Analysis Of Kidulthood And Skins

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the British youth generation, especially those British films and TV series. Media analysts pointed out that people absorbed the information transmitted from media texts, which might have impact on the audiences’ behaviour. That is to say, the representation of media texts is playing an important role in the society. In lots of British media texts, such as Kidulthood and Skins which are going to be compared and contrasted in this paper, the image of British youth generation is depicted as juvenile, violent, aggressive, idle, drugs addictive, having sexual behavior in early adolescence and causing trouble to the community. Therefore this present study is not only aimed at finding the similarities

One of their similarities is that stereotypical representation has been portrayed in two media texts. Both of them represent male and female teenagers and most of them are portrayed in negative ways. Kidulthood is a British film from 2006 directed by Menhaj Huda, it is about 24 hours in the lives of a group of 15 years old teenagers and what happens when they get the mourning day off of school due to one of their classmates committing suicide. The main themes of this film is about drug and alcohol abuse, violence and gun crime. Skins is a British teen TV series from 2007 directed by Paul Gay, focuses on the crazy lives of a group of crazy young people whose life are full of sex, drug, alcohol and party. It is apparent that the representation of British youth generation is stereotyped as chavs in both Kidulthood and Skins. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, "chav" is defined as an informal British derogatory, meaning "a young lower-class person who displays brash and loutish behaviour and wears real or imitation designer clothes". This is a very typical stereotype of “teenagers today” as they are portrayed

Since audiences from different social class background are likely to be targeted, the teens in Skins range from middle to upper middle class. They all live wealthly comfortable lives, but most of them are lack of emotional support from their family. As expected in a modern media text aimed at young audiences, there is a diversity of characters: a black called Jal, the most studious; the Muslim, Anwar; the gay, Maxxie. These are all fully rounded characters whose behavior is not simply motivated by their ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. Clearly, social groups in Skins are divided among a wide variety of races, religion, and sexual orientation, which also proves that UK society is reasonably democratic, as the pluralist theory suggests. Pluralists see society as a complex of competing groups and interests, none of them predominant all of the time. On the contrary, in Kidulthood, the protagonist Trevor appears to come from a working class background, as do many of the characters encoded within the narrative, which is likely to target audiences from working class backgrounds. There are also characters encoded into the narrative, which come from an upper class background, such as Katie and Blake, so they may also attract audience from an upper class background. In terms of race, white, black and mixed race characters are presented in Kidulthood as