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Will Dean: The Inbetweeners: more realistic than Skins?

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Will Dean: The Inbetweeners' portrayal of dull suburbia is closer to the drab teen years most of us spent, rather than the decadent time we wished we spent

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Derry Girls and its similarities with The Inbetweeners.

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1 year ago

The first episode was excellent.

While the majority of great comedy shows are heavily influenced by the area in which they're set - Peckham (Only Fools and Horses), Slough (The Office), Craggy Island (Father Ted) and the boring school life in suburban England (The Inbetweeners) being fine examples -what elevates the best comedies is their universal appeal.

For example, anyone that went to school will definitely know someone that's like Neil, Jay, Simon, and Will but after meeting the Derry Girls, you'll already feel like you know them.

Of course, having a knowledge about Irish culture makes the show a little bit more accessible, but just like any other good comedy, it's not essential.

Hell, you didn't need to be an Irish priest to find Father Ted hilarious!

Derry Girls follows 16-year-old Erin Quinn (played by Saoirse Monica Jackson) as she comes of age during the later years of the Troubles. Driven up the wall by her life in secondary school, an uncompromisingly tough mother (Tara Lynne O'Neill) and long-suffering father (Tommy Tiernan), the pains of growing up are made no easier by the constant sight of armed police roaming the streets and British Army checkpoints on every road.

Just like The Inbetweeners, all the girls here bring something different to their gang. Erin is the moody, overly-thinking and self-righteous one. Orla is madder than a bag of spiders, Clare always panics and Michelle can't go two seconds without cursing.

Written by Lisa McGee (Indian Summers, London Irish), and based on her own experiences of growing up in Derry, Derry Girls plays off The Inbetweeners feel of frustrated and misbehaving teens, but adds a strong dose of Catholic humour.

The show takes place in 1994, just after Pulp Fiction has just landed in Irish cinemas and it's brimming with gags, bad language, pop-culture references and surreal set pieces.

We loved the gag about Kumal - "the wee Ethiopian fella from Ballybofey.'

The first episode aired last night and plenty of people were instantly comparing it to The Inbetweeners.

Derry Girls returns to our screens on Channel 4 next Thursday night at 10pm but if you missed the first episode, you can watch it here.

In case you missed it, I highly recommend #DerryGirls which started on Channel 4 last night. It's a sorta female 1990s Inbetweeners with lots of refs to The Cranberries ! pic.twitter.com/uus0bgKERX

- Will Leahy (@willleahy) January 5, 2018

Derry Girls=Female version of the Inbetweeners set in the 90s #DerryGirls

- Caolán Mc Aree (@Caolanmcaree) January 5, 2018

#DerryGirls was a cracker tonight. Its like the inbetweeners for girls, in Derry, in the 90s. Ill be tuning in next week.

- Donal James Hardy (@DonalHardy) January 5, 2018

As a programme #DerryGirls reminds us how far we've come since the early '90s, and how far we haven't. As a sitcom it bears the template of a female Inbetweeners In Derry, but may yet be better. In short, I liked it. Well done all involved. @JamieLeeOD @BeccyChan @TaraLynneONeil1

- Simon Fallaha (@simonfallaha) January 4, 2018

#derrygirls my English husband just described it as The Inbetweeners in Derry! Great first episode

- Claire Staple (@clairestaple) January 4, 2018

Derry Girls is our answer to the Inbetweeners, unreal show

- Michael Hegarty (@michaelhegarty_) January 4, 2018

Derry girls is some show! It's like the #inbetweeners set in the 90's. Just just need a sausage roll bap to make it more Derry #derrygirls

- Darryl (@EireDarryl) January 4, 2018

#DerryGirls is basically like a female version of The Inbetweeners. Legit howling 😂😂😂😂

- jαsє (@JAS0Ntweets) January 5, 2018

#DerryGirls hint of inbetweeners ......very funny ...motherfuckers

- Flay Them All (@larrson39) January 5, 2018

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Channel 4's new comedy is already being compared to The Inbetweeners | JOE.co.uk

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1 year ago While the majority of great comedy shows are heavily influenced by the area in which they're set - Peckham (Only Fools and Horses), Slough (The Office), Craggy Island (Father Ted) and the boring school life in suburban England (The Inbetweeners) being fine examples -what elevates the best comedies is their universal appeal.

