Play That Funky Music, White Boy

Skins 1x03 - "Jal"

Episode Grade: C


Previously, Sid's in love with Michelle, which is a terrible shame, because Michelle's in love with Tony. And that's a terrible shame because Tony is mostly in love with Tony. And Sid and Tony are good friends. Really good friends, if you catch my drift. So, it's more of a real love triangle instead of a love V-shape like most of them tend to be. And I'm sure most of those could probably be solved if people would accept the threesome as a valid long-term relationship plan, but alas, most humans just haven't progressed to that Cylon level. Also previously, Sid was and still is being hunted with extreme prejudice by a man who managed to stand out as being the most irritating thing in an episode that involved Tony yakking on the phone for a few hours and Harry Enfield using "James Blunt" as rhyming slang.

We Plink Plink Plink! Plink! Plink! our way into a close up of Jal's eyes, and an offscreen voice tells her "No repeats. Don't get ahead." Jal starts playing her clarinet, and we zoom out to see this in case we do not know what a clarinet sounds like and have quite reasonably forgetten that she was also playing the clarinet when we first saw her, being as it was part of the Tony Is A Smug Git montage. She is soon joined in both sound and vision by the rest of the orchestra, who are, unlike her, an absolute shambles. The music teacher who is attempting to conduct the rabble yells "No, mezzo. Fucking mezzo, for fuck's sake!" See, because she is sort of posh, and using fancy musical terms, and yet she is swearing at the same time. It's a humourous juxtaposition indeed. I'm sure it will be a lot more humourous if we repeat it five or six times in the next ten seconds. Anyway, Jal tries her hardest to hold it all together for the rest of the orchestra, or maybe just block out the distraction of their uselessness, but either way, she's fighting a losing battle. According to her myspace, Jal likes the correlation between maths and music – Pythagorean triples – "my friend Cassie knows what I mean". Oh, mmm. Maths and music, science and art. Truth and beauty. It's a fine dichotomy indeed, and I love that she has the sense to realise that Cassie gets it. That Cassie gets things at all, outside of her own crazy little wild world. Cassie and Jal are probably the most intelligent of our kids, in their own ways; she might be the clarinet player, but Jal's clearly the maths/science/truth to Cassie's music/art/beauty. OK, Tony's levels of skill at manipulating clearly require a pretty keen mind too. He probably falls more on Cassie's end of the scale; there is a certain artistry to what he does, even if it is about as far removed from beauty as you can possibly get. It's possible I may be moving off point a little bit here, so let's get back to what's actually going down on screen.

Right, some time during all of that, the rest of the orchestra managed to slip away, leaving Jal alone with the music teacher, who is being encouraging about Jal's ability to win the competition she's entering. A camp Welsh chap enters to delicately raise the point that he's noticed the swearing during the orchestra's practice is a little excessive, and during this conversation they helpfully name each other as Doug and Claire. I'll leave you to fill in the obvious joke about filling in which is which. It's a really crappy joke, by the way, I hope you are ashamed of yourself. Claire promises to have a word with the orchestra about the swearing, which Jal finds highly amusing. Some exposition is clumsily delivered about Jal being a Young Musician Of The Year finalist, Doug ensures again that Claire will deal with the swearing and leaves, and Claire and Jal go back to rehearsing. "Yeaaahhh, fuck my donkey, that's good!" Claire declares of Jal's performance. Oh, Skins. If you stopped trying so hard to be down with the kids, you'd be a lot more down with the kids, I swear.

Elsewhere (and, as it turns out in a second, elsewhen), Tony and Michelle are making out on a couch. Slow pan across to show that Jal is on the same couch, attempting to distract herself from them with the TV. Tony's sister Effy is also hanging around, being her usual ineffable self. She's in more episodes than I remember her being in. It doesn't take long for Jal to decide she's had enough, and she flatly asks Michelle is she must "suck Tony's face off" in her every waking hour. Tony nauseatingly shrugs "She loves me", Jal exasperatedly reminds Michelle that they are supposed to be shopping, which according to her myspace, is not something Jal enjoys doing either, though I'm guessing it's the lesser of two evils in this particular case. Tony and Michelle do some irritating whispering and giggling, Tony feigns interest in the shopping for a moment so that Michelle can explain that Jal needs to buy a dress for her competition, which they will get right onto just as soon as they've gone upstairs and inserted tab A into slot B. By which I mean THE SEX. Jal disbelievingly asks "Jesus, are they really gonna...?", Effy answers her with a nod and an obscene gesture, Jal says "Fuck this" and walks out.

Or, she would, if Sid wasn't standing right in the doorway about to knock. He looks confused, as per usual, and asks if Tony's in. Jal says nothing and lets him hear the moans from upstairs by way of an answer. Sid says he'll wait until Tony's done, and steps aside to let her past, but Jal's too intrigued and/or disgusted by Sid's pitiful life to just leave now, and asks if he really spends his entire life hanging out with Tony. Sid shrugs "Pretty much, yeah." "And Michelle!" he realises, after some thought on the matter, which gets an eyeroll from Jal, after which she decides that Sid will have to do for someone to go shopping with her right now, since Michelle is all tied up. Sid gets mildly affronted that she assumes she can just drag him along without giving him any say in it, and at her lack of enthusiasm in doing so, but of course goes along anyway.

In a changing booth, Jal appraises herself in the mirror and comes to the conclusion of "Fucking hell." Outside, Sid fiddles with a rack of bikini bottoms and puts up a gigantic neon sign above his head saying "I HAVE NEVER KNOWN THE TOUCH OF A WOMAN". Jal drags him into the booth to zip up her dress, Sid does so as awkwardly as possible and comments "Looks... nice." Jal rolls her eyes and disagrees; "I can't breathe properly, look." Sid does as she requests, for a second, then relises where this requires him to look and quickly stops in case she notices. And then looks again, and there is pretty much a repeated cycle of all that throughout the scene, with Jal totally ignoring it. It's kind of funny. Jal asks how she's supposed to play clarinet when she can't breathe properly, Sid asks why she can't just where "normal stuff", Jal exasperatedly tells him "It's the Young Musician Of The Year!" Sid feigns interest in that, which just earns him some more eyerolling and condescension, and all the while Jal is sending his "Oh God, Where Do I Put My Eyes?" cycle into overdrive by taking off the dress to try on a nice shiny blue one. She asks Sid to zip her up again, Sid hesitates because the zip on this one goes way lower than the other, or, as he puts it, "it's in your arse, Jal." This, of course, earns him yet more exasperation, because 'exasperatedly' is Jal's Personal Adverb, and Sid gets on and does it. Or at least, he attempts to get on and do it, but somehow manages to be inept enough to get his finger caught in the zipper. Which cause him to cry out in pain, and Jal to say things like "Oh Christ, let me get hold of it", which means it's time for the Hilarious Misunderstanding Wherein People Who Do Not Have The Full Picture Think That There Are Sexy Shennanigans Going On When Really There Are Not, which I'm sure we all saw coming, certainly when Jal dragged Sid into the booth, if not earlier. They do manage to squeeze a little humour out of this dry, dry well though; Sid leaves to hand the first dress to a shop worker and a passing shopper tells him "You're disgusting", and Sid sniffs him armpits in confusion, assuming her disgust was a result of him forgetting to apply deoderant. Yeah, I did say "little", OK? Commercials!

Sid cheerfully sings to himself as they take an escalator down to the shopping centre's exit, which seems a little off considering all the misery that we know is being heaped on him right now, but I guess we're supposed to be focusing on Jal's pain at the moment. "It's just not right," she complains. Sid tells her it's just a dress, Jal snickers "You really know how to talk to a girl, Sid," and Sid's incongruent cheeriness makes him hilariously ask "Do I?" as if there was even the slightest chance she was being sincere. Jal moves onto the topic of Michelle and Sid's other gigantic neon sign regarding his infatuation with her, which puts a bit of a damper on Sid's mood, because it's yet another person who is able to notice the gigantic neon signs above his head, shattering his wild illusiory world a little bit more. Jal asks him honestly how he thinks this Michelle thing is ever going to work; Sid's plan involves copious amounts of alcohol, natch, and also the phrase "she goes crazy when she realises my tongue's double jointed", which will be leading me to copious amounts of alcohol right about now. Anyway, this epic fantasy gets our first smile of the evening out of Jal, and those things are pretty hard to come by, so I guess the boy done good. He suddenly declares "I want a cookie!" pointing in a random direction and happening upon a Starbucks, inevitably. I'd assume from the uncharacteristic happiness and sudden desire for food that he was stoned, but he's already indebted by three waterlogged ounces, even Sid wouldn't be stupid enough to buy even more at this point, right? Sid buys himself a chocolate chip cookie with gusto. (That's modifying 'buys himself', not 'chocolate chip cookie', obviously. Although requesting gusto as a condiment would be a pretty excellent thing to do, thinking about it.) Jal is amused by his enthusiasm for his purchase and says "There's more to life than sex, eh?" Sid nods sagely and agrees "You and me both", which gets Jal scoffs at in surprise, but if even Sid can see it, she's clearly about as obvious as he is. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Later, Jal's at home, preparing once more for clarinet rehearsal, this time with the added burden of the dress she bought in the previous scene. In the end, she opted for a pretty drab brown one, apparently, which I guess is a nice safe, sensible option, as befits a nice, safe, sensible character like her. She only manages to get a few bars into her practice before she's interrupted by an overpowering thumping noise coming through the walls. Jal let's out an irritated sigh and goes to sort this out, it's her brothers and their nerdy white friend, who are, to a man, like Kenneth without the sense of self-awareness and irony. They're doing practice of their own with their rapping and phat beats and what have you, and... well, they certainly need it. Jal pulls the plug on their equipment, Lead Brother yells "Oi, ba'ers! Why you messin' my flow, you get me?!" Jal, enunciating each word very carefully, tells him "I'm trying to do some fucking practice". LB's all "Who's stoppin' ya?" and Other Brother backs up his sentiment. Nerdy White Friend tries to get in on the action, and absolutely everybody finds it highly embarrassing; Jal, her brother, me, all four actors, I don't doubt, everybody. Jal slaps him on the back of the head a couple of times, he appeals to the brothers for assistance but just gets another slap from OB, who tells him not to call their sister whatever it was he called her. I don't know what the hell anyone is talking about right now; this is why I never recapped Shameless, every scene would just be like "Frank and Fiona yell some shit, and Steve nods sagely even though he has just as little clue as me as to what anyone is talking about. Debs is fucking awesome some more, I think." Anyway, OB tells Jal they've got some "seeeeeeeeerious balls goin' down", and would like to demonstrate, but NWF is just not in the mood to beatbox any more because he's still sulking about everybody slapping him. LB give him some reassuring words and they do the fist high-five thing which is basically the MANLY TESTOSTERONE GRRR equivalent of an emo hug. [Yes, this is indeed one of those gratuitous and pointless "HEY CHECK OUT THIS SHOW I JUST STARTED WATCHING" links I always do when I start watching a new show. Shut up.] And so the demonstration of mad skillz is back on. Jal is highly unappreciative, and storms off downstairs to tell on them to daddy.

Daddy, by the way, is one Ronnie Fazer who is, in the world of Skins, a pretty big name rap artist/producer, apparently. Anyway, on her way to a meeting with the esteemed Mr. Fazer, Jal runs into a ridiculously tall dude who is in some unspecific employment under Ronnie, I guess having something to with the bar he's standing in the doorway to. He compliments Jal's dress, or 'compliments', anyway; "I like it, it's... brown." For some totally nonsensical reason, Jal insists that the brown dress she is wearing is actually green, and will continue to do so throughout the episode, even though it is browner than a PS3 game, and everybody else tells her so. I don't know if this is supposed to make some cunning subtextual point about how Jal is extremely stubborn about things, or if it's just supposed to be funny or what, but... the dress is brown. This simple, unalienable fact makes the whole running gag or whatever it is just utterly fail.

So! Jal and her COMPLETELY BROWN dress go to see Ronnie, who is thankfully not an absolute caricature like most of the dads in this show, because I've had quite enough of that from the brothers, thanks. What that means thematically, of course, is that Jal is mature enough to actually see her dad as a real human being, unlike most of the kids. Good for her, I guess. Anyway, Ronnie's entertaining guests, including a young woman sprawled out on the arm of his chair, which Jal looks fairly disgusted by, because there are some things that no one of her age (or a lot older, probably) would be totally comfortable with. Jal registers her complaint, Ronnie tells her the boys need practice too, his friends laugh and agree that they really, really need practice. "Because those pussies are bad, and I mean fuckin' BAD." Subtly put, there. Ronnie defends his boys by pointing out that he didn't sound great either, "way back when". The woman on Ronnie's arm nervously tells him that she and Jal haven't been introduced yet, Ronnie does so (her name's Alicia), Jal gives her some major cold shoulder. Alicia attempts to shake off the awkwardness by announcing that Ronnie's going to be remixing one of her tracks later, Jal snarks "Has he shown you his special slider yet?", which Ronnie's pals just love. Alicia is either completely oblivious or chooses to ignore this in the hope of defrosting the atmosphere a little, as futile as it may be. Jal reminds Ronnie that her competition is this weekend, "not that you care", and storms off upstairs, as per her usual routine for moving from one room to another. Ronnie grumbles about "rooty-tooty music" and "dancing for Whitey", but it's pretty clear that his heart is not in it and he really does want his daughter to succeed. Ronnie's pals giggle some more about Jal's "serious attitude" and then randomly decide to throw an anvil at me; "She's looking more like her mother every day." Ow. Ronnie just stares moodily into space.

