lowculture.co.uk

Monday, February 11, 2008

Teenage schticks

BACK! Skins, E4, 10.00pm

We hope E4 realises they've spoiled a perfectly good lowculture meme by moving Skins to Mondays. Don't they know that it is supposed to be on THURSDAYS at 10PM? We're going to have to swap our entire plan for the week now. We had banked on it being on Thursdays, for crying out loud. If we hadn't been studying the Radio Times religiously, we'd have ended up watching Big Brother US, and that would never have done.

Anyway, scheduling issues aside, tonight is a good night for hedonism aficionados and admirers of celebrity parent cameos alike, as we welcome series two of Skins back to our screens. We had a love/hate relationship with series one, since we avoided watching it due to our general annoyance at the way E4 tried to tattoo the trailer onto the insides of our eyelids, but we caught the odd episode here and there and...sometimes it was good, and sometimes it was pants. Which happens quite a lot with the first series of anything, so we're willing to overlook that, but by gum if it doesn't pull its socks up this time around, there's going to be serious trouble, you mark our words.

So, series one had the immense feelgood ending involving Tony being hit by a bus, Mean Girls-style, but he's not dead, of course, because he has that weird protagonist immortality that's so common in TV shows. But instead, he's a changed man (well, manchild) which is set to cause serious reverberations amongst the other characters, particularly Sid. And meanwhile, Maxxie is a dancer - he loves to dance! - and is seriously clashing with his dad. Given that his dad is Bill Bailey, you'd think he'd be accepting of Maxxie's showbiz aspirations, but perhaps this is that reality/fiction distinction people say we have so much trouble with.