BBC3’s ‘Some Girls’ has filled the gap that ‘The Inbetweeners’ left

The cast of BBC3's 'Some Girls' (BBC)

This week I discovered BBC3’s brilliant new-ish comedy Some Girls. It’s equally witty as it is silly and it’s finally filled the gap left when The Inbetweeners finished.

The series focuses on four teenage girls living on the same council estate and is injected with the same mix of puerile humour and visual comedy that characterised The Inbetweeners.

There’s Viva (Adelayo Adedayo) who narrates each episode – she’s  the witty one determined to go to university and not to end up pregnant. Then there’s her three friends Saz (Mandeep Dhillon) – the smart alec with a embarrassing case of hirsutism; Holli (Natasha Jonas) the rough one with aggression issues; and Amber (Alice Felgate) who is the pretty but dim one of the group.

Despite their differences, the four of them are friends and the cast plays it out at just right the pitch and their friendship feels natural. To add to the mix there is Viva’s fireman dad Rob played by Colin Salmon, despite the more straitlaced roles Salmon has done in the past – three James Bond films and two Resident Evil films – he manages to be a little bit ridiculous as well.

There is also Rob’s Kiwi girlfriend and Viva’s P.E. teacher Anna played by Dolly Wells who viewers may remember from Channel 4’s satirical series Star Stories. One of Wells’ most memorable performances on Star Stories was as Nicole Kidman and her Australasian accent skills serve her well in Some Girls with her unintelligible New Zealand enunciation.

Some Girls is one of these hidden gems on a smaller channel and is just waiting to be discovered much like the aforementioned The Inbetweeners, along with Misfits and Being Human. All three are on smaller channels namely E4 and BBC3, although both of the channels are targeted at a younger demographic all of these programmes still have universal appeal – not to mention the fact that they have received Baftas nods and accolades.

Along with Some Girls, a spin-off series of The Inbetweeners called Drifters is in the works and will feature Lydia Rose Bewley, Jessica Knappett and Lauren O’Rourke who were in the film. Across the pond there is also Lena Dunham’s Girls which has been met with critical acclaim for its true-to-life humour and has been nominated for a slew of awards. It appears that we have a female comedy revolution in the works.

The first series of Some Girls is being repeated at the moment, so why not give it a chance?

For more information about ‘Some Girls’ click here

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• jordski

  Watched this the other night by mistake. It’s terrible. Truly, truly terrible.

• James Hammond

  Couldn’t disagree more. The writing is puerile, characters vacuous, and behaviour absurd. It has none of the creativity and originality of the inbetweeners.

• Martin_Kinsella

  Bbc3 does some genuinely good shows. This drivel is not one of them.

• don_king_kong

  The cliched aggressive “urban” posturing in this show ruins any comparison to the guileless, relative innocence of the charming characters from the Inbetweeners. The characters in the Inbetweeners were sympathetic since they were always the butt of the joke, where as the characters in Some Girls just seem vaguely unpleasant.

  Also it’s rarely a hallmark of quality when a show quite shamelessly “borrows” ideas from other recently successful shows and simply transposes them – from “suburban” to “urban”, from “group of 4 boys” to “group of 4 girls” – in a brazen attempt to emulate the other programmes success.