Jess Popplewell on drawing inspiration from Skins and Dante’s Inferno

A few months ago, on Reddit, I saw someone say that the British TV show Skins wasn’t at all representative of mid-2000s youth culture. Instead, this person opined, people should watch The Inbetweeners, which was much more accurate.

I have nothing against The Inbetweeners, but I strongly disagree.

I remember when Skins first landed onscreen. I was sixteen, and at the time I was officially homeless, sleeping on a friend’s bedroom floor and spending lots of time at another friend’s house attempting to stretch out my welcome with the family I was staying with. I sat in someone else’s living room and watched as a dysfunctional, disparate collation of teenagers who were only really friends through the proximity of college partied, shagged, ate hangover breakfasts and cried. And I recognised these people. They were like us.

By “us”, I mean the dysfunctional, disparate collation of teenagers I was only really friends with through the proximity of sitting together in the Museum Gardens every weekend. The bowls players hated us, because we tended to sit under the overhanging roof of their wooden pavilion in case of rain, anywhere up to maybe forty of us, as we discussed who was going out with who, and which of us had most recently fallen out with our parents and did you know Scott [names changed to protect the guilty] did his Art GCSE high on magic mushrooms?

And I, a bookish, reluctantly emo girl with a very high opinion of my creative abilities even then, would sometimes read out the latest angsty story I’d written, all about teenagers with lots of eyeliner having wild, supernatural adventures. Insufferable, truly, but a great training ground for becoming an author. In fact, one of those stories would ultimately become my first book, The Dark Within Us, which I often say was inspired equally by Skins and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno.

And when you think about it, that’s fitting, isn’t it? Dante famously wrote his enemies into Inferno, immortalising their crimes into verse. I haven’t done that with my book – it really is a work of total fiction – but I’ve tried to capture the vibe of my teenage life, immortalising that into prose at least. My main character, Jenny, is sofa-surfing at her auntie’s house when we meet her, and when a demon offers her a deal, he does so at a house party the likes of which I am intimately familiar with from that time.

Sure, Skins is overly dramatic – I mean, it never claimed to be a documentary. But if we’re talking about vibes, I would argue they nailed exactly what I’ve tried to with this book too – it’s just that I’ve also transplanted those mid-2000s vibes to a literal hellscape straight from the mind of a 14th century Italian poet.

The Dark Within Us by Jess Popplewell is out now in paperback (£8.99, Chicken House)