Tony lives! He was knocked down by a bus at the end of the first series of Skins (E4) in one of those out-of-the-blue, jump-start plot-twists writers tend to employ when they come to the end of a first series. He looked pretty dead but, also, now I think about it, a bit too pretty to be dead. Played by Nicholas Hoult, the engaging lad who persuaded Hugh Grant in About a Boy that a real man is a family man, Tony was the cocky little heartbreaker who wooed girls on screen and audiences off it. Sid, the bespectacled virgin, was more sympathetic. Cassie, the anorexic, played with brittle winsomeness by Hannah Murray, had the plot you needed to follow. But Tony was the life and soul of Skins. The writer Bryan Elsley and his team of young scribes (their average age, we are always told, is 22; it must be 23 now) were never going to let him go.
If you think I am spoiling the story for those who are waiting to get their skinful of self-obsessed rich kids in Bristol on Thursday night on Channel 4, I am not doing nearly as good a job of it as Channel 4 has itself. Spoilers have been running for days on its official Skins website in the form of video diaries. One has Tony, lying in a coma in intensive care, his eyes closed, listening to a tape his friends have made of their favourite sexual fantasies. Aroused, Tony opens his eyes, prompting a blogger on the site named “slightly_rebellious” to comment: “Wow. Gorgeous eyes! I think I may actually think Tony’s fit now. I’m a sucker for eyes.”
There was a shock in store for slightly_rebellious last night, however. Tony is back but he is brain damaged and limps around like a zombie, his sarcasm replaced by amnesia. When he turns up at a party, the ghost at the feast, the ghastly Abigail raves: “You look so OK! Well, they said you were like a total mong and I would have been so pissed if you had been a vegetable and had to be turned off.” Tony does not remember her, even though he once called her, like, his total dream shag. Improbability springs eternal, however, and by the end of the episode his gay mate Maxxie has taught him how to hold a pen. “Do I have to gay you now?” asks Tony, his rapier wit loosed once more from its scabbard. Yet his writing is slow and childish.
I’d say the same for Elsley’s in last night’s episode. There were some sparks. Maxxie was pursued by a gang of homophobic thugs one of whom, predictably, was a closet homosexual himself. He finally pounced on Maxxie and looked as if he was about to rape him when Maxxie went “what-the-hell?” and shagged him anyway. Cassie, exiled in Scotland, has surreally taken up the highland reel - she’s crackers that one - a development that left the lovesick Sid more concerned than ever.
But elsewhere the plotting was humdrum. Maxxie had developed a builder dad (nice cameo from Bill Bailey) who wanted him to be a builder not a dancer. This was the oldest father-son plot in the world with dialogue to match, including: “I love you too Dad.” We spent too long in a noisy dance hall, endured a fellatio joke as a mum helped to do up fumble-fingered Tony’s flies, and listened to Michelle moon on about what might have been with Tony. But who cares what I think? I refer you to E4.com, where the nation’s youth will by now have had its say, allowing the rest of us to marvel at the dizzying level of literacy it has achieved.
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Ross Kemp is proving the ultimate embedded correspondent in Ross Kemp in Afghanistan (Sky One). That’s good and bad. Last night’s episode had him back in Helmand after a break during which three of the Royal Anglian Regiment had been killed by an American bomb. A journalist would have had a go at unravelling the cock-up and worked up some outrage. Instead Kemp bought into the army euphemisms: a “blue-on-blue” incident, “hard love”, “the joys of war”.
Yet he sees his job as giving voice to the squaddies and those he talked to, friends of the dead men, were adamant that the press should not stir up trouble for the US, whose air support saves scores of British lives. There was no hiding their grief, however. When 7 Platoon’s Lieutenant George Seal-Coon was singled out for sympathy in a letter from the colonel of the Royal Anglians, we saw him, ever so briefly, weep.
OUT OF THE BOX
The Daily Star is claiming that with Bruce Forsyth turning 80 next week he may be about to hand over his job hosting Strictly Come Dancing to Ronnie Corbett, a stripling of 76. It quotes a source: “Bruce wants to leave the show in safe hands and he is quite bullish about the fact that he wants a veteran household name to take his place. He’s already mentioned Ronnie to producers.” But would this be the same Ronnie Corbett who told The Edinburgh News in 2006 that reality TV was not for him: “Jimmy Tarbuck’s been on Strictly Come Dancing, but I’d never do anything like that - I’m too old”?
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Massive speculation - well a little - over the studio format for Five News with Natasha Kaplinsky, which starts next Monday. We know she won’t be standing. So a chair, a desk, a sofa? How does a chaise longue sound to you? You think I’m joking, don’t you?