There is a reason why writing teenage girls is hard. It’s because you’re not just writing one character, you’re writing a flat-share. They’re all living in the one brain, like oestrogen-ed up Young Ones. They have the body of a woman and the brain of a child, or a toddler on Sunny-D, or a world-weary sea captain sucking on a fag and staring into the abyss. They can go from Jessica Rabbit to Josef Mengele within one X Factor ad break. Which is why they’re utterly brilliant, of course, and should be documented for always.
This week, Channel 4 shows Ellen, an unflinching closeup of a neglected 14-year-old girl in London. The first work by writer Sarah Quintrell, it’s a sparse study of a vulnerable girl slipping through the cracks. Ellen is what happens when you follow the rowdy, twerking, terrifyingly confident girls off the top deck of the bus, and round the corner into the quiet moments, the creeping silences and bad choices.
Ellen, played by Jessica Barden, is a gobby, paint-huffing hellion, friendless and flailing as her gran dies in the box-room and her mother parties with a bleak conga-line of awful men. Kidulthood’s Jaime Winstone is terrific casting as Ellen’s neglectful mum, looking more like her knackered big sister than a parent. You understand immediately how every character has got here.
Ellen is torn between her new friend Kayla, who appears to have the life she wants, and Jason, a morally ambiguous “bigger boy” who can offer her free iPhones and cocaine. It’s a brutal 90 minutes, as adulthood is figuratively and literally thrust upon her. I won’t lie – it’s a rough watch. Ellen is what happens when no one takes the time to hear the “help me” behind the “fuck off”. But the moments when it grasps you by the heart are the glimpses of teenage normalcy: Ellen and Kayla discussing pubic hair (“I just got ’em, I’m not cutting them off again”), doing make-overs and yelling off railway bridges because it feels good to do that.
As a comedy nerd, I grew up on a diet of Freaks and Geeks, Darlene from Roseanne, Daria, and even the equal-opportunities mankiness of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. Today’s teens, especially working-class ones, might have a harder time finding LOLs-galore female #squadgoals. Caz and Caitlin Moran’s bafflingly cancelled Raised By Wolves was a gloriously weird and un-glamorous gawp at awkward girl-teendom, an Adrian Mole for millennials. Fleabag, Girls and Netflix’s Lady Dynamite offer young women a wonky roadmap into adulthood – don’t worry, they say, we haven’t got a fucking clue either. But we still have a laugh.
Comedy Central’s fist-bitingly brilliant Broad City and Inside Amy Schumer show that comedy with women isn’t necessarily “women’s comedy”. If it’s funny, they will watch it; if you build it, they will come.
I put a question to my friends, who absorb higher quality television than me – the quinoa dramas full of slow-release intellectual energy. I asked if anyone could recommend recent dramas about young women. A list came back: Thirteen, Murdered By My Boyfriend, Victoria. Victims, corpses or corsets. If the only time we see a modern young woman is when she’s having a really terrible time, no wonder no one wants to commission it. “God that sounds awful – can we do something about zombies instead?”
But there is a sea-change coming, thanks as usual to cold-blooded commerce, as the way we watch telly has changed (in the hetero-normative household at least). In the streaming age, women pick the programmes. We’re still flappingly out of control in most areas of life, but by crikey, we rule the remote control.
The more diversity there is in commissioners, producers and writers, the less it becomes like panel-show quota ticking “do we have one of those?”, and more just people who want to see themselves on TV, who would like it if the shows they’re making took eight seconds to consider if this character has to be a bloke. (This is called “doing a Ripley”, after the decision to cast Sigourney Weaver in the lead role in Alien, immediately making the film more interesting.)
This is why we have a Game of Thrones full of Ayra and Sansa Starks and Daenerys Targaryen, influencing a generation who don’t think they’re powerful and interesting despite being young and female, but because of it. Orange Is the New Black and Transparent couldn’t be more about “being a woman”, but they are beloved by all genders, and reviewed and lauded with awards in the same manner as our important man-dramas about man-angst (The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men etc). But terrestrial television is starting to look a bit creaky if its only young lady-leads are dying or having a terrible time.
Because what’s actually shocking about Ellen is that it’s rare to see a show spend this much time with any young girl. Ellen is about a victim – and an important watch because of it – but it also serves to show how rarely we get to see the other side of being a young woman: the brilliant, giggling, un-apologetically weird bits.
We need more of this. To quote Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, when asked how his character writes women so well: “I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.” Well, doesn’t that sound like the sort of thing that makes really interesting telly?
Ellen is on Channel 4 on 1 September at 10pm.