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Opening Review of the Inbetweeners (2008)

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At first glance, The Inbetweeners doesn't seem like very much. In the current climate of comedies and comedy-dramas meant to appeal to the adolescent college-graduate-in-waiting, headed by the effervescent Skins, it comes in as a sort of awkward cousin to the King that is Skins. But, The Inbetweeners should not be written off as a copycat of its E4 relation.

Based around a private-school educated protagonist named Will, who is thrown into a hectic life of comprehensive schooling, underage drinking and, inevitably, sex, the show logs his futile attempts at leading some semblance of a normal life, making friends, going drinking, inevitably with disastrous consequences. Particular highlights are his indignant assertion to a local barman that "everyone in this pub is underage!", upon being refused alcohol, resulting in the whole pub being ejected, and his sex-fanatic new friend Jay miming doing "the business" on a coffee table.

The Inbetweeners is aimed expressly at young people, that much is evident from the soundtrack featuring the zeitgeist artists of the moment. However, like Skins, it can be viewed and certainly relished by any adult with an open mind; after all, everyone was a teenager once.

In writing The Inbetweeners, Damon Beesley and Iain Morris have provided what was becoming a stagnant comedy scene with a breath of fresh air. Yes, hormonal and sex-driven it may be (the tagline reads, "Basically, they just want to get laid"), but therein lies the appeal. With the screens flooded with serious dramas and, frankly depressing soap operas, the idea of being able to sit back once a week and smile for half an hour would be appealing to anyone. The Inbetweeners frequently transcends the boundary between a wry smile and full-on laughter with surprisingly subtle "trigger" moments. For example, when Will's friend Simon turns up to the love of his life's house, only to be sick on her small brother.

The main laughs derive from the exquisitely accurate dialogue, capturing the feel of adolescence perfectly. Jokes about mums and dads, jokes about lack of sex, all subtly crafted into the dialogue, make you laugh, simply because you would be able to hear the same conversation in your local Topman at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. And that is why it is utterly charming. It never tries to be anything it's not, it never pretends to raise moral issues or tackle strong taboos, it simply shows that being a teenager can be fun after all. For no-frills, unadulterated high-spirited camaraderie between four mates, The Inbetweeners simply cannot be beaten.

E-mail your 500-word review of an arts event of your choice to readerreview@independent.co.uk. For terms and conditions, see www.independent.co.uk/freelanceterm

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At first glance, The Inbetweeners doesn't seem like very much. In the current climate of comedies and comedy-dramas meant to appeal to the adolescent college-graduate-in-waiting, headed by the effervescent Skins, it comes in as a sort of awkward cousin to the King that is Skins.

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TV ratings - 13 September: The Inbetweeners pulls 2.2m viewers

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Opening episode of third series of Bafta-winning sitcom draws 2.247 million viewers. By John Plunkett

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Ever since the US remade The Office and did a pretty decent job of it, a lot of other hit British shows have been picked up for the American reboot treatment but that doesn't always end well - just look at the US version of The Inbetweeners.

The MTV series was cancelled after just one series back in 2012 and now UK Inbetweeners star Joe Thomas has explained where he thinks it all went wrong for the show.

Which basically comes down to the fact the US version didn't feature any of the swearing or drinking that we loved about the E4 show.

"I do think teenage boys are funny," Joe Thomas explained while talking about the longevity of The Inbetweeners on today's (August 12) Sunday Brunch. "I think that show retained its warmth."

He continued to share that he thinks it's difficult to do The Inbetweeners' style of comedy "without profanity", which is where the American remake went wrong.

"They tried to make an American version of The Inbetweeners and it was very hard because they couldn't really swear very much because it was on network TV," he said.

"And then you couldn't show them drinking and stuff and... that's kind of the whole show. Just do the credits then - the beginning credits and the end credits. Just film the outside of a school, and that's it.

"Just draw people's attention to the various educational opportunities available to them."

As for whether or not we can expect to see Joe Thomas and the gang return for another Inbetweeners story, the actor joined his co-star Blake Harrison in dashing all of our hopes.

"I think it's probably done," he shared. "I love those guys [...] but at the moment, it's really sort of [about] challenging myself in new ways."

