The Cutprice Guignol

When The Inbetweeners first came out in 2008, I can’t think of many shows I hated more.

Which is somewhat strange, when you think about it, given that I was almost comically in the target-audience sightlines of this now-iconic piece of generational coming-of-age comedy, which follows Will (Simon Bird, also, while we’re in these brackets, go watch Everyone Else Burns) as he starts a new school and navigates life with his friend group. I was a teenager, they were teenagers. I was in high school, they were in high school; I was an insufferable twat boasting about sex I wasn’t having, they were…well, you get the idea.

And, despite the show’s ridiculous success, I would go out of my way to avoid it. I hated the damn thing – it felt like, as a teenager in the UK in the 2000s, you couldn’t turn around without someone yelping some quote from the show in your direction, and I couldn’t wait till I skipped that age range and be done with it for good. It was all just so grim – so gross, so riddled with body odour, so utterly, painfully awkward and ill-tempered. While that might have been true for other teenagers, I, of course, was far above such complaints: between my exquisite personal style and my unmatched social skills, it didn’t speak to me. It couldn’t.

And now, it’s one of my favourite TV comedies ever made. Yes, there are certainly aspects of it that haven’t aged brilliantly – not least the era-appropriate language that literally makes me want to vanish back up into myself – but I truly think it’s an outstandingly funny, consistently committed, and even occasionally incisive look at British teenage life. Because I have come to terms with the fact that The Inbetweeners is not a show for teenagers, deep in the weeds of what it actually feels like to stagger through puberty like you’re bushwhacking through a particularly inhospitable rainforest; it’s for adults able to look at teenagerdom the way it actually deserves.

So many shows for teenagers – perhaps most significantly here Skins, which was a contemporary of The Inbetweeners and was highly-touted as having actual teenagers on the writing team – are married to the idea of selling this glamorous, sexy, cool version of adolescence (no, not that kind) that they functionally become aspirational television for the teenagers they purport to depict.

But The Inbetweeners? Creators Damon Beesley and Iain Morris were looking at being a teenager with only the clear-eyed horror that at least a decade’s removal from that time can grant. The show might be about teenagers, but it’s not for them – not when it’s this accurate, this piercingly relatable in ways you could never admit, at least when you’re in the midst of it. It’s the anti-aspirational show, a gleeful wallowing in all the worst parts of navigating teenagehood and everything that comes with it. But when you’re a teenager, seeing that reflected so bluntly is a little near-the-knuckle – at least, for me, it was only with the point of view of adulthood that I could really appreciate it for as brilliant as it is.

I know that The Inbetweeners was an iconic piece of television for a lot of people of my generation, and I would love to hear your thoughts on it – let me know in the comments below where you stood or stand on the show, and potentially dropping a picture of your worst teenage hairstyle in the process.

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(header image via Wales Onlline)