The real youth of England

"Piss off oldy"

I have really enjoyed watching series 3 of Skins on C4. Tonight is the grand final and I’m as excited as a school girl.

Last week they finally wrapped up the Emily/Naomi lesbian subplot which was a relief – it had been dragging on through the whole series and really just needed resolution to make way for the primary Freddie/Effy/Cook love-triangle subplot to take centre-stage.

I must admit, watching Skins does feel like a guilty pleasure, like secretly buying a Basshunter album.

If it wasn’t such a quality show I think I’d be too embarrassed to tell anyone. In my late 20s, I feel like a big voyeur, that at any moment one of the characters will break the fourth wall, look straight at me and scream ‘you’re old…OOOOOLD!! Just fuck off you OLD creep and stop watching us.’

In the world of Skins young people are constantly taking drugs, having sex, and generally enjoying neverending dance parties. In fact, according to the Urban Dictionary, to have a ‘skins party’ is to have a “huge party in someone’s house where nearly everything is broke, lots of people are having sex and almost everyone is either drunk or drugged up.”

I guess this isn’t too unlike reality, but with one major difference: In Skins the kids are fantastically attractive, witty, eloquent, charismatic and charming. In a nutshell, they all have  a certain je ne sais quoi about them: A gritty urban despair, a haunting melancholy before their time.

If my cursory studies of the real youth of England are true, it’s clear this romantic vision couldn’t be further from the truth.

This is what what young poms think they look like:

And this is what they actually look like:

When I said my study had been cursory, I meant I’d watched the Jeremy Kyle Show a couple of times (I can only last about 15 seconds before changing channels, it’s just too much to bear).

You know when your jaw actually drops? This literally happens every time I watch 15 seconds of the Jeremy Kyle show. The guests are astonishing. And each successive guest is more astonishing than the last. Just unrelenting ugliness and stupidity.

It’s the closest you can get to experiencing what Prince Philip feels when he sees black people.

Curiously, Jeremy Kyle’s guests seem to be able to get pregnant by just looking at each other. Subsequently, they are as familiar with the intricacies of paternity testing and lie detector tests as the Skin’s characters are with party pills. It’s the one technical area of life they will ever excel in besides exchanging pornography on their mobile phones.

My brother recently said that we both undoubtedly share significant amounts of genetic data with the Jeremy Kyle Show guests because our dad is English. He effectively said that, despite being New Zealanders, we’re just a few strands of DNA removed from pure chavness.

I will never forgive him for saying that. At my funeral a statement will be read saying that I had no brother.

Here’s a great clip which is disturbingly not that different from an actual episode: