Pills, Thrills and Headaches

So here it is, the weeks most anticipated and long awaited moment since Pingu 4: Lets Get Flappy - its my weekly review! I have just returned from a lovely weekend staying around my girlfriend's house to a world of job searching and daytime TV which poisons my last tatters of independent thought.
I had been so bored last Thursday afternoon that I decided to borrow my sisters DVD of Skins series 3 that I bought her for Christmas and was determined to sit through all 10 drug full, sex fueled angst ridden episodes. I had deliberately missed this series when it was originally shown on Channel 4 last year on the grounds that I was then hurtling towards the Thrilling Twenties and out of my Turbulent Teens and no longer thought the programme was aimed at people like me - and for once I was right.
The first two series were funny, thought provoking, entertaining and dark, but was always over dramatic to keep the viewers attention, and to do this they stuff the hour long episodes full of bright mesmeric colours, annoyingly repetitive electronic music (although to be fair most of the melancholic accoustic soundtrack is fantastic) and mindless destructive behaviour that would have been easily remanisant of an anarchic edition of Playdays, in which Why Bird takes an E, shags Peggy Patch silly as Dave Benson Phillips voyeurs through a crack in the cupboard while injecting heroin into his penis. That or a youth amateur dramatic society performing Platoon.
I am sure that most young people watching can see similatities in themselves and one or more of the characters, but this series is choca block full of the most repulsive and irritating characters, it is difficult to pick out a single character to even remotely like. The most likable character is the asperger sufferer, airfix enthusiast JJ, who comes across like how James May would have been in his teens if his parent had taken acid daily throughout the sixties. He is on so many prescription pills to kerb his problems his probably amazed that the world he lives in exists at all.
The main narrative focus is a love triangle involving JJ's best friends, the lanky reserved Freddie and his destructive, volatile mate Cook who are battling it out for the affections of Effy, the younger sister to Nicholas Hoult's character in Series One and Two.
The young actor playing Cook seems to be playing his way thorugh a biopic called Shane McGowan: The Early Years, is the most unlikable TV character I have seen in years, excluding anybody from Eastenders who are forever trapped in a bubble of their own doom preying fro the apocalypse to come. Each of the central characters play mainyl to conventional sterotypes, the ditsy blonde (Pandora), the shit (Cook), the no nonsense activist lesbian (Naomi), the bitcht slapper and her doormat of a twin (Katie and Emily).
Maybe I've missed the point, I don't know, but one things for certain - BRING BACK FUN HOUSE!