Upstairs, Jal gives Michelle a call, and I'd say it's pretty easy to establish the jist of the conversation from just her side, which goes like this; "'Chelle? Yeah. No, I bought one. Green [WHATEVER.]. Fucking horrible, of course. You don't sound very sorry. What's that noise? Is he...? Yeah, ring me back when you aren't actually being penetrated, OK?" And then she says "It's just you and me" to her clarinet, which is a sad state of affairs indeed. Jal needs to hang out with Maxxie more, I think they'd get along damn well, and they're both kind of lonely souls a lot of the time, but it seems like they only know each other in sort of a 'friend of a friend' kind of way. It's a damn shame. Jal's clarinet practice is once again interrupted by her brothers' intrusive pounding, so she heads out into a room labelled "STUDIO NO ENTRY", but Ronnie and Alicia are in there and I imagine it's probably quite difficult to play the clarinet whilst vomitting. Jal and Ronnie share a Significant Look, while Alicia's totally get into Ronnie's mix of her track, which features the lines "In my dreams/You're not what you seem/Pour sweet cream/On my strawberries". Awesome. Ronnie tells her "Needs work" and hands her a glass of wine.

Next morning, the Fazer family is gathered for breakfast, and Alicia is there too, wearing (I presume) one of Ronnie's shirts, so there is quite a lot of tension in the air. The brothers slurp the milk from their cereal with quite ludicrous volume, and goddamn, outside of scouse drug dealers with ridiculous moustaches, there are not many sounds more irritating than that. Jal just glares, which I think gets the point across far more effectively. Alicia makes another futile attempt to connect by saying "I hear you guys are musicians too?". The brothers respond, of course, by overplaying the lingo so she doesn't understand a word they say, and Jal smiles quietly to herself even though she hates that shit. And then Alicia commits a horrible faux pas by suggesting that Jal could maybe play her "flute" on one of Alicia's tracks. Oh, poor, sweet, stupid Alicia. Jal responds in the same way as the brothers, and she's pretty good at it, for all that. The brothers are impressed, Ronnie is not, and slaps them both upside the head and WAVES A STERN FINGER at Jal. And, OK, the kids are all upset that Ronnie appears to be replacing their mother so soon, because they are not ready for that, yadda yadda yadda. NEXT SCENE!

Mad Twatter. NEXT SCENE!

...Naw, just kidding. I'm sure I'd get through these a lot faster if I did that, but I guess that would get old pretty fast. So, actually, Jal is back at school to practice with Claire accompanying on piano. No oppressive drum 'n' bass to interrupt here, thankfully. But there is a camp Welsh fellow, bringing news that "the Director" wishes to see Jal right now. So Jal gets on to do that, Doug lags behind in order to unexpectedly declare his love for Claire, and oh boy, that sure did take me by surprise and astound and amaze me or some shit. Whatever.

So, right, Director. She's got the typical prim librarian look and mannerisms. Ah, joy, another caricature, I do so love those. Doug enters a little after Jal and hastily adjusts his tie, and explains "it's a little hot in here." Really, what was the point of that? So, the Director says "We're just delighted that we've produced such a talented pupil", Jal hastens to point out that "we" had fuck all to do with that, other than Claire, which the Director ignores in favour of blathering about how it's a particularly great acheivement considering Jal's "background", by which she means skin colour, and even goes so far as to refer to it as a "handicap". Ugh. Anyway, she wants Jal to do TV interviews bigging up the school and all the wonders it's done her under the I'm Not Racist, Some Of My Best Friends Are Black campaign and the If They Can Say Nigger So Can I It's A Fucking Double Standard Is What It Is initiative. Jal gives this all her "If you thought Alicia got it bad, baby, you ain't seen nothing yet" glare, but then Doug brings a little needed levity to the proceedings by listing all the interviews she has to do, which includes "Channel 4, they're ironic, OK?" which is some pretty fabulous meta what with the upcoming episode written by Simon Amstell. Anyway, Jal basically tells them to go fuck themselves, of course, but their heads are too far up their arses to hear.

But I guess Jal agreed to do the interviews in the end, and just completely ignored the "checklist of things to think when she loses" (not a paraphrase, by the way), because we now get to see her on some anonymous news channel, answering every single question with a moody "No." "So, if you win, will we see you in the charts?" "No." "Right. And... your family, they must be very proud of you?" "No." OK, that is pretty awesome. We're in Michelle's room now; 'Chelle and Jal watching Jal on TV, and I think it's pretty damn doubtful that that would actually get to broadcast like that, but whatever. Michelle sort-of-not-exactly-jokingly asks Jal is she has to be "so fucking sulky" all the time, Jal claims that she isn't. LIAR! They watch a bit more of the news ("Will you take a lucky mascot on stage with you?" "No." "So, tell me a bit about the clarinet, it's a kind of flute thing, isn't it?" "No. It's a single reed woodwind instrument." OK, this interview should absolutely be fired based on that last question. It's a kind of flute thing, isn't it?! Get out.) and then Michelle moves onto to despairing over Jal's choice of BROWN BROWN IT'S FUCKING BROWN dress, and squeezes out the fact that it is ridiculously cheap, or it would be, were it green, but seeing as how it is TOTALLY BROWN, £14 is probably a pretty reasonable price. Michelle throws the dress on the floor, Jal complains that she paid good money for that, Michelle eyerollingly tells her "You did not!" and goes to her wardrobe to find her some more suitable attire. And so the sprucing up of this ugly duckling into a beautiful swan is afoot, and oh, how wonderful it is that makeup and a slinky black dress can transform Jal into a routine vision of conventional attractiveness as perceived in today's modern culture. Rah rah rah. Jal doesn't look particularly enthused by the prospect either, at least. Commercials!

So, the lads are all outside this club, making an incredibly lame attempt to convince the bouncer that they are all over 21, complete with stupid moustaches drawn onto IDs. Not even Tony's mad manipulative skillz can make up for Chris and Sid in this case, and things are about to get ugly when Jal appears from inside, (because of course it is Ronnie's club) and says it's all OK, they're with her. Cue the boys all foaming at the mouth because Jal! Has breasts! And once inside, nobody will stop staring at them. Jal frustratedly reminds Maxxie that he is supposed to be gay, he's sighs "Yeah..." and continues staring, and then eventually his brain catches up and he's jerks his eyes away, embarrassed. Hmm. Jal turns next to Anwar and reminds him that his Muslim upbringing tells him to respect women's bodies, he points out, quite reasonably, I think, that he is certainly doing exactly that. Jal gets bored with it all a little later than me and exits in the direction of the toilets, Tony tells Michelle "Nice work," and wanders off to some unspecified location without making any mention of the equally nice work Michelle performed on herself, much to her consternation. On her way to the bathroom, Jal is accosted by some swanky geezer who appreciates her fancy get-up with a little more panache, and this sets her heart all aflutter. From the shadows, Ronnie glares at all this.

Later, Chris, Maxxie and Anwar have all disappeared somewhere, leaving Sid and Michelle alone. She's intently watching Tony, who is clearly flirting with Abigail, and angrily asks Sid what the fuck Tony is doing. Sid, also fairly angrily, tells her "I don't know, they're talking. Just talking." And in an actual surprising turn of events, Michelle notes his town, and tells him straight up, with the edge totally gone from her voice, "I know you fancy me." Hooray! No irritating stringing along of that plot then, right? Right? Uh. Anyway, Sid makes this hilarious strangled "Hey?" noise, Michelle tells him "I love you" which momentarily gets his hopes up because Sid is kind of an idiot sometimes. Well, most of the time. Michelle finishes that thought "but more like a..." Sid interrupts to tell her to please not say brother, but she was already saying it, so she does. It's a conversation you and I and everybody has seen so very, very many times before, but it's pretty nicely played, and also after Michelle gives him a chaste kiss on the lips, Sid pauses for a moment and then suggests that they could be "like, a Welsh brother and sister", which is pretty awesome, I think. Michelle tells him he's funny and then goes off to interrupt Tony and Abigail, which is awesome because she has to just sit there looking incredibly awkward while they make out in front of her. Hee.

It's also awesome because Cassie only talks to Sid when he is alone, and now he is. So, she has a pint for Sid already purchased to swoop in with just as soon as Michelle went away, which he grumblingly thanks her for, because he is in a serious brood mode what with all his lame false hopes having been dashed to pieces just a few scant seconds ago. He downs a whole lot of his pint, thanks Cassie again because he "need[s] to be drunk", and then... walks away. Shit! Not awesome! Abort! Abort! ...Damn. Cassie's heartbroken response is of course, well, heartbreaking. Sid, you fool!

Jal's brothers and their Nerdy White Friend are on stage, and one of them drops his microphone and breaks it, and they are awful again, and yet we have to watch them for a damn long time. Why? Eventually it all breaks down into Oasis-style infighting and horrible feedback and the crowd all boo them, and then somebody spots Ronnie and they all start chanting "Fazer! Fazer! Fazer!" even though hey already have two Fazers on stage right there. Ronnie is not going to perform for them, so instead they get a generic DJ set, and so we watch them all dance. I really cannot comprehend what the point of any of this is. There is no advancement of plot, there is no insight being given into any characters, there is no witty or interesting or even dull dialogue. It's just... young people dancing in a club look like this. I actually already knew that, thanks, Skins. Can we get onto some kind of plot or character development now? Even if it involves Mad Twatter? I won't complain, honestly. Well, OK, maybe a little. Well, a lot. Oh hey, wait, Tony's kissing Abigail! And Jal saw it! DEVELOPMENT!

Later. Sid is chilling on a sofa, feeling sorry for himself. Jal comes to join him and rests her head on his shoulder, he asks what she's doing, she explains that she is comforting him. Sid delusionally asks "What about?" even hough he already knows that she knows and all that. Oh lordy, give it up already, Sid. Anyway, once Sid is done lamenting the fact that everybody in the world knows he loves Michelle, he takes another gander at Jal's magically enticing dress and asks just how comforting she is feeling, exactly. Jal begins repeating Michelle's "I love you but..." spiel, Sid tells her not to fucking start, and I'll tell you who might have actually been feeling comforting if you'd had a brain in your head five minutes ago, Sid. Idiot. And then the swanky geezer from earlier shows up and offers to make good on his earlier promise to buy a drink for Jal. She points out that the bar is closed, he explains that a friend of his has a club just up the road that they could go to, and invites Sid along too, in an attempt to not seem totally skeevy. It doesn't work, as far as I'm concerned, but Jal and Sid are totally fine with it. Idiots. Seriously, I do not get why Jal at least does not pick up on the exceedingly bad vibe this guy is giving. Makes no sense.

The camera watches them wander down the road from a distance to emphasise the cold darkness of the night or some such, and Sid finally finds that tiny organ rattling around in his skull when the dude starts to lead them into a secluded alley and tries to call a halt, but it's a little too late for that. Turns out this guy is one of Twat's flunkies, so let's skip past the irritating speech and cut to the part where Mad takes Sid's credit card and demands the PIN, which Sid freely hands over in the hope of not getting the shit beaten out of him. Unfortunately, Mad decides that this isn't enough and sets his goons to ransacking Jal's bag. Sid makes a fairly valiant, if extremely stuttery, attempt to demand that Jal is left out of it, since this all has nothing to do with her, but of course it falls on deaf ears. Anyway, Jal doesn't have a credit card, but she is carrying her clarinet around with her. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. The daughter of Ronnie Fazer, artiste/producer extraordinaire, has no credit card. And carries her extremely expensive clarinet around in clubs, just in case she ever feels the need to whip out a sonata on a moment's notice. Whatever, Skins. So, Mad plays a jaunty tune on the clarinet and then smahses it to pieces, because THAT is the kind of GUY he is. The possible involvement of someone remotely as irritating as this man in your life is a pretty compelling reason to never take drugs, I must say. Deed now done, Mad and his goons fuck off into the darkness, Jal shreiks at them, her buffoon brothers arrive to give Sid the shit-kicking he inexplicably has not already received, erroneously perceiving him to be to object of Jal's ire right here, and basically everything is really, really shitty for everybody right now. Except Tony, the smarmy bastard. And I guess Chris doesn't have it too bad right now either.

