Some Girls

Some Girls is basically a teen girls' take on The Inbetweeners, complete with profanity, banter, sex, swearing, violence and football. The setting, however, is no salubrious suburb but an inner city estate, lending a little more edge, as well as a more varied culturally mix, to proceedings.

The comedy is frequently broad and sometimes blunt, but the relationship between the quartet of friends is well observed and firmly rooted in recognisable, realistic emotions. I wasn't particularly taken by the show's use of voice-over narration, but I was extremely impressed by the narrator - Adelayo Adedayo, as Viva, is a real find. Colin Salmon, who recently waltzed off Strictly Come Dancing, plays Viva's firefighter dad.

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.

"Just because we live on an estate, doesn't mean we're all single mums with drug problems ... I mean, obviously some of us are," says Viva, pointing at her friend Mel. Amber is the dizzy one. Holly is violent and Saz is sarcastic. They all play for the same school football team and banter for England. It's that brand of jaunty depravity made popular by Shameless but Febrezed thoroughly and nicely delivered by the young cast. Plus Dolly Wells is brilliant as their sadistic New Zealand PE teacher. In this opening episode Viva storms out when her dad and his new girlfriend make an announcement.