But at least one such challenge will see Joe team up with Will McKenzie (aka actor Simon Bird) once again, as he confirmed he was currently working on something new with his former co-star.

"I can't really talk about it yet, but... it's gonna be great," he teased. "It'll be in the future - not set in the future - and it's gonna be good. And that's it. Imagine... just something."

We can't wait.
Joe's new film The Festival is released in UK cinemas on August 14, while Sunday Brunch continues on Channel 4. Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit 'Like' on our Digital Spy Facebook page and 'Follow' on our @digitalspy Instagram and Twitter account.

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Inbetweeners star explains why US remake was so bad

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Ever since the US remade The Office and did a pretty decent job of it, a lot of other hit British shows have been picked up for the American reboot treatment but that doesn't always end well - just look at the US version of The Inbetweeners .

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Have we all become so politically correct in 2018 that we are automatically offended by jokes that are just a little offensive or risque?

That's what former Inbetweeners actor James Buckley thinks, especially if the British high school comedy would have been launched today.

Speaking to Digital Spy, the 31-year-old believes that some of the jokes from the hit show, most of which revolved about those awkward teenage moments, wouldn't have gone down well in the present.

I think that when The Inbetweeners was around, everyone understood the context - that they were kids.

There used to be a sympathy, where you could almost forgive them because you can't really have a go at someone for being stupid - that's not really their fault.

Nowadays, it feels very black and white with comedy.

There's no in-between, it's just, 'This person said this on television - isn't that terrible?' and it's killing comedy, because you're not allowed to joke about anything, it seems.

There seems to be a joke police, nowadays.

Buckley, who played the character of Jay Cartwright, an individual best known for his lies and bragging about anything, added that the status quo of being offended by anything would have killed the show were it to debut today.

It seems to be cool at the moment to be offended by stuff, and that's a shame.

It seems to be in vogue at the moment, and I'm hoping it will pass, because I do think that possibly people would maybe be more offended by.

The Inbetweeners ran from 2008 to 2010, spawned two feature-length movies and even won a BAFTA, so it's possible that folks wouldn't be offended.

Although there isn't a direct show to compare The Inbetweeners to, the likes of and Saturday Night Live still produce material that is still funny but borders on the verge of being controversial.

However, there could be some logic to what Buckley has said as this year has seen the likes of and American Pie have all been retrospectively criticised for racism, sexism and transphobia.

Seeking a bit more of a consensus on his opinion, Buckley asked his followers what they thought:

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The reason why The Inbetweeners wouldn't work on TV today

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Have we all become so politically correct in 2018 that we are automatically offended by jokes that are just a little offensive or risque? That's what former Inbetweeners actor James Buckley thinks, especially if the British high school comedy would have been launched today.

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In 2011, something unexpected happened at the UK box office. The two top-grossing films were the final Harry Potter and best picture Oscar-winner The King's Speech. Beneath them in the charts sat the expected parade of Hollywood blockbusters - Pirates of the Caribbean, Twilight, Transformers, Planet of the Apes, Fast and the Furious... but at number three, grossing just a few hundred thousand less than the Oscar winner was The Inbetweeners Movie.

Two of its four leading actors had never appeared in a film before; the other two only tiny roles in unknown indies. The Inbetweeners Movie had a budget of £3.5m and went on to gross £64.8m in the UK. It broke the record for the most successful opening weekend for a comedy film in the UK and stayed at number one for four weeks.

Film industry pundits from overseas might be confused by this. The film took just $36,000 at the US box office. But to understand this success, they would have to understand the fondness the British have always retained for sitcom.

The idea of transferring a 30-minute TV comedy with a circular narrative onto the cinema screen for a triple-length offering with a satisfying three-act-structure is, on paper - and often in practice - a bad one. Not only structurally but also economically, the sitcom is a format that, despite a few notable American examples, rarely translates. Yet, the British film industry has a long history in this arena and the results have always been... interesting.

Taxing times

Although there were fledgling experiments in the late 1950s and early 60s with big screen outings for sitcoms The Army Game with I Only Arsked (1958), Whack-O! with Bottoms Up (1960) and The Larkins with Inn for Trouble (1960), what could be classified the golden age of the cinematic sitcom, with its identifiable genre tropes, spans 1971 to 1980.