Later, Jal is on the phone, telling Claire "I'm sorry, I should never have been carrying it." That is a good point. That is a really fucking excellent point. I'm so glad you addressed that one so thoroughly. Jal then says "Yeah" a couple of times, and then there is a sudden and extremely jarring cut to Claire, in bed, calling someone a "Welsh studmonkey". OK, I'm pretty sure that was an error in this recording of the episode. But, really, I don't think we've missed anything remotely important, and this episode is not inducing near enough thrills for me to bother finding out. I'm sure you can fill in the blanks yourself which as much wit and originality as the writers acheived on this day, honestly. Commercials. We're onto the last leg now.

Camera focuses on Jal with the background all blurred so we can't tell where she is, while her brothers (plus Nerdy White Friend, of course) make a whole lot of noise about the violence they plan to inflict upon Twat and his goons, so I'm sure it comes as no surprise to anyone when we zoom out to discover that they are all in hospital beds with, like comic-book levels of casts all over every part of their bodies. They make excuses for their absolute failure to deliver a richly deserved beating to Twat, Jal says she's sorry and tells them "I didn't mean you to do that", but of course they were all too ready to take up arms in defence of their sister because deep down these crazy kids all love each other, aww. Jal gives them sincere thanks for their totally useless 'help' and asks if there's anything she can do for them. They all think on it a while, then OB requests a kiss from Michelle, which the others both jump on also, but dude, first come, first served, finders keepers, losers weepers and all that.

And, OK, this next bit is actually pretty sweet. Ronnie's in his studio, totally unaware that Jal is watching from the room next door. He gets a phone call from one or other of his sons and tells him "I know you took a beating, but your sister's grateful. I know it. You did good. ...Yeah, I'll come down again in an hour. I love you too. I love you all. Even that [stupid, or something that sounds fairly similar and probably has much the same meaning] white boy." And then, right there, he starts laying down some impromptu rhymes, and it's pretty awesome, he's got a real Maxi Jazz style going down.

I'm inspired
I'm offline
A renegade
Disturbing the peace while I'm spitting a serenade
All this tension, miscomprehension
I'm in informed, on the level and might mention
That when I scream, it's just passion
I ain't angry at culture, I ain't angry at fashion

...and so on. I'm not going to transcribe it all, because there's a lot, and it does rather trail off at the end. Jal watches the whole thing with a smile slowly spreading across her face as she and Ronnie both remember what it is that made him such a big name in the first place, and she realises that he really does love her, even if he sucks at showing it, and it works pretty well right here. And then Ronnie finishes and Jal flicks on the light; he bitches at her for watching him when he's in his private place, she yells "Don't you talk to me through glass!", and his face softens and he comes outside to talk to her. And then they ruin it all rather by having Jal exclaim "It's not my fault! It's not my fault I look like her!" Jeeeesus, would it really have been so hard to bring that point across without beating me over the head with it? Who do you think you are, Chris Chibnall? Bah. So, Jal tells Ronnie to stop wasting his talent, he churlishly tells her to go tidy her room.

Except, not so churlishly, because there is a brand new shiny clarinet sitting on Jal's bed. Because, by the way, daddy loves her under all that gruff exterior. Had you noticed? And so there's just enough time left for the orchestra build-up to Jal's big solo at the big competition (though not Jal's actual solo; much like last week, we cut out just before the inanimate object that is the focus of our central character's life meets their mouth) to play over a wonderful scene of Ronnie and a goon of his own driving up next to Twat on a deserted street and dragging him kicking and screaming into the car, never to be seen again. It's a seriously lame cop-out to Sid's whole mortal peril storyline, but I don't care because I never! Have! To watch! This! Twat! Again! YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Food For Thought

Skins 1x02 - "Cassie"

Episode Grade: A-


Previously: Sid was going to lose his virginity, but he didn't. He might lose his balls, though. And we met Tony, which turned out to be an all together unpleasant experience. We met the rest of the kids too, but not in so much detail. Today, we're meeting Cassie. Wow!

Opening credits! Plink plink plink. Plink. Plink.

Cassie blinks herself awake, and we slowly zoom out to reveal more of the scene around her as she inspects it all herself, looking confused. She's lying on a sofa, which appears to have had some tuna spilled and/or vomitted on it. Her hand is covered in something white and gooey and generally gross looking, which is of course, not what it looks like. Well, unless someone's produced enough to fill a saucepan. There's also some dude lying on the sofa with her, top to tail. I don't think he's one of our kids, but I can't get a particularly clear view. Cassie stands, she's wearing mismatched undies and socks. According to her myspace, Cassie collects love heart sweets: "you can change the messages if you scratch them, you just need a pin." She also loves Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and wishes she could meet a boy like Joel Barisch. So, socially awkward, wears a hat all the time... That's a toughie. Cassie pulls on a shiny dress. The whole room is covered in food, all up the walls, all over the furniture, and all over Chris, who is lying face down on another sofa, with "I LIKE BOYS" written on his back, and an accompanying arrow pointing south. You just can't beat the classics, eh. Chris rolls over in his sleep, and Cassie wows at him. From the corner, Jal sleepily chuckles and notes that the rumours aren't true, "they're not all the same size at action stations". Cassie agrees and says "poor Chris", and covers him up and then, here's the kicker, bunches up the covers to form the illusion of a huge cock. I make no apologies for loving Cassie any more, that's just so weirdly sweet, OK?

Cassie drifts out through the halls, shoes in one hand, bag in the other, past a curtain made of spaghetti and into the kitchen. I've got to say, they've done a pretty fine job of giving the place the trashed, morning after party, before parents return look. Outside, Anwar's fully dressed and praying, Cassie watches through the window for a while, then puts her bag and shoes in the sink and goes to the fridge for some water. She notes that the 13th of whatever month it is has been urgently circled in red with the words "MUM HOME" with a look of mild concern. She goes out to ask Anwar the date, he confirms that it is the 13th, and she asks dreamily (which, by the way, is to Cassie as 'smugly' is to Tony, if you hadn't already guessed) if he thinks maybe she should remind Michelle of the significance of that date. Anwar gently admonishes her, "I'm trying to pray to my God here, Cass", and she stares like she's seeing him for the first time and wows. "Is He listening?" she asks with genuine curiosity. Anwar says he hopes not, since that would mean He'd have been paying attention to everything Anwar was doing last night. Heh. Cassie suggests he pray quietly and drifts off in search of Michelle.

She finds her in her room, obviously, in bed with Tony, obviously, and Sid lying at their feet like a dog. Obviously. Cassie gently nudges Michelle awake, and she moans "Fuck off, Tone". Cassie corrects her identification, and Michelle mumbles "Crazy bitch," which Cassie quite hilariously accepts as recognition with no kind of offended or surprised reaction. Michelle continues "Never fucking eat", which is frankly pretty unnecessary on any level, and Cassie is all "Very good, but let's move onto my point now, OK?" Michelle groans "tomorrow" at her, Cassie tries to persuade her that her mother returns on the 13th, which is today, but Michelle groggily insists "Tomorrow!" So Cassie shrugs and turns to the mirror to apply some make up. She pauses long enough to remove the "VIRGIN" post-it from Sid's forehead and replace it with a lipstick mark, and then heads outside to enjoy the fireworks from a safe distance.

There she's greeted with a "Hello, Cassandra" by Michelle's mother, who's pulling a suitcase out of her car. Cassie wows and responds in kind with a "Hi, Anna" and then stalls on her new husband's name; he grumpily reminds her it's Malcolm. Cassie cheerily asks how they're honeymoon was, Anna shares some happy memories for a while and then heaps the dramatic irony on thick by mentioning an important meeting later today and asking if Cassie's been helping to clear up. Cassie agreeably says "Oh wow, totally", and there's a little more banter about how Cassie is "looking much better than the last time Anna saw her", and Cassie calls Malcolm "Martin", and he asks if they can hurry up and go inside because he wants "some fucking Coco Pops" and makes fun of Cassie because he's a small-minded prick. And then Cassie steps back as Anna heads in to light the blue touch paper. Or, wait, I think she is the blue touch paper in this analogy. Whatever, Cassie's certainly making pretty light patterns in the air with her sparkler right now.

From Anwar's kneeled vantage point, we here a bloodcurdling shriek and Michelle gamely tries to insist "Mum, I didn't know", and then Maxxie (who I have by now figured out was actually the one on the sofa with Cassie) and Jal hop out the window, soon followed by Chris, and then Sid and Tony, and they all tear off down the street in their various states of undress.

Meanwhile, Cassie's taking a bus home, and all around her, people are eating, eating, eating. Like, every single other person on the bus appears to be stuffing their face. Oh lordy. Cassie finds a post-it somewhere about her person with nothing but "EAT!" written on it, and sticks it to the window. The toddler sitting opposite her watches all this and, with the pure innocence of youth, offers her the chocolate digestive that's melting into her hand. Now, regardless of eating disorders, you wouldn't take that, but shit, that hurts. Commercials! Take a drink every time you hear the phrase "government legislation".

I need a breather, OK; anorexia nervosa scares me like little else in this world, and the reasons for that are not something I'm going to go into in any great detail, but I'm clearly not going to avoid any reference to them either, or I'd have avoided recapping this show like the plague. I don't want to let things get too heavy though, so, a joke:

A man with an orange head walks into a McDonalds and stands in line. The girl behind the counter is perplexed by the hue of his cranium, but says nothing as she takes his order (a double cheeseburger, naturally). Just as he is turning to go, though, curiosity gets the better of her and she calls him back; "Excuse me sir, but I couldn't help noticing that you have an orange head. Why is that?"

"Well," the man with the orange head explains, "a couple of weeks ago, I was rooting through the junk in my attic, when I found a dusty old lamp. I rubbed it with a cloth, to try to clean the dust off, and a genie came out and granted me three wishes. For my first wish, I wished for world peace, and it happened, and it's great. For my second wish, I wished to cure all disease, and it happened, and it's great. For my third wish, I wished for an orange head. I'm slightly regretting that one now."

Now, you might think that has absolutely nothing to do with this episode, but if you think about it, I bet Cassie would totally disagree, and she is, after all, the topic of the episode, so I think she should know, right? Anyway, let's get on with it. Cassie arrives home, and home has a nice orange VW Hippy Wagon parked outside, which is our first alarm bell. Inside, there's a pretty hideous painting of a naked woman who appears to have only one breast on the wall, and the sounds of adult giggling from further inside. Not far enough inside, as it turns out; Cassie enters the kitchen and finds her parents just about to start going at it on the kitchen counter. Cassie just stands and stares until her mum notices and even then they're pretty casual about slowly disengaging. Her dad (who's played by Neil Morrissey; a few steps up from Harry Enfield, just as he was on Men Behaving Badly) asks if she's had breakfast, Cassie lies with the effortlessness that only comes with a whole lot of practice "Oh yeah! Michelle does, like, crazy bacon, egg and sausage sandwiches. They're mad." Neil Morrissey cheerfully (which is his Personal Adverb, of course) tells her that's great and heads off down the hall saying he's going to have a shower, with a wildly unnecessary crotch pat. OK, ew. Mama Cass, meanwhile, is attending to Cassie's baby brother Reuben; Cassie offers to take over and specifically mentions feeding him; associating the idea of food with herself like it's no big deal, so nobody notices that it really really is. She's a smart one; that's what makes it so terrifying. Mama Cass breezily thanks her and heads off to join Neil Morrissey. Cassie mentions as Mama Cass leaves (with an unspoken, but nonetheless pointed, "In case you were interested") that it's her last day at the clinic; "They'll sign me off if I've gained a half-kilo". Mama Cass supportively asks if she has, Cassie claims to have "totally, for sure" done so.

Cassie gets on with feeding and changing Reuben, but attention is undeniably drawn away from this by the painting behind them, which covers the entire wall and depicts the same naked, psychotically smiling woman as before, only now she has all breasts present and accounted for, and is holding a baby with umbilical cord still attached, and from the context it is clear that this is a painting done by Neil Morrissey, of Mama Cass and Reuben. Yeah, anorexia nervosa has nothing on this painting. Ye gods. Cassie turns on a musical mobile above Reuben's crib in a hopeless effort to drown out her parents' moans from upstairs, and then takes out an ecstacy pill from her bag. She's momentarily distracted by a text from an unknown number, saying simply "EAT!", and then washes down the pill with something from one of those double-handled juice cups for babies. And then she smiles melancholically, looks upwards, and watches the mobile spin and the world fade away. She's always doing that, taking symbols of youth and innocence, and combining them with the exact opposite. It's so sad. Horrific paintings aside, it seems like her parents would seem just awesome to have when she was a kid, but now she's supposed to be growing up, and they've never really shown her how. So she keeps clinging to the childhood that she can never really get back, because it's the only thing she really knows how to do.

