You Little Maggots:Ladhood S2.

"Making good art is more important than people's feelings"

"The less ambition you have the happier you'll be" 

The second series of Ladhood (BBC3/iPlayer, originally aired in August 2021) pretty much continues on straight from the first one. That ended with older Liam (Liam Williams) being dumped by his girlfriend Jess (Lily Frazer). Episode one of series two opens with Liam, just five days later, dating again despite being far from over Jess.

A drunken date with Siobhan (Tessa Parr) seems to go very well. At least, that is, until it doesn't. After he's revealed his true self. A conversation with Siobhan leaves Liam struggling to remember the last time he was truly happy sober and this throws him into various attempts, often in vain, to improve himself. He takes driving lessons, he starts meditating, he tries to get fit, and, most importantly of all, he begins to address his mental health issues.

At the same time, however, he's not lost his habit of kicking bins in anger. That anger seems to have got worse rather than better. A bizarre group of prune juice drinkers and 10k run obsessives he falls in with reveal themselves to be Tories which results in Liam's impassioned rant about David Cameron and George Osborne's austerity policies killing 130,000 people.

Which is fair enough. There's good reason to be angry about the Tories. Less forgivable is the anger he dishes out to friends like Ross (Karan Gill) - whose house he's staying in - and the disrespect he shows other friends like Iona (Abigail Thorn).

More than anything, older Liam is looking back at the life of younger Liam (Oscar Kennedy) for answers as to how he ended up becoming the person he is. In this series, he's looking back at the time him and his friends, Ralph (Samuel Bottomley), Addy (Aqib Khan), and Craggy (Shaun Thomas), got their GCSE results and what that meant for the rest of their lives.

How that shaped the people they would become. While, at the time, their GCSE results were important to them they weren't the number one priority. That was still going to the pub, playing pool, trying to pull girls, smoking joints, and trying to get into nightclubs wearing ridiculous looking ties.

Ralph's still with Rachel (Emily Coates) and the slightly older former bullies Rupert (Nick Preston) and Tinhead (Jordan Pearson) have now morphed into friends. Friends of a sort. Not the best influences but then Liam and the gang hardly need to be dragged into trouble. They're more than capable of finding it themselves.

When Ralph, the first of the gang to turn seventeen, finally gets a car (his grandad's old Vauxhall Astra) the boys manage to accidentally visit a dogging spot, drive to a nearby estate to commit a few random acts of vandalism, and run out of petrol outside a garden full of gnomes.

When Liam's violent streak emerges, it is to the horror of his friends. But then Liam is coming to realise he's different from them. He tries to get in with an "indie lot" (they love Babyshambles but abhor Kasabian) before realising they're no less shallow than everyone else and he seems almost shocked when girls treat him as badly as he treats them.

Creativity and articulacy may give Liam a pass into a different world but they won't help him with his mental health and anger issues. I must admit I felt a little bit 'seen' watching some of these scenes. At other times I was reminded of Michael Apted's game changing and groundbreaking Up series of documentaries which, using a quote variously attributed to Aristotle and St. Ignatius Loyola, contested that the behaviour of children, as young as seven even, would define the behaviour of the adults they would grow into.

I hope that's not completely true. I hope we have some wiggle room to change and improve ourselves. I hope everything is not already written in the stars or beyond our control. Events of course play their part but how we react to them? Surely we can at least control some of that.

Those thoughts make Ladhood sound ponderous and analytical but it's not. It's very funny. Witness a discovery of an old copy of the Sunday Sport in Ralph's now dead grandad's glovebox, Liam mansplaining the word 'mansplaining', or Liam (again) going into a massive rant about wanting to have the living room at 8.30pm so he can watch Uni Challenge. To which Iona casually points out that Only Connect is on before it so he may want to get there half an hour earlier.

There are interesting diversions. Tinhead is due to appear on Eggheads, there's a critical look back at Neil Strauss's pick up bible The Game (its chapters include sections on negging, peacocking, and attraction circuitry projection), and even a brief history of the A1(M) motorway. Most surprisingly of all, there are some genuinely chilling moments when the boys decide to spend the night in a local woods said to be haunted by the ghost of Mary Pannal, a local cunning woman executed for witchcraft in 1603. 

The soundtrack is a bit more diverse than first time round (T.Rex, Steppenwolf, The Cars, and Blue Oyster Cult rub shoulders with more expected customers like The Streets, Arctic Monkeys, Girls Aloud, Sugababes, and Kaiser Chiefs) and there are good supporting performances from James Dryden as hangdog teacher Mr Dreyfus and Shiloh Coke as Suzie, an exasperated film maker whom older Liam employs to make an uncomfortably competitive wedding video.

Though the two quotes that top the piece do both feature in Ladhood S2, they aren't really the essence of the show's message. They're Liam's way of trying to make sense of the way he's lived his life and, like many of us, he's now getting older and trying, at least, to become a better person. If he'll ever manage I don't know. Better get on and watch the third and final series.