This period correlates exactly with a curious moment in British taxation history. 1971 was the year that the Rolling Stones famously decamped to France and the phrase 'tax exile' became a badge of anti-establishment honour.

With British film stars being taxed at a rate of up to 98% of their earnings, many set up residence on sunnier shores. This meant that legally they could only now work in the UK for a limited number of days per year, and Hollywood was generally more attractive and lucrative than Pinewood had ever been.

As a result, there was a vacuum. With fewer stars able to appear in British films, production companies such as Hammer and Rank decided instead to elevate the familiar, and cheaper, stars of television.

The format had been set in 1968 with the tagline "Yer never saw Alf like this before! Yer actual Alf Garnett as large as life on the Giant Cinema Screen", when audiences were able to see a very different take on popular sitcom Till Death Do Us Part.

Gone was the black-and-white living room of the small screen. Offered instead was a film of two bigger stories - the first half showing Alf and his wife Else during the Blitz in 1945 and the second half presenting the contemporary wedding of their daughter.

The film ended on a bittersweet note, with the Garnett family being relocated from the East End of London to an Essex tower block as part of the slum clearance.

Never mind the quality...

Social change becomes a recognisable feature in these films. 1976's The Likely Lads also contemplates slum clearance and the working-class struggle of conforming to life in the high rises and new suburbs. Race relations are explored, generally in a manner that would horrify the modern viewer, in the film version of Love Thy Neighbour. And On the Buses (1971) takes a stumbling shot at exploring the issue of gender equality, with a plot concerning Stan Butler's chagrin that women are suddenly allowed to be employed as bus drivers. Eventually he accepts the change - largely due to the physical assets of the new conductor he's paired with.

Away from the defining anchors of garish studio sets and canned laughter, the tone of the cinematic sitcom often careened accidentally into a form of proto-Mike Leigh contemplation of the malaise that consumed a post-war white, working-class generation. But usually with at least one scene of a man getting locked out of a building sans trousers.

These films have a feel entirely of their own, often with heavy overuse of zany music scoring to suggest where the laughs might fall, resulting in an anxiety-inducing surreality.

Talking of 'having a feel', the cinematic sitcom is, in many ways, where innuendo went to die. Away from the heavy restrictions of conservative TV censorship, formally family-friendly characters found themselves smack-bang in the landscape of the British sex comedy in its heyday.

The British sex comedy was another genre entirely peculiar to these isles and on a limited timeframe. A run of cheap films that painfully combined equal measures of soft-core pornography and cheeky-chappy humour, they served an audience of porn fans who liked to maintain a veneer of respectability. The sex comedy was wiped out by the proliferation of the home video recorder.

Although the cinematic sitcom rarely strayed into ever showing actual nudity on screen, the objectification of women was rife and the sight of a middle-aged man making moves on a teenage girl was a common fixture. Even Alf Garnett gets his glasses steamed by a barely-legal, if imaginary, blonde in 1972's The Alf Garnett Saga. Rampant homophobia and celebrity cameos aside, the film has impressive aesthetic moments and some savvy social commentary.

It also largely manages to avoid playing to an invisible studio audience, making the most of a bigger canvas without desperately moving its protagonist into a fish-out-of-water scenario.

For that is perhaps the classic hallmark of the cinematic sitcom - the transposal of the cast to a foreign location. Be it the cheaper option of a camping or holiday camp trip (The Likely Lads, Please Sir!, Holiday on the Buses) or to the exotic luxury of mainland Europe, usually Spain (Steptoe and Son, Are You Being Served?, Never Mind the Quality Feel the Width).

Perhaps the cleverest use of the fish-out-of water trope, and for my money by far the greatest offering of the genre was the film excursion of Porridge in 1979. Ronnie Barker 's knowing, amiable prison sitcom inverted the narrative of the cinematic sitcom but also of the jail-break movie.

It was a darker, grittier film, with less laughs and the fantastic central conceit of lead character Fletcher trying to break back into prison before he's noticed missing. Porridge was deemed of a high enough calibre to even secure a release in the US, retitled Doing Time.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister and swiftly changed the tax laws in favour of the high earners, ensuring the return of many of them to their homeland and the bosom of the British film industry. 1980 saw the axe fall on the genre, with George and Mildred and Rising Damp films representing the final hurrah.

