Bernadette Davis

One programme that outstayed its welcome almost as soon as it began was BBC3 sitcom Some Girls. Regular readers of the site will know that I've had a rocky relationship with the show since it first debuted back in 2012. Although I'd really like to see a sitcom that deals with the problems that modern teenage girls face, I've never felt that Some Girls is based in reality.

I'd even be willing to forgive it its lack of laughs and thinly-drawn characters if it had been brought to us by a first-time writer. But instead Some Girls is created by Bernadette Davis, who wrote Game On in the mid-1990s, and therefore has little knowledge of what life is like for teenagers in the 21st century.

The comic mishaps that befall our young heroines in this episode include one of them getting her hand stuck in a letter box and another believing that her sometime boyfriend had gone on witness protection.

Some Girls's saving grace was the central character of Viva (Adelayo Adedayo); a level-headed young woman who I feel was a fine example for teenage girls. But I feel that Davis has somewhat spoilt the character after she agreed to marry her dopey college dropout boyfriend. As we are now in series three, it's also getting harder and harder to believe that our quartet of female protagonists are still only eighteen.

I know that not many teenage characters on TV are actually portrayed by teenagers; but the lead actresses in Some Girls all look like they should at least be at university now rather than hanging round sixth form college. Thankfully, as the foursome are set to depart college in the near future, it looks like this will be the final series of Some Girls and I for one won't be mourning its departure.

The first series of sixth-form girlcom Some Girls was savaged by some on the basis that it wasn't The Inbetweeners. And fair enough: while the characters were as vacuous and clichéd as their E4 male counterparts, they were seldom as funny. But the opener to this second run suggests a mild reappraisal might be in order. The characterisation has scarcely moved on, but the performances are more confident and Bernadette Davis's writing rings a little truer.

We rejoin the girls shortly after sensible Viva (Adelayo Adedayo, the best thing in it) finds a dead teacher in a store cupboard. Enter an eminently fanciable counsellor (Jonathan Bailey), rapidly courted by bimbo Amber and aggressively on-heat Holli. It's no masterpiece, but its eagerness to please lends it a certain surreptitious charm.

The crude description of Some Girls would be a female Inbetweeners. It's got four crisply differentiated school-age friends and a similar salty take on teenage sexuality and exasperation with the adult world. But the crude description doesn't entirely do justice to what's distinctive about Bernadette Davis's comedy, which is a definite tilt towards drama and sympathy. When the camera catches Holli preparing her siblings' lunch boxes by putting a boiled potato and M&Ms into each one, you're simultaneously invited to laugh at the menu and to feel a little pang at her precocious maternal responsibilities. I'm far too old and male to say whether it's authentically representative of young girls' lives, but there's heart here.

Expect some pearl-clutching tabloid outrage about this. Bernadette Davis's comedy introduces a quartet of girls in their mid-teens who swear, have sex and regularly countermand their mothers and fathers! Yet while parents of girls approaching that age may well blanch, there's some depth to lead character Viva (Adelayo Adedayo), who's rebelling against her dad (Colin Salmon) because he's seeing her school football coach (Dolly Wells).

The script mixes deft set pieces with cheap laughs - the mute girl in a burqa made me uncomfortable - but the direction, by Adam Miller, is consistently great: plenty of swift visual gags and a very funny, lairy girls' football match filmed in slow motion.

This attempt at a female Inbetweeners falls flat

Teenage girls are a lot more complex than their male counterparts so trying to put them into separate boxes, as Bernadette Davis does in Some Girls, just doesn't work so therefore there aren't many laughs to be had as in The Inbetweeners.