Today's teenagers are scary. They are depressed. They want to be famous. But do the studies offer a true reflection of the generation? At auditions for Skins, the Bafta-winning teen drama, we found they can be ruthless and ambitious, but also polite and fiercely articulate
The line snakes like a loose hair extension, round the upper playground and into the gym, where photos are taken of the 8,000 people auditioning for one of eight lead roles in Skins, E4's hit drama about teens today. It's the last day of the Easter holidays and the sky, in places, is blue, but the crowd's bare legs are coming out in goose pimples. They've travelled from Dublin, from Manchester, from London's south and east. They came on 6am trains. Gates opened at eight.
Every second series, as the Skins characters leave sixth-form college, a new set of students is cast. I am here to help pick series five's new stars, who'll be propelled to huger, terrifying heights by each episode's million-odd viewers come January. A Skins novel came out this year and a Skins film is in production, as is an American pilot, transplanting the story from Bristol to Baltimore. The franchise, a primary-coloured snapshot of contemporary teenage life, is about to explode, and in this north London playground you can sense the excitement. It smells a little like Impulse.
Teenagers today, according to recent surveys, are sad, anxious, isolated, hyper-sexualised. They "ruminate about failure", they sleep with each other before they feel ready, and pass on diseases in the process. They're malnourished, they're violent, they're vulnerable, but "feral"; they're optimistic about money, but at the same time, feel hopeless. They want to be famous, though they don't mind for what ? more than half of British teenage girls would consider a career as a glamour model. They drink. They burn things.
It's almost 10 years since I was a teenager, in suburban north London. The surveys then revealed that page 3 girl Melinda Messenger was the teenager's most-fancied woman, and (as now) Britain produced the most sexually active youths in Europe, despite Labour's "It's OK to be a virgin" campaign. In 1999, 14% of girls were unhappy with their legs, while 10% of boys were unhappy about their height. Top of the Pops was starting its slow decline, and a comment piece in the Guardian mourned the "death of the teenager". Still anxious, still being surveyed ? as my twenties draw to a shivering close, I wonder how my local teenagers have changed in the past decade.
Hollie Hennessy is 16, and nearing the front of the queue with her twin sister. "We've got a band, a sort of indie acoustic group?" she says, head to one side. She's written a song called "Abercrombie Jeans", and I transcribe the lyrics carefully. "You're my best friend, you in your Abercrombie jeans/your voice," (she waits for me to turn the page), "your guitar and me/the beach as the summer rolls in." She's waiting for her break. Deeper into the crowd, I meet 16-year-old Tashan Bonner, who keeps his headphones in as we talk, and leans against the fence, hands in pockets, but with the air of a bee trapped in a pint glass ? excited and nervous. He wants to be famous. "Of course I do. Everything would be so much easier, I'd live like Lady Gaga. I want to see what it's like to have everything you want."
Ambition hovers over the playground like static. Teenagers make eye contact with each other then look quickly away. Recent surveys report that 69% of children have been bullied, a third of teenage girls in a relationship "suffer unwanted sexual acts" and a quarter physical violence. We have the fourth-highest teenage pregnancy rate in the world. It was during my teens that lap-dancing clubs began multiplying. Teenagers felt sad then ? in 1997, 15% of teenagers were depressed ? but studies suggest they're sadder now; in 2006 the Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology journal reported that teenage girls "felt constantly under strain". Perhaps the most striking thing about the surveys of teenagers now is just how many are commissioned: in one month, polls told us that three in four British adults are scared of teenagers; that a third of girls have self-harmed; that a quarter of young teenagers are frequently depressed. They build an image of teenagers as binge-drinking fame seekers who terrify their teachers. How have teenagers changed since my days of polling?
Talking to them in the queue, I'm struck by the endearing combination of arrogance and insecurity, and the lipgloss, worn thick. As a crowd, their hair, highlighted, rises up and veers off to the sides in varying haloes, and as rain threatens it limps a little. Ten years ago I took my English A-Level in this school, William Ellis, in Kentish Town, and as I walk through the doors, the smells, of thrice-lacquered floors and bleach, take me back to my own short teens. I didn't want to be famous then, nor did any of my friends. It wasn't really an option, even in the late-90s, when most things seemed possible.
In the canteen, the show's producers take a break between auditions. The writing panel is made up of teenagers and 21-year-olds, along with 24-year-old Skins co-creator Jamie Brittain. With his dad, screenwriter Bryan Elsley, he conceived the show in 2006, basing the characters on his friends, and creating the teenage "writing room" to keep the language and plots authentic.
"What was I like back then?" Jamie asks his sister, who sits beside him. "Stoned," she says. I ask Elsley how these auditions make him feel. "They always fill me with wonder at the niceness of teenage kids," he says. "I think in real life, they must carefully hide this from their parents and teachers, otherwise why would they be regarded as so problematic?"
It's with an odd mix of resignation and hope that teenagers today are told that they can be whatever they want. Their lives are about auditioning, and then about winning. The Children's Society report discusses the effect of excessive individualism ? "the belief that the prime duty of the individual is to make the most of their own life". If personal success is relative, it suggests, then teens will never lead satisfying lives, as their wins rely on others' failures.
Is it the swell of the internet and the invention of reality TV (two things that shadow the decade since I was 18) that seem to have made today's teenage lives just a little bit harder? Problems were similar, but the knowledge that anyone can be a star if they want it enough certainly seem to stem from the internet and audition shows. But then, too, the teenagers I spoke to were more eloquent than I remember any teenager being back then. As a teenager in the 90s, I felt blank. My diaries were lists of people I hated and CDs I'd bought ? I couldn't have discussed my thoughts (as today's auditionees did) on "respect" or "media pressure", even at gunpoint. Taught to question their motives, to find out "what kind of person they really are", young people now are able not only to locate a feeling but to analyse it, discuss it and learn how to treat it. Is this, as well as being the saddest, the scariest and the least shockable, perhaps, the most articulate generation yet?
In the playground I find Kaya Scodelario, nude-faced, sneaking a cigarette away by the trees. As Effie, she was the only Skins actor to appear in every series, her role growing from surly little sister to drug-dabbing harlot. Today, 18, she swings from the football net and giggles like she's under water. Scodelario came through these open auditions, spotted by Bryan Elsley "looking naughty" in the crowd. We walk slowly towards the queue, and it bristles as a whole, excited. When she leaves, people tell me about it as though there's been a flash storm: "She hugged me! She stood right here." A producer, walking through the gym, asks a crowd if they got their photos taken with Effie. "YES!" they scream. "And how many of you have already put them on Facebook?" They wave their iPhones in the air and bellow, their voices erupting in a cacophonous "ME!"
None of the teenagers I met made it into Skins's final eight for series five. Later that day, I walk down to the tube station in a sea of neon and vague disappointment. On the pavement are a group of 15-year-olds stalling before they have to catch their train. Jake Tyrrell didn't get a callback. "I reckon some people came just to try and get laid. But most wanted to get on telly," he smiles, beginning to peel the audition number off his baseball jacket, "because then everyone else would know that they exist."
Skins begins at 10pm on 27 January on E4. Eva Wiseman is commissioning editor of the Observer Magazine
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