Possibly the most time-worn musing on Skins ever committed to the interweb

[alexsarll]

Skins is set at the outset of sexual life, the Peter O'Toole film Venus at its end. But watching the two back to back on Thursday night, it was the correspondences I could see. Yes, that episode was largely Election with added Father Dougal, Art Brut and teenage sapphism, but it was also about the stupid, humiliating things the bewitched will do for beauty (shorn of the gender stereotyping Hanif Kureishi either displays, or allows his lead to display, in Venus, where O'Toole's Maurice suggests that while a naked woman is the most beautiful thing most men will ever see, for women it's their first child). And while the Freddy/Cook/JJ plotline was sidelined this Skins, you see that same sense of toxic male friendship in Venus when Maurice and his old muckers meet in the cafe each day, Maurice still trying it on with people his chums consider off-limits just like Cook would. Albeit with considerably more charm, obviously, because Maurice is Peter O'bloody Toole, isn't he? Pretty much playing himself, with admirable self-awareness (an actor who has cornered the market in corpses); beyond that, playing the himself he played in Russell T Davies' Casanova, the old roue not quite prepared to admit that the game is over and Time won.
(Speaking of Time - Peep Show being a comedy of my generation, how terrifying to see its love object, tarnished as she may there be, now playing the mother of a teenage lead character in Skins)

Comments

The obvious joke but also for serious.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Yes, that episode was largely Election with added Father Dougal, Art Brut and teenage sapphism

I really have to start catching up with this.

Re: The obvious joke but also for serious.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Did you watch it before and then abandon it when the cast changed, or are you a Skins neophyte? I know a lot of people feared it was going to be insufferably Yoof, but it's really not like that. Well, not often.

[intermix.livejournal.com]

Last nights episode was great, I think particularly as I've been watching lots of Father Ted before bed. Dougal came and gave a talk at my school, when he was doing that awful superhero sitcom thing. He was quite feirce (in the Tyra sense).

I love gay twin.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I don't think I know what the Tyra sense is, but dear heavens My Hero was disgracefully bad. And yet it got multiple series, even once Ardal had the sense to leave!

Does anyone not love gay twin? Though I'm afraid I think pippaalice may have bagsied her first.