Later, Neil Morrissey is painting yet another paean to his lord Cthulu. Cassie is unfazed by the sight of her mother posing naked, because, as established, this is a fairly usual occurence in her household. Plus, Cassie is never fazed by anything that isn't edible. If you are thinking what I think you are thinking right now; NO. JUST DON'T. Cassie tells Neil Morrissey that her taxi's here, he has no idea what she is talking about, because her parents are crazy hippies and pay no attention to her, which is why she is so fucked up. Now, it cannot ever be boiled down to something as simplistic as that, and you are stupid if you think it can. But since I don't think the show or anyone else was saying that, this is not actual criticism, I'm just enjoying the sound of my own voice. Ho hum. Cassie reminds Neil Morrissey that they send a taxi every week "to make sure I go", and he is momentarily overjoyed with the "fact" that Cassie is soon to be cured of all her ills, and then immediately returns all his concentration to his painting. Cassie looks a little upset for a moment, then silently walks away.

In her taxi, Cassie is sticking weights in her knickers to cheat on her mass test. Dayum. Now, it seems a little odd that she'd be doing that now rather than just before leaving the house, but maybe she's trying to limit the time she has to stand up with them in there in case of wardrobe malfunction. One the one hand, if that was true, I would have thought the skirt she's wearing would be a pretty uncharacteristically bad choice of attire, but then, on the other hand, I guess anything tight fitting enough to contribute significant support would probably give rise to extremely suspicious bulges. Either way, I am putting far too much thought into this. Her kindly old taxi driver, Alan, watches this and asks if she's "got enough room back there", which strikes me as slightly odd, somehow. Cassie says "You won't tell on me, will you, Alan?" She already knows the answer, or she certainly would've put the weights all about herself earlier; "You know me, kid. See no, hear no, speak no." There are a lot of things I love about this episode, but I think the camaraderie between Alan and Cassie is the thing I love the most (aside from The Plinks, of course). Cassie explains that she won't have to keep going back if she's half a kilo up, Alan, without a hint of accusation, asks if she knows what she's doing; she says "Oh totally", of course. Alan catches her of guard by telling her plainly "I'm going to miss you, Tiny". Cassie gives a "hadn't thought about that" wow and responds in kind. Alan, again like it's no big deal either way, asks if she's going to start eating this time. Cassie, of course, says she totally will, and flashes him her accomplished disarming smile, which he immediately calls her out for. Cassie promises not to pull that one on him again and sincerely tells him she loves him, which he reciprocates. Aw, man. And then things get a little "Attempt To Tip The Scales" weird; Alan asks if she wants him to change the music, and the nice sedate mood music that they've been playing throughout the scene is flicked off and replaced by some dude yelling "Go, bitch, get out the way, get out the way, bitch, get out the way", which Alan incongruously declares as his "new favourite". It's perfectly possible that that mood music actually was playing on the radio, and that Alan switched to CD or whatever, but that still gives the whole thing a slightly unsettling atmosphere. We're seeing the world through Cassie's eyes, and those eyes don't quite see the same world as anyone else. It becomes more noticable as the episode wears on, of course, because these things tend to; you never want to show all your cards at once.

Lending credence to my point, the yelling dude carries on yelling until well after Cassie's out of the taxi, and all the way through her mass test. Cassie heads to the corridor outside, where another girl is preparing for her own test by chugging down an entire two litre bottle of water. Cassie watches in admiration and does some quick maths in her head to tell Watergirl just exactly how much weight she's giving herself. Unfortunately for Watergirl, the clinic people keep her waiting out there for too long to actually retain all the water, and she goes desperately rushing off in search of a toilet. Tough break, I guess.

Cassie heads on to the office of the head clinic lady, who just so happens to be the mother of Abigail (the posh girl whose house they all wrecked last week), which is revealed by an overly conveniently coincidental phonecall about promises being broken and carpets being damaged. Still, it's always nice to see my old pal Continuity, although I can't help but feel he might have been put to better use answering the question of whether Chris and the polish girl ever got out of the car. This phone call also involves the line "I am not an expletive bitch!", hilariously. That and "Have you taken your medication? Well, take it now! NOW!" Hey there, Foreshadowing! Mrs. Posh hangs up, and, with a little too much forced smiling and making big shows of having to check her papers to remember Cassie's name, she ticks all the boxes to give Cassie her freedom. While she's doing so, she rattles off a totally emotionless rendition of a speech she knows by rote about how the clinic is Cassie's friend and she should look upon it as a sanctuary of goodness and hugs and puppies, and all the while, Cassie is watching a guy charging around the fields outside in nothing but a straight-jacket and being tackled and then dragged around by his penis by orderlies. Ironic Juxtaposition too! The gang is out in full force tonight! Now, this is either a pretty shittily written attempt at getting a cheap laugh at the expense of any regard to realism, or this is showing the clinic as Cassie sees it, as a sinister organisation that takes away your freedom under a crude mask of kindess. First time through, it's obviously the former, and I'm still not sure I really want to keep watching this show, with the benefit of hindsight, it at least seems completely reasonable to interpret it as the second, and this is actually rather brilliant. Once Mrs. Posh has finished her spiel, Cassie says "Thank you" to Mrs. Posh (who is actually called Dr. Stock, so I apologise for not giving the correct title, Dr. Posh), because Daddy might be a crazy hippy who's too busy tiling on the roof and fixing waterproof to really pay attention to her, but he sure didn't bring her up with bad manners. And then she kisses her on the cheek, because that is just our girl's way. Dr. Stock is totally frozen in confusion at this, and remains so even after Cassie leaves the room, so I take it I am to believe that as a genuine reaction.

I guess group therapy was another requirement of Cassie's course, because she's sitting in a circle with a bunch of people and being applauded. She wows and thanks everyone for their help, and I guess she likes the therapist here a little better, because his praise actually seems kind of genuine. Although he is still a little abrupt on moving onto the next member of the group, "Madison". Wait a second.... Aw, shit, and it was all going so well. It's Mad Twatter. Ugh, let's gloss over the stupid ranting; he's mad because he hasn't got his money from Sid. We already knew this. It's bad enough you feel the need to stick him in scenes that advance the plot in some way, please don't go filling out time with his pointless bollocks. Oh, he's got some kind of photo ID card of Sid's, so now Cassie knows about this, which I guess is something of a development. Eh. Commercials.

Cafeteria. Sid gets himself his lunch, which is basically a plate piled high with chips, plus some pilchards for reasons of tokenism, which goes along with a funny little bit where the dinner lady is contractually obliged to dress as a pilchard and explain their health benefits for reasons of Jamie Oliver being a pillock. He walks over to sit with the boys (minus Tony, plus new character Kenneth) who all laugh at him because he's still got Cassie's lipstick mark on his head from this morning. Kenneth, by the way, is black, and plays this up ridiculously with urban street lingo that I tend to find pretty impenetrable ("bear shit on his forehead an' ting!" is all I can make any sense of in this scene) before suddenly slipping into an almost Chris Eubank-esque accent. This is all he ever does; he's completely one note, but damn it if it isn't hilarious every time anyway. Thankfully, they do just about keep him on the right side of 'overused' throughout the season. Chris quite excellently asks "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" after his babble in this scene. Heh. Anyway, Sid gets irritated by their mockery and goes to take an empty seat instead.

Cassie appears with just an apple in hand and asks if she can sit with him; Sid is cool with that. She notices the lipstick too and just asks if he's been home today, which obviously he hasn't. They converse a little about how wrong everything went at Michelle's and her mum called the police and Sid starts off about how "Tony had to go and ju-jitsu Mr. Michelle". Cassie observantly notes "You love Tony", Sid is all "Wuh?" so Cassie repeats herself and adds "You always talk about him." Sid obliviously says "Do I?", Cassie sweetly tells him "It's cool you have someone to look up to" and then weirds him out a little with over-enthusiasm about how fun the food fight last night was, "just, like throwing it! Everywhere!" There's even a double wow in there, so you can tell she's really excited about it. Then she suddenly notices just how much food Sid's grabbed himself and notes that he must be hungry, which in turn causes him to notice how little she has, and that she is not even eating that. Cassie distracts him and/or succumbs to OCD by arranging his chips into neat rows and columns, and insists again that she's "totally better". But Sid, despite being oblivious to so many things, entirely sees through this one. It's weird how that works sometimes. He curiously asks how she does it, Cassie feigns ignorance of what he's talking about, Sid admonishes this with a little harshness and then softens again as he clarifies; "I mean, you never eat anything. I mean, your parents must notice or something." Cassie looks him square in the eye; "I like you, Sid," she says, "So I'm going to show you." How deep the rabbit hole goes. I don't know if I'm ready for this.

OK, Cassie pulls one of Sid's plates (turns out the chips 'n' pilchards weren't actually his entire lunch... he's a growing boy and all that) over to her side of the table and grabs a knife and fork, and the performance begins. Hannah Murray puts so much into this, and it's seriously mesmerising in an awful sort of way. Without ever pausing to breathe, or let Sid point out that no food is actually entering her mouth at any point, this; "You have to do a lot of talking. I'm good at talking. You do that a lot when you're cutting things up, and then: questions." She raises a forkful of food to her mouth and then stops just before it reaches; "Where's your student card? Your ID, have you got it?" Sid says no, he's lost it, and before he has time to dwell on that, she's off again. "Change the subject. This is great! I love these sausages. You should try one! Go on, delicious, mmm." She forks it over to his plate, and Sid starts to get the idea; "Hang on, you didn't..." Cassie doesn't let him finish that thought; "You're not quite sure what I'm on about, but I keep distracting you. Then I up the ante; yum, I love this stuff! Really delicious." She grabs Sid's plate and steals a few chips. "You're really sure that I want some more. I'll keep waving it at you until you stop looking at me." And then another forkful to the mouth, and pause; "Where'd you lose it? Your ID? I mean, they won't let you use the library, will they?" While Sid's pondering that one, Cassie checks her watch and says "God, I've got to go!" and scrapes her food onto another plate, putting the now empty one on top to disguise how much is still there. "So full. Gotta dash." And, scene.

Cassie returns to the table for a critique; Sid is impressed, for which Cassie cheerfully thanks him. "But aren't you kind of... lying to everyone?" Sid says, under his breath so she might not hear it, like he can't quite decide if he should take the red pill or the blue pill. Cassie insists again that she's "so better", and adds that she got discharged from the clinic by way of proof. Sid, even more mumbly, says that seems "a bit fucked up", which is certainly no overstatement. Cassie doesn't hear this one, and asks him to repeat so he looks at her straight and says again "That seems a bit fucked up." Cassie's totally taken aback, and wows while she tries to think of something to say to that. It takes her a while. "But you see," she starts and then laughs, because she's really not sure which pill to take either, and girl's got some experience on that front. "It's like, nobody's fucking business." The smile is wider and more strained than ever before, it hurts so much. Her and me. "And it's not like anybody cares, so..." she trails off, Sid looks up and hesitantly says "I... care." And for a couple of seconds they stare into each others eyes, awkwardly connecting but not knowing what the fuck to do with it, and I'm just about ready to put my crazy Harry Potter-referencing shipper hat on again, but then fucking Tony has to show up and ruin the moment. Wanker. Things go well at first, with Sid giving pretty clear "piss off" signals to him, but then he points out the lipstick on Sid's forehead, and Sid is totally distracted into trying to figure out how it got there. Cassie opens her mouth as if to own up to it, but the foul essence of Tony in the air is overpowering and the connection is severed, so she settles for knocking a plate full of gravy or something onto his lap and sarcastically saying "Wow, Tony, it looks like you've pissed yourself." Excellent! Kenneth goes crazy laughing at that one, which gives Cassie a quick window to bring Sid's attention back on her while Tony goes to deal with him for that. "I'm a bad person," she giggles, but it's just not enough. Tony leaves to go clean himself up, and tells his lapdog to come along. Sid apologetically tells Cassie he's got to go, she snarkily says "Sure you have." He pushes his plate of chips forward and tells her to finish it off for him, which, really, is only going to make things worse. Just as Sid's about to go, she decides to repay him for his pre-Tony efforts and tells him that Mad has his ID card. After Sid's gone, Cassie takes a look back at the plate of neatly arranged chips, only they're not in rank and file any more; they've been arranged to spell out "EAT". Her expression as she looks back at Sid again is pretty inscrutable.

Tony attempts to dry out his trousers under a hand dryer in a bathroom in which Angie is just finished taking a shower. The camera spends an exceedingly gratuitously long time watching Angie strut around in the nude before either of them notice each other's presence, at which point she quite calmly points out that the room is for female staff, and Tony fulfills neither of those criteria. He lamely excuses himself by saying the dryer in the boys' room is broken, although he does at least have the good grace to look pretty embarrassed. Sid barges into the room at this point (God knows how he knew Tony was there; I'm thinking some kind of homing device because he wouldn't want to stay apart for too long, I'd imagine), tosses off a casual "Hi, Angie" before launching to a tirade about how much shit he is in before his brain catches up with his eyes and he stops mid-sentence to go "Ohhhhhhhhhh, fuck" and stare at Angie. And then his brain catches up again and he hurriedly turns away and starts cleaning his glasses. And then Chris wanders in as well to tell them how hilarious the cafteria antics were. There's at least a small enough time-gap for him to have conceivably followed Sid in. Anyway, he gets in his double-take and then hurriedly bustles the boys out of there because heaven forbid anyone else look at Angie. Although Tony's wearing no trousers, so I think it's safe to assume Sid's not a worry on that front. Now that they've already left, Angie stops being dumbsruck and yells "For fuck's sake, fuck off" unnecessarily, then looks down at herself and grins "Still got it." Heh.

