Some Girls Are Better Than Others

A moderate cheer for Some Girls, the BBC3 sitcom that's just wrapped up its second series. It's hardly been a critical smash, but I've been weirdly compelled by it, and the more I think about it the more it's worth celebrating. In fact, in a world of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, it's quite nice to to step back from the world of Albuquerque meth dealers and Westerosi power struggles and celebrate a mildly amusing half hour sitcom about teenage girls. Sometimes what the world needs is massive praise heaped on the things which are just slightly better than average. I say this, incidentally, as the guy who's been telling everyone for years that Rev is the greatest thing to have happened to television in a decade. More on that anon.

Firstly, there's the very simple fact that Some Girls actually features the rare TV sight of girls talking to each other, which wins it some Bechdel Test points, and that they occasionally venture into topics other than boys, which wins it a bunch more. Better than that, they're witty with each other in a pretty unassuming way. It would be very easy to create a sitcom that was terribly impressed with the fact that girls are being funny, basking in its own modernity and relevance. Instead the quartet - Viva, Holli, Saz and Amber - exchange pretty naff observations about their pretty ordinary lives and break precisely no boundaries or challenge anyone's sensibilities. The fact that they're pretty comfortable discussing sex seems to me to be a triumph - when the choice is between a Skins-esque depiction of teen sex as well, sexy (it usually isn't) and a Grange Hill Issue approach, I applaud a sitcom world where it's just not a very big issue. Who fancies who, yes, who got with who, yes, but the actual facts or danger or allure of sex - yawn. All of which seems a great step forward.

Then there's a decent set of characters - I love Dolly Wells' blunter-than-a-rock Kiwi stepmum/football coach, who got over her first heartbreak by "shooting my best friend's sheep and moving on." There's three-dimensional bit parts, with a nice-but-dim love interest in Rocky who is neither all that dim nor a cardboard cutout Nice Guy. The script has the remarkable feature of being rarely laugh-out-loud and yet tight and breezy enough that it's never boring, which is the ideal for a piece of quick BBC3 iPlayer time sinkage. But mainly, it's an undemanding piece of fluff with a good heart and good aspirations that normalises the idea that inner-city girls from ethnic minority backgrounds can be funny and cheerful and never really make a big thing of it. From such tiny, apparently insubstantial building blocks is progress made.