Going large

It would be 17 years before a British sitcom character would grace the silver screen again. In 1997, Rowan Atkinson took his character Mr Bean to cinema audiences. The story, of course, saw him leaving the UK to be a fish-out-of-water. In this case, in Los Angeles.

The film grossed more than $250m dollars worldwide from a budget of $18m, setting off a mini-renaissance of the genre. Bottom, The League of Gentlemen, Kevin & Perry and Stella Street all made it to the cinema with varying degrees of critical and financial success. In 2012 Armando Iannucci took the characters of his highbrow political satire The Thick of It from Westminster to Washington, for In the Loop, garnering himself an Oscar nomination in process.

The success of The Inbetweeners Movie was a surprise. Although it had a strong TV following, it might have seemed unlikely in the age of Netflix and illegal downloading that people would bother to make it to the multiplex for an extended adventure of some sitcom characters.

But ticket sales were strong. And the audience was treated to an almost perfect example of a classic cinematic sitcom: the characters went on holiday to Ibiza, where they were fish out of water, and the film was markedly more sexed-up than the series.

The only notable differences were that the soundtrack was better and, rather than see a hideous middle-aged man get his end away with a teenage girl, we were treated to a transgressive inversion in which one of the leads, a teenage boy has it away with a hideous middle-aged woman.

The success of the film lead to a sequel (fish-out-of-water in Australia) and yet more cinematic sitcoms. This crop included The Office, I'm Alan Partridge, Bad Education and Absolutely Fabulous all having a roll of the dice. They also all featured the characters going away somewhere, except Alan Partridge who used the film as a chance to finally put Norwich on the filmic map.

Like jellied eels, the knotted handkerchief, queueing and a dewey-eyed devotion to the queen, the great British cinematic sitcom is entirely peculiar to the UK and barely explainable to anyone outside of it.

We are a nation of people who like to see our favourite TV characters go on holiday and we demand to see this holiday not on TV, but in the cinema.

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When sitcoms go large - Britain's curious demand for the TV comedy film spin-off

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In 2011, something unexpected happened at the UK box office. The two top-grossing films were the final Harry Potter and best picture Oscar-winner The King's Speech. Beneath them in the charts sat the expected parade of Hollywood blockbusters - Pirates of the Caribbean, Twilight, Transformers, Planet of the Apes, Fast and the Furious...

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23 Inbetweeners moments that will never stop being funny (NSFW) | JOE.ie

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23 Inbetweeners moments that will never stop being funny (NSFW)

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The Guardian highlights the growth and development of the Inbetweeners with its initial poor reception and review and its eventual blockbuster success. Draws upon the Inbetweeners cultural legacy in its language and the doors it has opened for female centric sit-coms such as 'Derry Girls.'

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en years ago this week, a comedy about a quartet of hapless sixth-formers debuted on E4. The channel's first original sitcom was met with a dismissive review by the Radio Times and tiny viewing figures. Just three years later, The Inbetweeners Movie was breaking records at the box office, the show had a Bafta award and the critics were fully on board the banter bus (the show has a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes). A decade on, The Inbetweeners has established itself as one of the most successful UK sitcoms of the 21st century. So how did this puerile tale of four idiots on the pull earn its place in the canon of great British comedy?

When The Inbetweeners pitched up in 2008, there hadn't been a hit British sitcom about teenagers since The Young Ones. In the US, teens existed in glossy California dramas or gross-out coming of age movies. In Britain, they featured in gritty films and series about crime and, more alarmingly, Skins - E4's romp through the untowardly eventful lives of a gaggle of pill-popping, sexually reckless 16-year-olds. It was into this lopsided landscape that The Inbetweeners arrived and injected television's teenage narrative with a dose of pure, unadulterated ordinariness.

Narrated by goody-two-shoes teenager Will (Simon Bird), the show follows his move from private school to bog-standard comprehensive, where he makes bog-standard new friends. He meets perpetually lovelorn Simon (Joe Thomas), chronic bullshitter Jay (James Buckley) and nice-but-dim Neil (Blake Harrison). Iain Morris, who co-created the show with Damon Beesley, said he wanted suburbia to be the show's fifth main character, and the overwhelming mediocrity of The Inbetweeners' grey-skied commuter-belt setting is reflected in everything from the soundtrack (landfill indie) to the characters' ambitions (try to get served in a pub).

