Growing Up Absurd:In My Skin S1.

Drinking in the park, throwing up, eating chips on rainy streets lined with nondescript shopping parades, trying to avoid bullies, and hanging around in playgrounds you've long since outgrown because there's absolutely nothing in the small town you've grown up in for you to do.

These are the recognisable rites of passage for almost everyone who grew up in the UK and Kayleigh Llewellyn's dark comedy In My Skin (BBC3/iPlayer, originally shown in spring of 2020 - not quite sure how I missed it back then) paints these rites in a way that is both bleakly familiar and, somehow, grimly romantic.

If the story that In My Skin tells is quite specific then the background it plays out against is anything but. Welsh teenager Bethan Gwyndaff (a hugely impressive Gabrielle Creevy) is, on the surface, a fairly normal girl. She's not one of the popular kids but she's not without friends either.

She's got her gang. There's openly gay, in a very homophobic environment, Travis (James Wilbraham) and there's Lydia (Poppy Lee Friar) who seems hellbent on getting into each and every piece of trouble available. They have a bond of love and trust between them that seems solid. But Bethan's home life is far trickier.

Though she lies that her parents have a house in Italy, take her to ballet, and make her watch Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse the reality is that they are dysfunctional beyond belief. Her mother Katrina (played by Jo Hartley with, according to my friend Michelle, the dead eyed stare of Paul Daniels - I'd agree but also throw Willie Nelson into the mix) is severely bipolar, prone to saying cruel and hurtful things to Bethan, and to washing the car in the middle of the night while blasting out New Order's Blue Monday.

Father Dilwyn (Rhodri Meilir) is worse. A cider swigging Hell's Angel who hates 'poofs', neglects both his wife and daughter in favour of grim drinking sessions in rough estate pubs, and has an abusive streak to boot. He makes Frank Gallagher from Shameless look the absolute model of decorum.

Bethan, understandably, lies about her father's drinking and her mum getting sectioned to friends and teachers alike. When she gets one of her poems published in an anthology, Bethan - a budding writer anyway - comes to the attention of the most popular girl in the school, Poppy (Zadeiah Campbell-Davies), which causes Bethan's anxiety, and obsession, to go into overdrive.

Bethan worries she's too common for Poppy but it's clear, or at least as clear as anything can be in a troubled teenager's mind, from the off that but Poppy and Bethan like each other. Not just as friends but, potentially, physically and romantically as well.

Which isn't easy as neither of them consider themselves to be gay. But an even bigger issue is whether or not the tangled web of lies that Bethan has constructed to protect herself, and her family, will eventually be her undoing. Will she remember what lie she told what person and how will she stop people finding out the awful truth about her life? Would it not even be better to simply tell the truth?

The potential unravelling of Bethan is the crux of a drama that takes in such typical teenage fare as calling older people 'crusty old dicks', backchatting teachers, having periods in gym class ("Auntie Flo's in town"), and trying to make sense of one's own feelings for others just at the same time as you become more self-aware than ever.

Creevy's performance seems effortless as she shows us how Bethan navigates this minefield with, despite a few almost dreamlike sequences, nothing more than a pensive stare here or a throwaway comment there. She captures, and In My Skin does too, teenage awkwardness and teenage heartbreak, perfectly. Bethan is a sixteen year old girl but one who, in many ways, circumstance has made wise beyond her years.

By the second episode she receives, or appears to receive, some utterly shocking news that will set her life on a different course entirely but she's still young enough to joke in the park with Lydia and Travis about a girl who rumour insists has had sex with a frozen sausage that then snapped off inside her. 

Some of the supporting cast are painted in broader strokes than others. Aled ap Steffan plays school bully Stan Priest as if a compilation of every school bully that's ever lived's greatest hits and Laura Checkley's PE teacher, Mrs Blocker, is ludicrous and (initially) cruel without a single shred of self-awareness. As the series develops Checkley seems to lean heavily into this caricature and the results become ever more rewarding.

If you suspend disbelief while she's on screen at least. That's perhaps the biggest problem with In My Skin. Billed as a 'dark comedy' I didn't laugh out loud once during five entire episodes. There were amusing lines for sure - not least poor Alfred (Dave Wong) in his tuxedo obsessing over Charlotte Church - but the darkness outweighed the comedy to such an extent it could almost have played as a completely straight drama.

But where would that have left Mrs Blocker and Stan Priest? Even Nana Margie (Di Botcher), Bethan's nan and the only sympathetic character in her entire family, is played as a classic sitcom character right from the off. If this had been an American series there'd have been canned applause every time she appeared on the screen.

Credit, too, should go to Alexandria Riley as Bethan's supportive English teacher Mrs Riley, to Suzanne Packer as a nurse, Nurse Digby, at the psychiatric hospital Katrina ends up in, to timid victim of school bullying Lorraine (Georgia Furlong), and to Richard Corgan who has the unenviable task of embodying the viler traits of toxic male behaviour in Tony Chippy, a man who'll give a schoolgirl a free chip butty if there's a blow-job in it.

Some of the crude behaviour and jokes sat uneasily with the often sensitive subject matter but that's, as far as I can see, how life is. A series of hugely important, and emotional, events stitched together with humour and friendship so that those events become bearable. Kayleigh Llewellyn, and Gabrielle Creevy especially, did a fine job of illustrating that. In My Skin series one ends with a very obvious signpost towards what might happen in series two. I'll be finding out very soon if I've been sold a dummy.