Having successfully got Sid and Tony the hell away from naked Angie (and drawn the stares of every person in the school by loudly shoving Tony, still trouserless, out of a feamle staff bathroom), Chris goes back inside under the pretence of... no, he wants to see Angie naked. There is no pretence.

Meanwhile, Cassie's drifting along an upper walkway, high above the level of the rest of the student body. Take that in whatever sense you will; I can think of at least three just off the top of my head. And when I say drifting, I really mean it; they appear to have filmed this segment by dragging her along on a trolley below the line of the camera or something. Copuled with the breezy music, it's a nice effect, if not all together original. Cassie walks her fingers along the bannister for a time, then presses her face against a window to watch the floor below, where Sid's chatting with Tony. "Look up if you like me", she chants, but Sid does not; instead she gets the ironic attentions of the least attractive people possible, Dirty Old Man, Fat Chick and The Fonz. "Bugger," Cassie declares, and walks away sadly.

Sid's chilling out in the psychology classroom. Or rather, paranoiding out. The lipstick mark is still there, which, if I were Cassie, I would take as a more important sign than my own lack of telekinesis. Telekinesis of the mind, I mean. Not in a redundant way; like psychically influencing someone else's thoughts and emotions, I don't know if there is another word for that. But anyway, whatever you want to call it, Cassie does not have it and this fact is making her miserable, because she is a glass half-empty type. And I've successfully distracted myself enough to have only just realised that Cassie is not even in this scene, so I should probably get back to some kind of point. OK, Sid is paranoiding out. Angie walks in, the door shutting noise makes Sid jump because he thinks it's Mad come to collect his collaterals, Sid's lurkiness makes Angie jump, because she's just kind of a jumpy person. I just noticed that they don't show us at all what happens in between Chris walking back into the bathroom and Angie actually putting some damn clothes on and coming into her classroom; this fact does not, however, make me jump. The awkward levels go through the roof with Sid apologising for entering the showers, explaining that he is in something of a crisis and Angie, I don't know, assuming this is some kind of crisis of masturbation or something? And extremely awkwardly telling him "Well, sometimes adult bodies can be a bit overwhelming..." Yeah, psychology teacher sure was the right profession for you, Angie! Sid irritatedly dismisses this with a "For Christ's sake, Angie, I don't care about your tits. I care about my balls." OK, he doesn't actually say that second part, which is actually somewhat surprising given Sid's knack for saying absolutely the worst possible thing in about nine out of every ten situations. He just straightforwardly explains the actual crisis (albeit lacking some of the details initially), and I think we can put this stupidly over-emphasised shower scene behind us at last. Angie tries to give him advice about managing his debts (GOVERMENT LEGISLATION IS HERE TO HELP. Take a drink for that one too.) and suggests calmly asking Mad to reschedule payments, Sid explains the rest of the details and why every one of Angie's increasingly desparate plans won't work, eventually leading her to agree with Sid that he is totally fucked. Sid hilariously tells her that she's taken a whole lot of weight off his mind.

Chris wanders in at this point, and Angie tries her best to put on her Teacher Voice, saying "You've come to apologise, right?" Chris looks confused for a second, then remembers what is going on and starts apologising for what he saw, going into great detail as to what exactly that was until Angie flusteredly interrupts. Sid leaves, and thus Angie is now in a private conversation with Chris and barely even tries to pretend she isn't loving his attention. But this is still not actually going anywhere much as of yet, so it's not all that interesting, so let's gloss over into the commercials. Have you had an accident at work?

Classroom. Cassie watches her phone vibrate its way across the table, and then looks behind her shoulder to see Sid press a few buttons on his and then close it up. She opens up her phone; it's another "EAT!" message, of course. Meanwhile, Sid's bitching at Tony for being so relaxed about the situation, but it's not Tony's balls on the line, so why the hell would he care? If you pay really close attention here, you might notice Sid's phone magically transport itself from his hand to the table when the camera cuts from one view to another. It may well be an accidental continuity error, but I think it's pretty excellent anyway. Anyway, while Tony tells Sid that he's calm because he is "confident in [his] ability to improvise", in the background, their idiot of a history teacher, Tom, is explaining how he'll be away for the next few days, so they'll have a supply teacher, who turns out to be one Mr. Twatter. Like that guy would ever, ever pass the background checks to be allowed anywhere near any kind of school. Come on. Cassie gives Sid a freaked out look that's due to both the text and Mad's appearance in equal parts, Mad does more of his Twattery that I shall not be recapping unless it moves the plot forward in any way beyond his presence as supply teacher, which it does not.

Outside, Anwar and Jal walk along to the bench where Sid is sitting and repeating "Oh God" to himself over and over and ask what's going on with him; Maxxie and Michelle, who have apparently been there a while, explain it to them, and Michelle puts a comforting arm around Sid's shoulders, which he's too paralyzed with fear to even notice, so you can tell this is serious. Anwar lightly taps Sid on the face with his palm in an attempt to snap him out of it, which doesn't work at all, so Tony full on slaps him and takes charge all "Sid is our friend and we are going to solve this". Maxxie and Jal encouragingly agree that they are all there for him, and they are thinking of the answer to his problem right now, but then there's an awkward silence while everyone tries and fails to come up with anything at all, and they all mumble that they have classes to get to, leaving Sid to "Oh God" to himself some more. Jal tells them to hold up, "We can't just leave him like this". Tony promises that they are going to give this serious thought, Jal is still decidedly unconvinced but soon realises that there's really not a whole lot she can actually do right now, and tells Sid with as much positivity as she can muster that they'll get back to him, then leaves with the others.

Alone now, Sid calls up his mum and, voice a few octaves higher than it ought to be, tells her to please ring him back as soon as possible. A way away, Cassie sees Sid with his phone out and gets another "EAT!", at which she strides purposefully towards him and asks if he's OK. Sid tells her that he is not, as such, of course, Cassie apologises for that and then tells him "It's, like, totally kind what you're doing, but it won't make any difference." Sid is confused, she tells him she's talking about the messages, Sid slightly pissily tells her he has problems of his own to deal with right now and points out that a) he hasn't been sending her messages, and b) no one else has either, there are no messages on her phone. Cassie looks perplexedly at it and discovers that that is indeed the case, and says in a small voice "I thought you liked me..." It's quiet enough that Sid doesn't hear, and Cassie tells him not to worry about it and heads back into her shell, because Sid's problems are clearly more important to him than hers right now. Now, in this case, it's actually true, but Cassie goes on believing that, or rather, letting it be an excuse not to open up, in far more situations than she really should do.

And then she runs off down the street, trying again to find a way to get away from life, just for now, and The Sleepy Jackson's "This Day" comes on the soundtrack. Check out the lyrics; I wrote all of this recap without remembering this song was coming up, and it is nice to see that I am somewhere in the vicinity of the same page as the writers as far as Cassie goes, if the use of this song is any indication. Cassie leans against a lamp post to catch her breath, to let everything overwhelm her for a second, and then she makes her way home. She walks and stands in the kitchen doorway, watches as, in slow motion, Neil Morrissey cracks open a bottle of champaigne and Mama Cass feeds Reuben, and the three of them celebrate the wonders of the world, not noticing Cassie stand there. Never noticing that Cassie isn't inside their world of frivoloty and happiness. Cassie runs upstairs to her room and pulls out a drawer from under her bed that's stocked full of choclate bars and things, in case of emergency. She grabs one, turns it over in her hands a few times, but just can't will herself to open it. She looks through her bag and finds the card that Dr. Stock gave her when she left the clinic, then gets out her phone. "Hello? Yes, it's Cassie. I think I need to see you again."

The music fades, as we move over to a cafe, cars zooming by in the night. Cassie's put on a hoodie to protect her from the cold and make her look as tiny as possible. A waitress delivers something to her table, and Alan the taxi driver appears and kindly asks Cassie what's up. "I'm having a few probs," she tells him, and he calmly assures her he's listening. "There's somebody I like. I thought he was sending me a message; texts and things, but... he wasn't." What was the message? "EAT." Which, by the way, is also written on a big blue neon sign behind Cassie's head right now, awesomely. Cassie asks if it was really Alan that sent the messages, already knowing it wasn't. "I don't tell you what to do, Cassie, I'm just a taxi driver." And anyway, there's no way he could have done the thing with the chips. Cassie continues asking questions she already knows the answer to, deep down; "So, like, who's telling me to eat?" Alan just asks who wants her to eat, and Cassie thinks about it and silently reaches understanding, and looks at the gigantic burger in front of her. That thing is bigger than her head, I swear. But, you know, not really; Cassie's reality is shaped by her perceptions of it, to an abnormally high degree. Cassie tries to back out by saying she has no knife and fork, Alan tells her he doesn't need them. She tries the same distraction tactics she demonstrated so ably to Sid earlier, and asks how his day was. "Fine," he says emphatically, and continues to stare at the burger. Cassie tries again, asking if he has any more cool tunes, Alan doesn't even answer that one, just nods at the burger, pauses for significance, and tells her again that he loves her. Cassie reciprocates and finally accepts that she can't push this away any more and lifts the burger up again to take a bite. We cut away right before teeth meet bread, because nobody gets to see that but Alan, if he even really exists, which is not something I am wholly convinced about.

And that's the end of that chapter; come back next time to meet Jal.

The Smarm Before The Storm

It has been a while, hasn't it? I hope things will be a little more frequent from now, but I am making no promises because I inevitably jinx myself into breaking them when I do.


Skins 1x01 - "Tony"

Episode grade: C+


So, Skins! From the makers of Shameless (which I love, a lot), plus one episode, I think, by Simon Amstell (who I love, a lot). And I think some other people, who I am less acquainted with. Ways in which it is similar to Shameless; people will tell you it is nothing like real life, and that these characters are total caricatures. And in a sense, they're right, I think. Because while I firmly believe that there are real people out there in the world who are every bit as fucked up as Cassie, and Frank Gallagher, and everyone else; it's exceedingly unlikely that you'd find this large a group of them in the same place at the same time. If they hail from outside your sphere of experience, these people will, obviously, be totally alien to you, and if you need to tell yourself that no one is really like that to feel comfortable with yourself, that's OK. You're probably wrong, but let's just pretend.

Ways in which it is not similar to Shameless; most of these people talk in accents not dissimilar from my own, and so I generally know what the hell they are talking about most all of the time. Where Shameless is about family life, and the wonderful and fucked up things that members of a family do to each other, and themselves, and everyone around them, Skins is about teenage life, and the wonderful and fucked up things that teenagers do to each other, and themselves, and everyone around them. Which is really another way that they are similar. Which is not a knock, because replace the variables with whatever, and that's what all stories are about; people, and the way people relate to each other. The people might never eat anything and say "Wow" a whole lot, they might be exceedingly remniscent of Ozzy Osbourne in every damn way, they might have giant prosphetic penises all over their face. They're still people. Shall we begin?

Opening credits! So jolly and full of life! There's this jaunty tune, and we see flashes of all the characters (am I supposed to refer to them as "the skins" or what? I can never quite decide. Naw, that sounds lame, let's just go with "the kids". Because hey, I'm pretty sure every single one of the eight main characters is played by someone younger than me, which is really pretty odd right now) and it ends in these five plinked glockenspiel notes that just put me in a great damn mood like you would not believe. I love Cassie, and Sid, and Jal, and maybe even Tony eventually, but mostly I love those five glockenspiel plinks.

Every episode is named for the character it focuses on (which may have been a totally unofficial fan-invented thing, the wikipedians are having a big furore about this, of course, but either way it works for me); this one is called Tony, so we'll start with him. He's in his double bed, the bedcovers have a headless naked man and a headless naked woman lying side by side so that two people in that bed could take the place of the heads like those things in carnivals where you stick your head through the hole and people throw sponges at you. I could say something trite like "That tells you everything you need to know about Tony", but really, nothing tells you everything you need to know about Tony, because you don't want to know about Tony.