Fantastic four ... Jay Cartwright, Neil Sutherland, Simon Cooper, Will McKenzie. Photograph: Allstar/Film Four

In many ways, The Inbetweeners was a very conventional sitcom, complete with slapstick scrapes and slickly concluded storylines. Cleaving to British comedy tradition, its on-screen leads, Bird and Thomas, were alumni of the Cambridge Footlights, and it stuck to age-old sitcom tropes like antagonism-glazed male bonding and romantic humiliation. But into this template, Morris and Beesley injected real life. From Simon's humiliatingly yellow car to Jay's pretend sexual exploits, the creators packed the show full of their real-life experiences (fans of Morris's and Jimmy Carr's mid-00s XFM show will remember the writer as a source of superb adolescence anecdotes). They also took care to mimic the way teenage boys spoke. Doing so meant The Inbetweeners broke new ground when it came to the level of crudity you would expect from a prime-time sitcom. But it worked. The Inbetweeners Movie took £13.22m at the UK box office on its opening weekend. (The most successful TV comedy spin-off before that was Borat, which managed £6.24m.) Its success was staggering and triggered a Gaelic TV and film renaissance when its Skye-based producer Chris Young used the money he had made to start Gaelic-language projects.

This puerility made The Inbetweeners easy to dismiss, however its juvenility belied not only expertly constructed comedy, but lexical joy. Like every great sitcom, The Inbetweeners created its own language - popularising terms such as clunge, bus wanker and "friend" (the latter is all in the high-pitched delivery). It feels as if The Inbetweeners was the last comedy to permeate the cultural consciousness of young Britons in this way. Its dialogue passed into common parlance and its characters became archetypes (Jay, in particular, is useful shorthand for a whole category of human). That's probably because it was broadcast at a time when the TV comedy as a unifying cultural touchstone was steadily disintegrating. Digital channels hadn't totally poleaxed the concept of the national-treasure sitcom yet (Gavin & Stacey, which debuted the year before on BBC Three, was similarly big news), but in the coming years streaming soon would - Netflix was introduced in the UK in 2012 - and viewership would fragment.

Derry Girls ... wouldn't have existed without The Inbetweeners. Photograph: Jack Barnes

The turn of the decade was a pivotal moment for television in general, but it was especially important for comedy. As blockbuster sitcoms died away, a new style of comedy was taking its place - one that focused on the people who always played the boring characters: women. As a show about failure, disappointment and rejection, it feels faintly ridiculous to view The Inbetweeners as a tale of four middle-class white men and their privilege, but it is true that the show seemed to put more effort into thinking up slang terms for vagina than giving depth to its female characters. Which makes one facet of The Inbetweeners' legacy even odder: it created a template for the female-centric sitcom to thrive. Shows such Derry Girls, Some Girls and Drifters (whose leads appeared in the first The Inbetweeners Movie, and is executive-produced by Morris and Beesley) have all been referred to as the "female Inbetweeners", while Caroline and Caitlin Moran's sister-sitcom Raised By Wolves picked up where the masturbation-obsessed teen boys left off. Without the original, these shows might never have been possible - they flipped the script that The Inbetweeners wrote.

The Inbetweeners also existed at a particular point in teenage life. When it began in 2008, Facebook had just about taken root in the social lives of teenagers; the show's final episode aired 12 days before the launch of Instagram. The latter overhauled teenage life, making adolescents cautious curators of their own image. Teen years no longer seem like a place for fashion sins and horrendous character-building scrapes but a prime time to start building your brand. You probably couldn't make a show about teenagers today without having social media at its core. For that reason, The Inbetweeners seems like a harbinger of the end of two eras: both as one of the UK's final sitcom phenomena, and a portrait of a humiliating, awkward and tedious paradise lost.
The Inbetweeners is available on All 4 throughout May

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Puerile, provincial and prophetic: how the Inbetweeners became a classic

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en years ago this week, a comedy about a quartet of hapless sixth-formers debuted on E4. The channel's first original sitcom was met with a dismissive review by the Radio Times and tiny viewing figures.