How do teenagers have a watercooler moment? In a chatroom, or with a BlackBerry full of downloaded interactive opinions with clips? Since the drama series Skins (E4) was aimed at them, they’ve probably shared their verdicts on its MySpace website, part of a marketing strategy to hook viewers who switch channels as fast as they can text. The trailers also suggested a provoking brew of sex, drugs and feral youth. As it turned out, amid the expletives and dilated pupils, any gratuitous nudity came from the adults.

Perhaps the most shocking sight was Harry Enfield’s pot belly as the ranting father of Tony (Nicholas Hoult), the ringleader for a bunch of 16 and 17-year-olds at a sixth-form college in Bristol. They were so neatly variegated — the pretty one, the anorexic one, the gay one and so on — that you wanted to put them in detention in The Breakfast Club.

These were well-off kids whose extra-curricular activities included tap-dancing and playing the clarinet. As Tony explained to his geeky friend Sid (Mike Bailey), he couldn’t possibly score some weed for a posh party because he had t’ai chi, a choir audition and a psychology class. Far too busy, then, to go joy-riding on an inner-city crack estate.

The series’ pre-publicity has also highlighted that the average age of the team advising and writing for the series is 22. This opening episode was initially like an immature show-off as we saw Tony’s morning routine of watching his “I like to be seen naked” neighbour, winding up his dad, reading Sartre on the loo, and acting as the mobile reveille for his mates as he headed to college. It was like watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with the charm replaced by pettiness and arrogance.

Tony’s mission was to find a girl to “de-cherry” Sid and “give him the keys to the furry kingdom”. Tony often spoke like that and you wanted to slap him. Hoult, in a determined bid to banish his tag as “that kid from About a Boy”, did a decent job of being insufferably smug. You already want Tony to crash and burn later in the series. Once he had hooked up Mike with Cassie (Hannah Murray), a space cadet with eating disorders, the laddish strutting gave way to more involving drama and a relationship of tentative emotions and missed opportunities, nicely played by Bailey and Murray.

The script was good at capturing that mix of wanton self-absorption and vulnerability that makes parents want to wring their kids’ necks and hug them almost at the same time. But the portrayal of the adults jarred. Understandably on the periphery in this teenage world, they were stock figures — the over-emotional “progressive” teacher, the tweedy authority figure — to be laughed or sneered at.

Perhaps that’s why comic actors have been cast as the parents — Neil Morrissey and Arabella Weir follow Enfield next week. Still, they add to the sense that the series’ primary aim is to entertain rather than raise issues with a helpline number at the end.

More importantly, it shows heart rather than a blanket “Whatever!” cynicism that makes it worth watching for the Space Invaders generation as well as the MySpacers.

The Convention Crasher (Channel 4) was also a pleasant surprise. Justin Lee Collins, the leonine shouter on The Friday Night Project, displayed an engaging nervousness that balanced his usual badgering bonhomie as he prepared a Tom Jones impression for a celebrity impersonators’ convention in Florida. This was Stars in Their Eyes meets Faking It.

Rejecting his mentors’ idea to exploit his “fat Barry Gibb” looks, he followed his belter instincts that produced a decent Jones (and not a bad Alison Moyet); his Jonesian renditions of Teletubbies and Postman Pat might well have charted as a novelty single in the 1970s.

At the convention, it was touching to see the mutual support among the impersonators, though one wondered if this extended to rival lookalikes as we never saw the five Marilyn Monroes in attendance having a group hug. Collins did a spirited It’s Not Unusual and even got some bookings. But I kept wondering what audiences get out of this kind of ersatz entertainment — especially when a “Neil Diamond” advising Collins had a wig and make-up that made him look more like Action Man.

Then it hit me as underwear hit Collins’s Jones on stage. There’s a certain freedom in not straining to keep up the pretence that you’re hip and up-to-date, that your musical taste stopped 20 or 30 years ago and you’re OK with it. When the kids in Skins grow up, they’re going to feel so relieved.

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