I'm not gonna lie, as a student, I regularly stay up until about - well, it's 4:30 a.m. as I write this, and I'm not remotely tired. Come seven in the morning though, I'll be out like a light. What this means is there is a hell of a lot of time for often misguided forays into the depths of 4oD. In 2 B.S. (before Skins) Channel 4 put out a borderline daring teenage drama show called Sugar Rush, which is about a fifteen-year-old girl discovering her lesbianism in, you guessed it, the town of Brighton.
My designation "before Skins" is essential to understanding how that show revolutionised teenage programming. Compared to the characters in Skins, when one looks at previous teenage shows all the characters seem very immature and simplistic, and this is a criticism I can apply to Sugar Rush.
The lesbian packaging attracted me to Sugar Rush because I am fascinated by homosexual relationships and the particular personal challenges young homosexuals face (all joking aside, I am interested in these issues). Because girls are cute and boys aren't, I'd much rather watch lesbians. Kim is a cute little ginger virgin with a family entirely set up for comic relief and background drama. She is quite sure of her sexuality, especially since she moved to Brighton and became fixated on "Sugar", a local chavette whose hobbies include playing pool, underage clubbing, alcoholism, chain-smoking, petty theft, fucking surly meatheads five years older than her, manipulation, pathological rudeness, impulsive and reckless behaviour and generally acting unladylike. The behaviours rub off on naive Kim, but she is well depicted, clearly uncomfortable with the whole thing.
These attributes of Sugar's are what make the show fall apart after the first few episodes, because nobody with half a brain would genuinely fancy a girl like her. She is representative of the identikit British teenage slag, but she needs some elusive, ethereal quality, so we can understand Kim's feelings for her. Things threaten to look up by episode eight, when Kim washes her hands of her friend and attends a Christian homosexual reform group, where she meets a girl. Finally, we think, we're going to see this programme expand its horizons, but the girl affirms she "only went along to the group to see who I could pull". Even British teenagers aren't that shameless, certainly not sweet, clear-faced girls with Irish accents. And by the final episode, you are screaming at Kim not to be so pathetic, as she follows Sugar in fleeing the town.
Kim's family is comic relief, but her mother is unfaithful, lazy, unmaternal and impulsive, which causes her parents to split up. I feel that this is tokenism.
So I don't think it was the greatest executed programme ever, but I'm very much down with both the premise and the relatability of the characters Kim and Sugar. I feel that the "home town drama" is one of my favourite genres of slice-of-life. In my review of Scott Pilgrim I talked about how one really felt involved in this particularised alternative scene of Toronto, and here, you feel similarly involved in the truisms of the particular town of Brighton and its relatable, if not particularly colourful, inhabitants.
Kim narrates her life in the teen-pulp style of Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, and it is amusing to look at her as an irrational, melodramatic teenager. However, I feel that this is marketed with no sense of irony, and that the depiction of teenage kicks is gratuitous. If something is gratuitous, it should be psychodrama, well sexualised, as it was in Skins. But this isn't, it's second-rate sordidity. It's the British seaside town of teen dramas: cheap and determined to be cheerful, with a sort of Carry on Camping brand of sexuality that leaves you cold.
"Sugar Rush" may be viewed via 4oD and intermittently on E4 or Channel 4 in the UK. It might go away if it hasn't been repeated on the telly in a while.
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