Girl talk

When watching the first episode of a new comedy, drama or… well, any kind of programme, sometimes it occurs to me how much better it would be if I could see the first few episodes at once, rather than just the first one. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not greed of viewing that’s prompted this, more the pursuit of fairness in reviewing.

“Somes Girls appears to be something between Skins and Byker Grove”

The first episode of any series is always heavy on the exposition. The set-up is all, allowing the viewers to get the measure of your main characters, or even your style of reportage if it happens to be a documentary or news show. In this case, I have been watching the first episode of Some Girls, a new ‘yoof’ comedy for BBC3 about a group of teenage girls who all live on the same estate and who play for the same school football team. With that brief I was expecting something between Bend It Like Beckham and Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps.

Boozed Up Teenage Footballers? Really, that wouldn’t have surprised me. Instead what I got appears to be something between Skins and Byker Grove, with an element of Outnumbered added simply by lieu of having no laughter track but clear comedy elements and being produced by Hat Trick.

The difficulty is, this is the first episode. Everything is about the set-up. What may seem clunky and a little laboured could just be birthing pains as we establish that our narrator – there is a voiceover narration, be warned – Viva has to live with her evil Kiwi football coach who also happens to be seeing her dad. Side note, this is the most disheveled I’ve ever seen Colin Salmon as he plays Viva’s pater, and it suits him! Here is an actor who is pretty much good in everything he touches, even when it was Resident Evil! Now, that’s class. But I digress.

Some Girls episode one is fun enough. It’s crude, it’s lewd, it’s brassy and it’s got teenagers being explicit about sex and mocking it. And girls fighting each other on a tarmac football pitch. The characters are varied, if two-dimensional (at the moment), with a nice but dim one, an angry one, a sarcastic one, and the main one – who hopes to go to university and gives her cider-swilling, chain-smoking single parent pal a banana each morning to try and keep her on the right track. By the end of episode one we know everybody’s moral compass, which will hopefully see us in good stead for the rest of the run that’ll (fingers crossed) have more plots than simply a grudge football game and Viva cross with her Dad for knocking up his evil gal pal. I just can’t be sure.

See, that’s the problem with scene-setting – it takes all of half an hour to do, meaning that next week’s show will really be the first one. Now that we’ve sat down and had tea and an orange slice with the crew, will they be our new best friends or ships that passed in the televisual night? Blimmin’ exposition.

Some Girls, BBC3, Tuesday 6 November 2012