“Nowadays I am more sure about that plotline, although I do sometimes think that it was a mistake including a thriller element,” says Elsley. “I don’t really regret it. I just think I could have done it better. Lot of things could have been done better but there were lots of things that were brilliant as well.”
It’s true that at its best Skins was a wonderful mix of the brash and brutal, as capable of making viewers laugh as cry. Episodes such as the Kaluuya-written ‘Thomas’ in series three deftly interwove the comedy of misunderstanding with serious points about the reality of life for young immigrants in this country. Meanwhile, ‘JJ’ — Elsley’s episode from the same season — cleverly unpicked the realities of raising a high-functioning autistic child by showing us the character from his mother’s point of view.
Most interestingly of all, Skins was never afraid to make its main characters unlikeable. One of the show’s key moments came midway through the first series when Hoult’s Tony, who in any other teen drama would have been a clean-cut leading man, revealed the extent of his narcissism by coming on to Maxxie (Mitch Hewer) simply because he was bored and wanted ‘to try something new’.
It was a small but beautifully handled moment and one which established that the show was more interested in exploring the way in which teenagers form their personalities than dealing in stereotypes.
If the show was smart about characterisation it was also astute about how to harness the early days of social media in its favour, creating innovative partnerships with Myspace and previewing trailers and, more unusually for the time, episodes online.
“There was a certain cavalier bravery at Channel 4 at the time and they really let us take risks so that we could reach the audience we wanted,” explains Elsley. “We had an episode featuring 400 Skins fans bussed in from all corners of the country. We would never have got away with that today.”
Nor, he admits, would they have got away with some of their employment practices. “In the early days we paid our writers in cash — £50 at 4pm every day — and amazingly they all stayed around,” he says. “Not everyone wanted a career in the industry — there was a sense that a lot of interesting people were hanging out because they thought it was fun.”
Similarly, not every actor wanted to pursue a lengthy career. “We had quite a few who stepped out of showbusiness after Skins. They had two years of fun making a TV show and then got on with their lives.”yet despite, or perhaps because of that, many of them remain friends to this day.
“The nice thing about them is that they stick together regardless of whether they’ve hit Hollywood’s giddy heights or found new careers as graphic designers,” says Elsley. “Many of them go on holiday together and party together. They hang out and help each other. Being on Skins for most of them was really like being at university.”
For the rest of us it was a different kind of education – in how to make a teen show that was genuinely for teenagers. Skins endures because it never patronised or mocked its audience but instead celebrated their lives in all their messy glory. Smart, funny and yes, often entirely over the top, it remains the British teen show to beat.