But if you insist, it starts like this; Tony gets out of bed, flicks on a song that I believe is by someone named "Chingy" and is called "Right Thurr", and starts doing some stretches, lifting some weights, admiring himself in the mirror. According to his myspace, Tony's favourite philosopher is David Hume, his favourite medieval king is Charlemagne and his favourite Primal Scream album is Vanishing Point. That tells you... something else you now know about Tony. He's also played by the kid from About A Boy, to which I'm sure I'd make well-placed amusing references if I could distinguish the plot of any Hugh Grant film I've seen from any other in my mind. Outside, a teenage girl walks by, dressed like I'm sure no parent would want to see their teenage daughter dressed (Well, Stella probably wouldn't care. You know what I mean.), and mascara spiders around her eyes. This is Tony's sister, Effy, and we've got a long time to wait before we get to know anything about her. Tony's watch sounds an alarm, which he takes as a cue to go to his window and watch his neighbour getting changed. Down outside, Effy rolls her eyes at this and, after a little irritated gesticulating, manages to attract Tony's attention her way. He nods, cranks up the volume on his iPod (TWAT!) to max, and gives Effy the 'OK' sign. Defying the whole "opposites attract" thing, this obnoxiously loud music draws Tony's dad into the room. Tony's dad is played by Harry Enfield, and so right away you know he's going to be every bit as loud and obnoxious as Tony is smug, and by that I mean a mighty shitload. I said earlier that maybe they're not caricatures, but I was only talking about the kids when I said that; most of their parents are wholly and deliberately massive caricatures (and played by fairly recognisable comedians, which is a decidely interesting approach. Whether or not it works in another matter entirely, but it's certainly interesting). While Tony pretends that the volume control on his iPod is busted, Effy sneaks into her room to pretend she's been there all night, and Harry Enfield yells and yells, and the only particularly significant part of what he is yelling, lost among the torrent of expletives if you're not paying close attention, is "EVERY FUCKING MORNING!". But that's not going to be significant until a long, long time later, by which time you'll have long forgotten it even if you were playing close attention, so it's really just yelling, yelling yelling. Shut up forever, Harry Enfield.

Later, in case you didn't already get the dynamics of the family from that little snippet, Tony sits in the toilet reading some Sartre, while Harry Enfield is trying to get in there. Harry Enfield swears at him, Tony quietly climbs out the window, shimmies down the drainpipe and, after a sly smile at the neighbour he was watching earlier, walks back into his house through the front door. Tony and his mother, Andrea, have a boring conversation about breakfast, Harry Enfield comes down, still swearing at Tony, and stares accusingly when he realises Tony is not actually in the bathroom. Tony smugly claims that the lock is broken, and in future, I'm not going to bother with the adverb, because 'smugly' is how Tony does every damn thing in his life. Harry Enfield swings at being down with the kids and misses completely by saying "You take me for a right James Blunt, don't you." Quite aside from the try-hard nature of it all, it appears to be wildly out of the only character he's displayed thus far for him to not just go ahead and say 'cunt' anyway. Andrea asks Harry Enfield if he must swear all the time, Harry Enfield responds by saying "Bollocking fucking shit" or whatever, and man, I do not know how I ever made it through the start of this episode without foreknowledge that it will get better later. Beyond the obvious fact that it really couldn't get much worse, I mean.

Tony finally leaves his stupid house, not that things are going to improve any right away, because now we get a horrendously overlong sequence of Tony calling up all his friends and being an unbearable little shit for hours on end. Look, I can see how pilot episodes are probably hard to make; introducing all your characters and themes and telling a coherent and interesting story and all, it's a lot to fit in, sure, but there have got to be better ways to go about it than this.

First on Tony's call list is Sid, who has dirty plates and clothes scattered around his room and moans and refuses to wake up yet when his phone goes off. Sid always wears a pair of emo specs and a beanie hat, and... is by far the character I can relate to the most in this show (though not because of those things), which is maybe why I thought this episode ought to have been called "Sid". But this recap is, superficially, at least, not actually about me, so let's move on. Tony tells Sid's voicemail that he is "a lazy turd" and that they have plans "concerning [Sid's] cock". Oh, how risqué. Tony's second call, to Chris, also just gets voicemail, so he tries Jal, who actually answers despite being in the middle of clarinet practice. He tells her to go to Sid's house and wake him up, she objects on the grounds that he lives half a mile away, Tony cuts her off because he has another call coming through. It's his girlfiend, Michelle, or 'Nips', as he calls her. Because, he tells her, "I've seen a lot of nipples in my time and believe me, yours are hilarious". And also, he's "nominated" her to "help out" with the epic quest to pop Sid's cherry. The number of times so far I've wanted to punch Tony is reaching double figures. The number of minutes elapsed in the episode is not. That is not a good score.

And then Chris calls him, and Chris is too busy having sex with an ex of Tony's to go wake Sid up, or I think that is what they said. I'm kind of running on autopilot for now. Leave a message. Right, somehow Tony accidentally tells Jal instead of Chris that Sid needs to get laid before he turns eighteen or he can't be Tony's friend any more. And Michelle agrees to help Sid out. Tony calls Anwar, who is a Muslim, and in the middle of prayers when he gets the call. Tony calls Sid's dad and tells him Sid has an exam that morning so he'll yell at Sid and wake him up, Anwar bitches at Tony for making his uncle want to stone him to death and says he can't help out with Sid's virginity because he's going with Chris to Maxxie's big gay night out, on the extremely fuzzy logic that there'll be plenty of horny women there with no one else to turn to. Maxxie gives Tony much the same story, except that, being the gay one, he's less with the 'horny, desperate women' and more with the 'taking the lads on a journey of discovery'. And tap dancing. I mean, that he is tap dancing right now, not that he wants to take the lads on a journey of discovery and tap dancing, though I'm sure that would be tremendously fun. Maxxie is quite astoundingly pretty, I must say. Tony gets back to Sid, who's got bored and started masturbating in the interim. I'm possibly wishing I hadn't made that confession regarding my ability to relate to him earlier, but apparently not enough to go back and erase it. Tony tells him to meet in the café and also that "Tonight, Mr. Happy is getting the keys to the furry city." Sid actually relays this message, verbatim and aloud, to his penis. I know this show is not overly concerned with maintaining realism, but that really is just fucking stupid. And if you've made it this far, reward yourself with a refreshing beverage of your choice, you deserve it.

You know why I hadn't given up by this point, originally? Those glockenspiel plinks. It's got to be. Hold on while I rewind, I need a refresher. Plink plink plink, plink, plink! Ah yeah. Anyway, Sid meets Tony in the café as per instructions, and apologises, saying he's "crap in the mornings". Tony tells him he's always crap, "no exercise, rubbish food and too much caffeine." Sid good naturedly tells him to fuck off, and confirms that the test Tony told Sid's dad about was just a ruse to get him out of bed, adding "Fucker." He sighs and tells Tony "This better be good", Tony grins. "Trust me, Sid. Tonight, we go to a party, and you finally pop the cherry. You finally get the V.I.P. tour of Netherland, You finally..." Sid tells him to fuck off, again, "...Not 'finally'." Tony glares and tells him "It's embarrassing", Sid objects that it's perfectly normal for "someone of 16" (in case you were wondering on the ages), Tony flatly repeats "It's embarrassing," and Sid, embarrassed, says "...Shit. Alright, how?" How do you not hate Tony, really. I mean, further in it becomes pretty clear that that is what we are meant to do, so, why this opening? Who thought it would be good idea to take the least likeable character they have created, the least likeable character anyone has created, and spend the first ten minutes of the first episode on nothing but the smug bastard talking, talking, talking? I don't get it. I am confused and alienated. Tony's Mensa-worthy plan is "Get a girl catastrophically spliffed up, and in her confused state, she comes to believe, however momentarily, that you are attractive enough to shag." And here is another that bugs me; maybe (in fact, probably) it's a regional thing and they're perfectly correct, but I've always been given to understand that the word 'spliff' refers to a, shall we say, enhanced cigarette, rather than the substance contained therein, as it is constantly used on this show. Whether this is a writer error or not, it's still annoying to me, because I am frightened of change.

Anyway! Sid, baked bean juice dribbling down his chin, asks which lucky lady has been selected for this thankless task, Tony is deliberately elusive and just says "I think you're going to like this", and Sid sees Michelle walking towards the café outside and immediately jumps to the conclusion and/or dares to hope that she's the one, because Sid is desperately in love with Michelle. That's a plot point. Make a note. So, Sid starts gushing praise at Tony for this, Tony attempts to correct him, but, despite being Tony, cannot get a word in edgewise, so he settles for the old "picture paints a thousand words" adage and starts making out with Michelle right there. Sid watches them and grimaces for a while and then, after a few minutes in which they show no signs of coming up for air, interrupts with "Are we getting me laid, or shall I just start filming and take it back for private time?" Woah woah! Ha! Tony acknowledges this display of wit by actually showing something other than disdain for his supposed 'friend', and asks Michelle "Who's stupid enough to fuck Sid?" Michelle suggests Cassie, Sid nixes this because "She's still in hospital", but Michelle tells him that they've let her out, "She's just not allowed near knives." Sid eventually shrugs "She'll do," Michelle tries to talk a little more enthusiasm into him by reporting that "Cassie's great in the sack. As long as she's not hungry." So, in case you hadn't noticed, Cassie is A BIT OFF, MENTALLY SPEAKING. I know it's subtle, but there are a few hints if you know where to look. Christ, and this is before we've even met her. Anyway, Sid wants to know who says Cassie is good in bed, Michelle and Tony, in unison, say "Everyone." Come on though, Sid would not ask that, Sid would assume Michelle was talking from personal experiences and keep that mental image around for later use. I'm just sayin'. Tony announces that they'll need "a lot of drugs" and gives Sid the address of his dealer, since he has "choir practice" and "tai chi" and thus no free time to get them himself. This is not actually a lie, shockingly. Now, no one who had met Cassie would actually be under the impression that you'd need a particularly sizable quantity of 'spliff' to get her into a confused state, but of course Tony is going to want plenty for himself, and be thoroughly willing to take advantage of Sid to affect that outcome. OK. Also, the dealer is called "Mad Twatter", which Sid skeptically asks Tony about, but he's too busy being fondled to pay attention to Sid any more, so Sid rolls his eyes and leaves.

And now, Tony sings. He's in this posh all-girls school for his choir practice, and they're all pointing and giggling at the sight of him. He has a beautiful singing voice, of course, and that has a power. A power to make all the two dimensional adults of the world of Skins say things like "Oooh, he's such a lovely boy" and blind them to the true horror of Tony. The sound he makes is graceful, wonderful, but when Tony is singing, that is when he is at his absolute worst. When he is at his most smug, most certain that he is better than everybody else in the world, and that he knows exactly how to get anything he wants out of any of them. OK, maybe I can kind of see where they're coming from on this; the bigger they are, the harder they fall and all that, but even knowing the fall is coming (Which is not a spoiler, because no one creates a character as hideous as Tony without the intention of giving them a comeuppance somewhere down the line. If you hated the world that much, you just wouldn't stick around long enough to write that story.) doesn't make this opening any less unpleasant to watch. I don't like Tony, by the way, in case you were wondering. While Tony's singing is going on, we get to watch Sid flicking through all the hundreds of pictures of Michelle he has saved on his phone, in case you hadn't yet picked up on the fact that he has a thing for her. There's at least a bit of humour injected into it by the old guy on the seat behind him looking at the pictures over Sid's shoulder and smiling contentedly to himself. Relatively speaking, anyway.

Tony finishes up, the teacher accompanying him on piano, looking quite flustered, tells him "That was lovely, Anthony," (YOU SEE?!) "I'm sure we'd love to have you in the chamber choir." The girls all titter, because they would indeed, a particularly vapid example of them strays from the pack to tell him "My fruhnds think you're reahlly cool, yah?" Tony has a little trouble translating from Posh to English, so she has to repeat "fruhnds" before he gets it. This is Abigail, who blinks far too much, and if you pause any frame in which she appears, you will see more teeth than you can count, for which I must give kudos to Georgina Moffat because that level of commitment to your acting has got to be actually physically painful. She asks Tony if he's still coming to her pahteh tonight, "it would be so safe if you did" and bleats about her parents being away on holiday and whatever, "so we're going to go absolutely wiuhld on drum and bass." She adds "After 8:30, because Miriam has to get back from her cello recital. And bring some fruhnds." Tony amiably says it sounds great fun, and he will, and his phone takes this opportune moment to start ringing, giving him an excuse to get out of there. It's Michelle, and apparently she hasn't yet persuaded Cassie to come along. Tony tells her to hurry it along, and then says "Alright, safe, I'm going to psychology and then I'll come jump you, yeah?" And as he says this, he walks past a doddering old professor, who is duly outraged and asks Tony what his business is here. Tony says he's here for an interview, Dr. Dodder refuses to accept this on the grounds that it is an all girls school, Tony clarifies that the chamber choir are looking for male parts (*snicker*), and addresses Dr. Dodder as "man", which gets his gander up even further. "My name is Mr. Griffiths and I'm the head of French here and addressed as sir! Do they even teach you French in that technical college you attend?" (The words "technical college" said with the appropriate sneer). Tony says they do, and he addresses his teacher as "Pierre", and all the girls snigger and Our Hero gets one up on the crusty old stupidhead grown-up, who actually literally calls Tony a "common little oik" at this point. Yeah, I've always felt that edgy teen "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" dramas need more plotlines ripped from Dennis The Menace.

