We forget what it is like to be a teenager, as unteenagers. We forget the sheer, throbbing, agonisingly frantic desire of it all: the way your brain seems to be pulling apart in as many directions as your muscles are; the craving for money and freedom and a provisional driving licence. To be a teenager is to have your brain stretched thin and pinned to a rack and have someone whisper “Harry Styles” to you in a way that makes you die and live at exactly the same time. It’s to really care about posters and shoplifting and still get a thrill of illicit excitement every time you hold a lighter. It is an emotionally fragile time, is what I’m saying. You have no empathy and most of your emotional complexity is expressed through shutting a door really, really hard. This is what adulthood teaches us to forget.
Good, then, that Just Tattoo of Us (MTV, 10pm, Monday) is back, the glossiest and most bombastic of TV’s one million tattoo-based franchises, and also the closest synthesis to inhabiting the pent-up mind of a teen currently available. If you are unfamiliar with the show: members of the public go to a studio that looks as if police just cleared a rave out of it, to get a tattoo. The tattoo is designed by the partner you came in with and so, quite often, it is the worst possible design in the universe. Geordie Shore’s Charlotte Crosby, as host, yells at the audience throughout with the perennial energy of a girl you just met in the smoking area who’s lost all her mates. And the whole thing has the same giddy feeling as learning that a friend of yours has their house free for the weekend and finding out another friend’s older brother will get you all some Vodkat.
This is the joy of Just Tattoo of Us, though: diluting the attention span of the teenage brain into something that can be half-watched for 47 minutes, plus adverts. In many ways it’s a bit like getting waterboarded by a Ministry of Sound compilation: exhausting, frenetic and bulging with the excitable energy of being young.
This week, two lads emotionlessly try to prank each other with the worst tattoo they can think of (spoiler: a fake six-pack and a unicorn crapping out a rainbow); a mother–daughter combo ink each other with the thing they both most go on at each other about (cleaning; makeup) and two best friends share a genuinely tender moment. There is a joy to watching people with no fear of consequence or responsibility: not one of the young people on this show has ever had to think about making a sandwich to take with them to work, or asked HR for one of those special back-support cushions. None of them have had to cut caffeine out of their diet. None of them have bought a skipping rope late at night on Amazon in a frantic attempt to lose weight, or switched from butter to a plant-based spread. They have, none of them, been coloured by the unmistakable greyness of adult life, and that is something to rejoice in.
Charlotte Crosby is edging nearer, now, shouting: “DO YOUS WANT TO GET A TATTOO WITH US?” And you take two swigs of Malibu from the bottle you’re sat on a swing clutching, and tell her: “I do.”
