Some Girls

Second series for the knockabout teen comedy-drama set at Greenshoots Academy. Viva, Amber, Saz and Holli return as the thoroughly adorable foursome at the centre of this snappy saga. It's more comedy than soap, and the excellent Dolly Wells particularly shines as their sadistic Kiwi PE teacher. Tonight, Viva thinks her relationship is getting too serious, while Saz wants to kill everyone in the school, and Amber and Holli fight over the new school counsellor. Really nicely done.

A welcome return for the sassy south London school comedy that charts the ups and downs of adolescence as negotiated by best mates Viva, Amber, Saz and Holli. They kick off with a light-hearted game of playground favourite 'would you do it with?' but it's not long before relationship issues rear their troublesome head: should Viva dump fit-but-dim Rocky? Her mates are no help, they're too busy obsessing over the hunky new school counsellor...

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.

Some Girls - Series 2 review

The BBC Three sitcom has made some improvements but is just as unfunny as it was last year.

That classic tale of an evening's babysitting fraught with mishaps gets an update, with Viva's mates keeping her company while she looks after a gravel-voiced devil child. Their night doubles as an end-of-Brandon party that Viva's arranged to help Amber get over her ex, and when a bottle of red wine and a sex toy are involved it can only end in disaster. Viva's not the only one with problems: her dad (Colin Salmon) is getting booty texts from a mystery admirer, Saz is being bullied by a group of bitchy girls, and Holli's worrying that the booze might run out.

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.

The Inbetweeners have nothing on these schoolgirls. It's one thing being foul-mouthed and sex-obsessed in a middle-class suburb: quite another on an ugly council estate where teenage pregnancy, drug addiction and masturbation are dropped into conversation as casually as the weather.

While that may not sound like a bundle of laughs, you can't help but empathise with Viva, the main character. She's the sole voice of reason in this amoral world, although not above a bit of deliciously puerile banter with her mates (usually at the expense of wide-eyed, dim-witted Amber).

Tonight, Viva reluctantly agrees to hide a stolen hamster, with icky consequences, and Amber investigates her new boyfriend's enigmatic past.

It's a Hat Trick production, so despite occasionally feeling like a risqué kids' TV show filled with sex, swearing, drugs, more sex, lots more swearing and, er, dead hamsters, there's real talent emerging in this new comedy about a group of sixth-form schoolgirls, not least in the script. After last week's opener introduced us to a cast that felt hard to connect with, tonight's storylines - revolving around Amber's mysterious new boyfriend from Hove ('although strangely, he doesn't have a Welsh accent'), Holly's determination to get little brother Armani a pet for his birthday, and narrator Viva coming to terms with her new mother's pregnancy - offer some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments. On top of that, gentle character development is subtlely beginning to give the girls personalities and make them more likeable. A standout scene with the four girls in a café is played so well it could be a flashback in Sex And the City, and the closing scene will have the most cynical going 'ahhhh' before the fast turnaround to a very funny close. Could well be a grower.

Something light on realism was BBC3's new comedy Some Girls, which wouldn't matter if it weren't equally featherweight on laughs. I rather liked the premise - four inner-London teens playing on a women's football team chimes with these post-Olympics times - but it turned out to be a weird mixture of right-on correctness, with its multicultural line-up, and half-hearted irreverence. Teenage mothers swigging cider and dropping ash on their babies were stereotypes that worked to no particular end. Still, lurking below the surface was some kind of positive message about friendship, even if at times it felt less like the view of an out-of-touch adult than that of someone who had never been to planet Earth. I still preferred it to the creepy, sexed-up version of teenhood that is Skins.