Outside, he calls up Sid to ask if he's found Mad Twatter's residence yet; Sid is opposite a house with a car parked outside with the number plate "MD TW4T", so it's probably safe to assume he has. Sid has a little trepidation about going in, Tony rolls his eyes and tells him to get on with it. Sid steels himself and knocks on the door, at which point his phone rings again. He tells Tony to fuck off already, as a woman in lingerie answers the door and asks if he's her 2:30. So, of course, it's actually his mother on the phone. The prostitute at the door hurries him inside because "the neighbours are right bitchy with the digital cameras", Sid hurriedly tells his mum he'll call back later and hangs up. The prostitute shouts "Alicia! Little geek guy here, is he yours?" up the stairs, and another comes down. Sid, looking more confused than usual, says "hi", Alicia says "You're here for my accidental threesome, yeah?"

Back to Tony, a scruffy looking Welsh guy in the street tries to sell him a Big Issue, Tony amiably replies "Get a fucking job, Kenny" and then asks how his holiday was. Kenny tells him it was crap, "Four star means nothing these days" and then goes straight back to attempting to sell his magazines to passersby. Tony continues on towards the gang, sans Sid and Michelle. Jal says "Here he comes, cock of the year" and Maxxie wonders who's going to tell him they won't be able to attend Abigail's wiuhld pahteh. The others shush him as Tony gets closer, and Anwar asks what he was doing in the posh birds' school, Tony answers "Broadening my horizons", Chris refutes this, saying "those girls do not do fickety-fick with town scum like you", Tony jokes that maybe that has been Chris's experience, but "I say this world extends way beyond this little field of dreams we're dancing in, and I want to see that world." Jal and Anwar grin, Chris gives an awesome look of confusion and asks what the fuck he's talking about. Jal explains that he's quoting, "It's a literary reference," Chris says "What, you mean like Shakespeare and shit?", Jal tells him it's actually from the show that launched a thousand recaps, Dawson's Creek (which my dad has apparently got into lately, hilariously enough. Well, it is to me.) Chris says "Whatever, I don't know what that is" then immediately contradicts this by ranting about how they're all braindead if they can't think of better things to entertain themselves with than TV. Jal asks for suggestions, Chris considers for a while and comes up with "pills." Jal asks is that's all, Chris says "No!" and then pauses for a while before coming up with "shagging". Tony smirks "Cultural", and Jal nods her agreement with a sarcastic "Oh yeah". Hee. I actually really like this scene, all the bantering feels way more natural than anything else has so far, and I can actually see reasons why these people would be friends with Tony here. Jal teases Chris, saying he won't get anywhere with option #2 with the minute size of his penis. Everyone laughs, Anwar tells him he shouldn't have got it out, Chris complains "It was strip poker for fuck's sake, what did you want me to do?", Anwar points out that he wasn't even playing. Chris calls them all a bunch of pussies, which I'd say pretty effectively tells the story of what went on that night without actually, y'know, telling the story, which is pretty deft. "Anyway, enough of that," Chris continues, "We've got to get going, cuz we've got psychology, and we don't want to miss Angie, now do we?" Hey, is that a plot point introduced with something resembling subtlety too? Awesome! As they're getting up, Tony verifies that they are all coming to the pahteh, Maxxie (this is the first thing he's said since Tony got there, you'll note) reminds him about the big gay night out. Tony tries to persuade them with the allure of large quantities of spliff, but Chris tells him they're not in any great need of it, "the town's awash, it's like someone planted up Lithuania or something". Tony swears, because that means the ounce Sid is currently getting hold of will be way more than they need, and tries to call him. But, of course, Sid turned his phone off when his mum called, so Tony can't get through, and now the inevitable wacky hijinks will ensue.

House Of Twat, the prostitute that isn't Alicia sings "Stickwitu" to herself and paints her toenails, then looks at her watch and tells Sid "I've got to walk in on 'em by mistake now. D'you wanna coke or summin'?" Heh. Sid looks exceedingly uncomfortable, of course, and nervously asks if she thinks he'll be long. She says "Not once I burst in all flummoxed up, he won't", Sid clarifies that he meant Mad, and then asks if that's his real name. With a large air of forboding, she says "Oh yeah", and Sid fidgets nervously for a while and stands up, saying he'll come back later, but the prostitute pushes him back down and assures him it'll be fine, "Just don't stare. He doesn't like people staring. He's sensitive, y'know? Just don't stare at it." Sid nods in agreement, then realises what she said and asks what 'it' is, but she's already gone upstairs to yell "Hello? I've unexpectedly come home by accident!"

College, Tony leaves Sid a message to tell him the plan is aborted because nobody is coming to the pahteh, and to tell him to pick up his messages, and that he is an "absolute and utter lower colon". He snaps his phone shut and sighs. Cut across to Sid's phone, jiggling about in his shaking hands, while quite unreasonably loud moans come from upstairs. Sid says "Fuck this" to himself and gets up to leave, again, but there's a short scouser with an utterly ludicrous handlebar moustache standing in the doorway. Sid stares at him, he threateningly asks Sid if he's staring, Sid continues to stare and say he isn't, and then asks "so, you're Mad?" Mad confirms that he is indeed "Madison Twatter, PHD. You got a problem?" Sid assures him he doesn't have a problem (although personally, I am already thoroughly tired of his schtickzophrenia), and says "you're a doctor then?" Mad asks who said that, Sid reminds him of "the PHD thing", Mad says "Yeah, you could say that. You could say, um. Pretty. Huge. Dick." You certainly are! He heartilly laughs at his own joke then suddenly threateningly asks Sid which it is, "Doctor, or pretty huge dick?" Sid nervously suggests "Both?", to which Mad grins and tells Sid he likes him. Then, fuck it, I can't be bothered with detail any more. Mad continues to be an irritating psycho, Sid gets to the point; he wants an ounce of spliff, only "someone" said he could get it free now and pay later, which just sounds like an awful idea both ways, you nonce, Tony. Also, Mad grabs Sid's balls to check they exist, because they're his "collateral" if he fails to pay Mad back within 48 hours for the three ounces he gets thrust upon him. OK.

College. Jal reads out her essay, about the five stages of grief, and in the background, someone is crying. Once Jal finishes, we get to see who; it's their teacher, Angie. Now, I have repeatedly had to check imdb and wikipedia and all of them to convince myself that I don't actually recognise her from anything else, because she is seriously goddamn familiar, and I wish I knew why. Anyway, Chris cheerily says "No more sports science teachers, Angie. Eh, it doesn't matter how big his dick is...", at which point Jal interrupts to tell him to shut up, and then Angie, still crying, tells the class they're all so lovely, and their coursework deadline is next week, "If that's OK. It's important for my department's score." Everyone files out uncertainly, leaving her crying, Chris stays behind to offer to say the offending sports science teacher "touched [him] up in the shower", which Angie seems amenable to, but Jal drags Chris out of there before the conversation can proceed.

In the corridor, Sid finds Tony and asks if he managed to rope Cassie in. Tony says he did, but before Sid can enthuse too much about that, Tony also tells him he's a tit for not checking his messages. Sid gets out his phone and turns it on, it gives 'new message' beeps again and again and again. Sid stares for while and then looks at Tony and innocently deadpans "Problem?"

Meanwhile, Angie, with a pile of books in her hands, has finished crying and leans against the wall outside her classroom and sighs. Chris, who has apparently managed to get Jal off his tail somehow, approaches and asks if she's OK, then offers to carry the books for her. Angie, sounding kind of exhausted but not actually at all annoyed at this, tells him he may indeed carry her books, "but you don't have to do it every day, Chris." Chris grins and says "I do", and then grabs her phone, which has started ringing, from on top of the books and answers it. Angie tries to get him to stop, but with the books in her hands, it's ineffectual at best, so in the end she just lets him get on with it. I shall too, because this is fairly awesome: "Angie's phone. Look, stop ringing her, you wanker, or you'll have me to deal with. Yeah, Chris Miles here. Angie's friend. She's got a lot of friends, you know what I'm saying, you tosser? ...Right. Yeah, no, yeah, I'll have the coursework in by Thursday. Are you saying I can have an extension? Yeah. Yeah. ...And don't ring her again. Bellend." Angie can't help but smile, but then there's an awkward pause and she worries, "I'm not sure you're supposed to..." but then smiles and thanks him and hands him her books. He tells her "The pleasure was all mine", and starts to walk away, obviously knowing exactly where Angie needs the books taking without asking. She appreciatively watches his back as he goes for a while, then mentally slaps herself and follows.

Pahteh time! Oh man, finally. Chris and Angie are kind of cute, admittedly, but man it feels like it's taken forever to get here. Of course, you don't know when I started writing this recap; maybe it actually has. Tony and Sid approach, Sid wows at the size of Abigail's mansion, Tony tells him that this is the place, "And we have to sell an ounce of dope." Thank you for finally at least acknowledging that there might be words other than 'spliff' for it, even if that may actually be correct. Sid tries to tell him it's actually three ounces, but Tony is not going to let himself be interrupted right now; "What I reckon is, we tell 'em it's, like, I dunno, Mongolian hallucenogenic, right? There all so dim, they might just buy it." Sid tries again to tell Tony, this time he's interrupted by the arrival of Michelle and Cassie. Oh wow, Cassie. Cassie is, like, totally... wow. I believe the word 'spacy' (or is it 'spacey'? No, that's just Kevin, right?) was invented solely for her. Wow. I love her, I can't help it. She just... wow. Tony and Michelle proceed making out, and Sid looks a little disgusted, Cassie stares unblinkingly at Sid. Michelle eventually disengages to ask where everyone else is, Tony tells her they're not coming, "and Sid's got to sell or he's in shit with his dealer". Sid objects to the wording there; "MY dealer?!", Michelle hurriedly dissolves tension by presenting Cassie to them, in case Sid hadn't noticed her crazy staring. "Cassie, you remember Sid, right?" she asks. Cassie grins, "Yeah, wow, lovely. ...no. But, I like that you're funny-looking. It's cute, like, wow, man." Look, I understand perfectly if that bugs the crap out of you, I don't understand in the slightest why it doesn't do the same to me, honestly, but nonetheless, I just find Cassie absolutely adorable. Tony asks Cassie how her treatment's going, she says "Oh, it's cool. I wear a white dress, and now I can eat yoghurt, cup-a-soup aaaand hazelnuts now. I'm not sick if they let me play with cats. [I am not at all certain that sentence is right, but most of the actual words are wholly irrelevant, you know? She's like a Hybrid. She transcends language; I understand her in spite of the words, not because of them.] Yeah, it's like... hazy days, you know?" No one does. But Tony nods sagely and says "Well, that's encouraging" anyway, which is quite sweet of him even if he is being a sarcastic bastard. You may have picked this up a while ago, but I am going to get quite weird, recapping this show, and particularly Cassie. Episode two is her episode, so... I don't know. Just giving you a heads up. Like, wow.

Back to the show; Cassie is extremely touched by Tony's words, and tackle-hugs him. Actually, you know what, this is why I love Cassie; she is immune to the Power of Tony. Sincere, insincere, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference to her, and Tony does not understand this. He doesn't understand her, and without understanding, he doesn't have control, and I think Tony loves Cassie for this too. And the fact that we share this love of Cassie will heal the rift between us, and that's how I'll be able to not hate Tony, somewhere down the line, but like all good things, that will only come through waiting. Michelle finds this all very sweet until Cassie starts kissing Tony, at which she gently pulls her away and aims her at Sid instead, "Sid's going to be looking after you tonight." Cassie wows, of course, and then again when Tony tells her that Sid has a whole bag of drugs. "And I bet you won't even make me eat anything." Cassie has an eating disorder, OK, but next episode is called "Cassie", and that is the time to freak the fuck out about that. Sid looks to Tony and Michelle for guidance, because he's a little out of his depth, as ever, and manages to work out that "No" is the correct answer there. Cassie says "Thank you" and hugs him too, Sid awkwardly pats her on the back a little and Tony announces that it's time to go in and shift that ounce, at which point Sid finally manages to tell him it's actually three. Tony gives him a nice look of horror and disappointment.

Abigail opens the door and happily greets Tony, "And these must be your fruhnds". Michelle hilariously also cannot comprehend that word, but Tony introduces everyone to Abigail before there is time to dwell on that. Abigail announces that this is "super", Cassie says "Wow, you're lovely" and gives her the requisite tacklehug, Abigail declares this to be "super" also, though in a slightly more confused and frightened manner. I tell you what though, I could watch Cassie and Abigail just sitting in a room, calling everything "super" and "lovely" for hours on end. I can't tell you how awesome that would be. Cassie eagerly jumps up and down like a child asking "Where's the kitchen? I wanna see the kitchen!" Abigail hesitantly points her towards it and tells the others to come in, then suddenly stops them and says "Shoes! It's just that mummy had this carpet imported from Iran, and we have to be so, so cahfull with the pile." She grimaces a little at the holey socks that are revealed when Sid follows this instruction, but soldiers on and offers them some rum punch; "I'm afraid we're getting rather giggly on it, isn't that safe?" Tony agreeably says "Mmm, we love rum punch, don't we, 'Chelle?" Michelle gives him an "Are you fucking kidding me?" look but accepts the punch with a forced smile and a "Super!" (Hee!) on Tony's nudge.

Abigail leads them into the next room and introduces her fruhnds, "Sara, Josh, Sara, Maddie, Felicia [I think. It actually sounded like 'Blistia', but nobody has ever been called Blistia, I hope.], Hugo, Sebastian, Sara, Sam and Sara." It's an obvious joke, and on an unrelated note, either Hugo or Sebastian appears to be female, but goddammit, it's funny anyway. Also funny; Abigail asks Sid what his name was, again, and on being reminded, asks "Is that Polish or something?" Which is actually a cunning (as far as Abigail goes, anyway) segue into introducing Danuta, who is Polish, and I guess an exchange student or something. "She doesn't speak English," Abigail explains, "But you can just speak to her in French or Italian." While Sid looks a little bemused at this prospect, Abigail tells Danuta (in subtitled Italian) "This is Sid. He goes to a school where you don't even have to pay. Isn't that lovely?" Danuta laughs at the size of Sid's hands, and suggests that this indicates that he also has a small penis, which of course Abigail just translates to "She likes you." Tony brings the conversation to a point, at last, and asks Abigail if she and her friends would like "a little something." Abigail is confused, so Tony makes smoking gestures and says "You know, get a bit squiffy", and Abigail is all "Ohhh, yah, that would be so safe, you know." Sid breathes a sigh of relief, but then tenses right the hell up again when Abigail mentions that they can't smoke in the house, because "the silk wallpaper's just arrived from Rome, and mummy's awfully particular about odours, and we simply musn't or she'll go wiuhld". And then just to add insult to injury, they get to hear "This is M.C. Hugo on the decks, and we're going to have a tremendous time, yah? So let's shizzle on this dizzle, and pahteh dowwwwn!" Can't unhear that. The posh kids get their embarrasing-dad-at-a-wedding dances on, and after rolling her eyes at all this, Michelle decides to take off her coat and show them how it should be done, which Tony joins in with soon after. Sid watches Michelle and her short, clingy dress for a good long while, looking forlorn, then gets fed up of that and heads off to find Cassie.

Who is still in the kitchen, piling all the food tins into little symmetrical towers, because I guess she also has OCD. Sid says "Hi", Cassie says "Oh, hi! This is so so wicked! They've got such cool food. Look at it all. ...wow." Whew, that was a long time without a 'wow'. I was getting worried. Sid doesn't understand, at all, so he just lets her get on with it and vaguely mumbles "Cool..." when she finishes up and declares "I don't feel sick any more." She goes on to ask "Are you going to fuck me later?" by way of making small talk, Sid is rather taken aback that Michelle actually told her this part, but it's all wow cool lovely as far as Cassie is concerned. Sid decides not to pursue the matter right now and remembers that he has "all this fucking weed", and offers Cassie "a spliff". Hooray, familiar terminology! Cassie quietly tells him "You can't. It makes you hungry." Sid obliviously tells her he doesn't mind, Cassie stares at the floor sadly and says "I do." Sid, not knowing what the hell else to do, says "Sorry" and gives her an awkward peck on the cheek. Lucky for him, that is exactly the right thing to do, because the smile that Cassie smiles now, oh man. These two. Look, what I've got on my screen right now, they're both leaning against the kitchen counter, looking at each other and smiling shyly and I just want to take this picture and draw pink hearts around it. I want to write sappy awful fanfiction about them, and times like these, these recaps might veer dangerously close to doing so. I AM A CYNICAL AND JADED MAN AND SHOULD NOT BE HAVING THESE THOUGHTS. Nonetheless, I am typing the following sentences. What have you done to me, Skins?! OK, so Sid's got a clear Harry Potter thing going on with the glasses (and the hair, if he didn't hide it all the time), and Cassie is Luna Lovegood to the point that not getting Hannah Murray to play her in the last three films would be the biggest mistake those guys could possibly make (and man have they made a lot of those), and JK if those two are not together by the end of Book 7 I will hurt you. Yes, I realise they have already cast the part, and Hannah Murray is probably just a little too old anyway, and I'm sure Ms. Lynch will do an absolutely fine job. Some vestigial remnant of my point still stands. Possibly. There is probably also just a little vicarious living going on here because in addition to being a jaded, cynical man, I am also a sad and lonely emo kid.

Let's quickly move along. Big Gay Night Out! Which, as it turns out, not so big. There's precisely two blokes there, besides our kids. Maxxie looks so disappointed, aw. He tries to persuade Chris and Anwar that it's usually a lot better than this, but they're fairly doubtful. Chris starts to head off to find the pahteh, which Maxxie really isn't in the mood for, so Chris tells him "It's posh kids! All the boys are gay!" Heh. Anwar asks if the girls are gay too, Chris is like "Sure, why not?" and they all accept the fact that whoever is or is not gay, it will probably be more fun than they are having right now.

Five hours, four buses and two bottles of vodka later, they've found their way to Abigail's mansion, where, judging by the front garden, mummy is going to go absolutely wiuhld when she gets back. Inside, Chris pockets a few phones and wallets that have just been left on the table and shakes his head, declaring this "careless". Anwar sniffs at a not entirely empty champagne glass and then shrugs and downs it. They find their way to M.C. Hugo's Shizzled Dizzle room and Chris spots Tony, takes off his hat, scarf and shirt and yells "Changed our minds man, the monkey man's here!" And all the Big Gay Night Outers rush to embrace Tony and Michelle.

Outside, some idiot cameraman is standing behind a hedge, so we've just got audio right now. You'd think someone would've caught that before it went to broadcast. Fortunately, we don't really need visuals right now; There's springs rhythmically squeaking, and someone female is breathing heavily, peppered with occasional "wow"s. The cameraman finally finds his way to where he's supposed to be, and as I'm sure we all realised, Cassie is on a trampoline. I guess a minor error like that wasn't even worth correcting. Cassie falls down and just lies there, Sid, who is not letting the entirity of his three ounces go ununsed, even if no one else appears to want any, asks if she's OK. Cassie tells him to get up on the trampoline with him, "You've got to got to bounce, wooo!" Sid gives his joint an uncertain look, and then throws it away.

Inside, Chris grabs Abigail and starts dancing with her, she is horrified by his muddy shoes and cries "Take them off! Take them off!" which Chris misinterprets as a request for him to drop his shorts. One of the posh boys tries to pull Chris away, Tony lays him out with a pretty killer right hook. All the posh kids stand around looking horrified, and then Danuta lets out a hearty laugh declares that "at last, the real men have arrived!", pulls off her shirt and starts making out with Chris.

Outside, Sid is jumping on the trampoline while Cassie lies there, he stumbles and ends up straddling her to avoid actually falling on her. Cassie leans up and kisses him, but then says "It's no good though, is it Sid?" Sid asks "What is?" as a formality to hold up the pretence that this -logue is dia. Cassie explains "You fancy me," which Sid contemplates for a second and then agrees with, "But you really love Michelle." Sid lies back and laments the fact that it shows. Yeah, it always shows, and everybody sees it. And everybody except you always knows that everybody else knows too, Sid. You would too if you'd just admit it to yourself. But hey, if it's all a big secret, then maybe things'll be different when you finally find the time to tell her, which of course you never will, because you know damn well that she already knows and nothing will change except you won't be able to hold onto to this stupid false hope any more. Because maybe, this time, it's different, and she actually doesn't know and everything will change.

So, were where we? Right, Sid loves Michelle, and Cassie knows that Sid loves Michelle, and Michelle knows that Sid loves Michelle, which is all a great tragedy as far as Sid is concerned. Cassie continues to lay out the intricacies of this wildly precedented scenario; "[Michelle] says that Tony doesn't love her properly, but you do. And it's too fucked up because she like, totally loves him and just thinks you're sweet." Sid bemoans his sweetness, Cassie takes his hand and tries to assure him that everything will be fine, Sid asks what she'd do "if everything was just so fucked up, and you didn't know what to do?" "I'd stop eating until they took me to hospital," she answers, matter-of-factly. So hilarously delivered, and yet so very sad. And then she giggles and wows at how lovely the clouds are, and tells Sid he can fuck her now, if he wants, but he'll have to be quick, because she took a whole bunch of pills. And then she passes out. Sid shakes her and says "Oh, fuck", which is, of course, not a massively effective solution.

Inside, the kids are continuing to trash the place, Michelle is the first to see Sid carrying Cassie in, Tony declares that it's time to go, and they all gather their shoes and head outside, Danuta following. Chris grins and says "Good party," Sid asks if they could please hurry along "in case Cassie's, like, dying or something". Michelle says the city hospital has an all-night walk-in, "that's where I normally take her," Tony complains that that's miles away. Danuta makes kissy faces at Chris, Maxxie (Eyyyeaih, they've bloodied up his pretty face! Why couldn't it be Tony?) laughs "I think she likes you". Chris, in the loud, slow way of ignorant English speakers talking to foreigners everywhere, tells her "We have no bus or taxi. WE ARE STUCK." She smiles and dangles a set of keys, saying "Ve steal car, then make fook, English boy, yes?" Chris looks at the others and gives a hilarious nod; "Yes."

Cue Tony driving like an absolute loon while Chris and Danuta make out in the backseat and everyone else yells bloody murder at him. Tony panickingly tells the others to get Cassie inside quick, Anwar asks what they're supposed to tell the hospital. Tony says "I don't know, improvise. Go on! We've got to stash the car." At which point Cassie sits up and blinks groggily and giggles. "Oh, I had such a lovely dream. Wow." Tony rolls his eyes. Maxxie looks pissed at her too, even though his bloodied face had nothing to do with her passing out and, in fact, he probably would've ended up with worse if she hadn't. Maybe he's just annoyed at the world in general.

Tony stops the car alongside a lake or canal or something, Anwar goes running out to take a piss against a tree, Cassie leans out the window to watch the beauty of the world go by. Tony tells Sid to "get it out [Dirty!], we'll at least have a couple of spliffs before you're taken out and de-bollocked." Again with the familiar terminology. I swear all that nonsense earlier was part of the ongoing effort to drive me crazy in the first half of this episode. Which... I made a lengthy comparison involving Harry Potter characters a little while back; I think there is a lesson to be learned here, writers. Sid frets about the coming de-bollocking and sarcastically thanks Tony for his supportive words, Tony tells him to relax, because they'll find a way to sell it tomorrow. For he is Tony, and there is nothing he cannot do. Apropos of nothing, as ever, Cassie says "I like boats. They go places." Woah... deep, ma... Yeah, even I'm not going to try to defend that one. Tony notices that Anwar's been a while and asks if he's OK, Anwar tells him to shut up, because evidently he has shy bladder, and yells at everyone not to look. Even Cassie has enough grounding in reality to know that that is a signal for everyone in the car to immediately bore holes into Anwar's back with their eyes. Sid asks "Who's got skins?" (TITLE! Drink.) Tony roots around his coat pockets, but can't find them, and when Michelle groans that he's forgotten them, he jinxes the hell out of everybody by saying "We've had all our bad luck for today." Fucking IDIOT. Sid for some reason knows that Tony put the skins in his back pocket and gets him to turn around so Sid can fumble for them, and I may be overly enamoured of Sid + Cassie, but this is the very definition of HoYay. Frankly, that's the only explanation I can find for why Sid would ever consider this wanker to be his best friend. Anyway, in the midst of all this feeling around in back pockets, either Sid or Tony's elbow nudges the handbrake off, which in turn send the car careening into the canal. Ruh roh!

Anwar runs over to the edge and stands around looking ineffectualy worried, lots of bubbles surface, eventually followed by Michelle, then Cassie, then Sid, then Tony, then Maxxie. Thank God everybody's OK! Tony says "I think that could have gone a lot worse, don't you?". Sid laments the fact that he's lost all his dope, and ergo his balls as well, very soon. Cassie cheerily says "At least we've got our health! That's the important thing!"

Time for an iconic credits shot of everyone walking down the street in their soaking wet clothes, set to some indie-pop! Anwar appears to be as soaked as everybody else, oddly. I guess maybe he fell in trying to help them out? Why not. Also, every one of the boys is wearing more than one layer (except Anwar, who has a jumper tied around his waist), and not one of them has thought to give anything over to Michelle, who has got to be fucking freezing in that dress, so they are all jerks.

In the canal, Sid's bag o' dope floats to the surface. And, next morning, in her house, Tony's naked neighbour goes to her window, and looks a little upset that he is not there to watch her. In her bed, her husband complains that "anybody would think you wanted the neighbours to see you!" I guess they have this discussion every morning.

Tony's room. Tony and Sid lie in his bed, shirtless. Can't see if they are anything else-less. Tony' on the male side of his nude bed cover, Sid's on the female side. In case the dynamic of their relationship wasn't obvious already. Sid has a nagging doubt on his mind; "Chris and the Polish girl, they got out of the car at the hospital right?" Tony says "yeah", but does not sound remotely sure of himself. They both try to convince themselves that this is indeed the case. I don't mean to spoil anything, but... I don't remember if this "cliffhanger" is even mentioned in any future episode. And finally: "You still a virgin, then?" "Yep." Because it only counts if it's with a woman.