Skins turns 10 today.
That's 10 years since those iconic trailers, with teens snogging, shagging and spewing to the tune of Gossip's 'Standing in the Way of Control'.
10 years since Skins parties became a sort of urban myth for the late '00s, with tabloids raging over tales of small shindigs exploding out of control (all thanks to a new-fangled website called 'Facebook').
The series was devised by Jamie Brittain - a student who'd enjoyed "a hedonistic time in Bristol as a teenager" and now found himself "faffing around" at King's College London - and his father Bryan Elsley - a professional writer then best known for creating ITV's rather respectable crime drama Rose and Maloney.
Brittain came up with Skins - or at least what he calls "the very broad strokes" of what the show would become - as a direct response to a string of glossy teen dramas, mostly American, that had dominated the TV schedules in the '90s and early '00s.
Speaking exclusively to Digital Spy, he recalled: "My peers at university would watch things that were ostensibly for young people - Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The OC and Dawson's Creek, and also things like As If and Hollyoaks... and with the exception of Buffy, I hated all of them.
"On reflection, I can see good things in The OC, and even in Dawson's Creek, but back then, they just seemed deeply patronising. Everyone looked so perfect, to the point of actually being really quite unattractive.
"Seth in The OC just drove me crazy - they were aggressively promoting the notion of him as this virgin nerd... but he was one of the sexiest men on television! And he was a man, as well - he was not a teenager!"
These frustrations, coupled with Brittain's desire to see a British teen drama with the wit and bite of his then-favourite show The Thick of It, led to the initial idea of what would become Skins: "Bryan was the one who took all those slightly incoherent notions of what it could be and turned it into something, really."
The original pilot script, written "very quickly" by Elsley, was just as swiftly ordered to series by E4, with a team of young writers - including Brittain and future BAFTA winner Jack Thorne - assembled to start work on a run of nine episodes.
"It was terrifying, really. It was really quite strange. I think I did go a bit power-mad, to be honest."
Finding the Skins cast was "a really long process"
With the notable exception of Nicholas Hoult - who'd been Hugh Grant's cherub-faced sidekick in the 2002 film About a Boy - the majority of the original Skins cast were every bit as fresh-faced and untested as the writing team.
For April Pearson - then head girl at Colston's Girls' School in Bristol - the opportunity to play spirited Michelle Richardson, love interest of Hoult's sociopathic shagger Tony Stonem, came entirely out of the blue.
"I had the weirdest experience, actually. [Skins casting director] Jane Ripley came to my school... I guess she must've seen me do something as part of school drama and asked me to come for an audition, and I thought, 'Yeah, OK, why not?'
"So I got to the first audition and I was really early so I sat down on the curb outside and there was a guy who was also waiting... I was quite flirty when I was 17 and I was being all forward and bubbly... I thought I was being really funny!
"Then we head inside and the auditions start and this guy gets introduced to me as Adam Smith, director of the second block of Skins. I was like, 'Oh shit! Oh god, April, you idiot!'"
Looking back, this very Skins-esque incident might seem like a good omen - but Pearson says that landing the part of Michelle was "a really long process" that involved at least eight auditions.
"They were trialling out which groups of people worked together and who had chemistry with who, so it was a long process, but the day I got the call from [producer] Chris Clough saying that I'd got the part was a good day!"
"It was really weird seeing billboards of myself sat on the toilet with a lollipop in my mouth."
"Don't forget, at the time, E4 wasn't even really a proper channel," Pearson says. "Friends was maybe their biggest thing - and they'd never ever produced anything themselves, so this was breaking new ground.
"We didn't even know if anyone would watch, or what we were doing! Especially in the first series, we had no idea of the kind of impact we were gonna have. We were just a group of mates having fun making a TV show.
"It was really weird seeing billboards of myself sat on the toilet with a lollipop in my mouth outside my school... and I was head girl at the time, so they were not happy about that!"
Once Skins launched - on January 25, 2007 - it became abundantly clear just how big an impact the series was having. It was a ratings hit for the fledgling E4 and while some objected to its portrayal of casual sex and casual drug use, most critics responded warmly to its fresh and innovative approach to teen storytelling.
"Dawson's Creek just had the characters describing their feelings endlessly - but Bryan really, more than I did, had this emotional, sensitive, affectionate way of writing teenagers," says Brittain.
"John Hughes obviously nailed it every single time, but I think Bryan nailed it in a way that possibly people hadn't done in recent times. That is the original thing we did, rather than there actually being anything notionally or conceptually original about the show itself."
"The show was so successful - we had leeway to do whatever the f**k we wanted and no-one gave a shit."
The huge popularity of the series afforded the Skins team an enormous sense of freedom - and if fans were taken aback by a first series finale that featured a surreal musical interlude, with the cast performing Cat Stevens's 'Wild World', then that was nothing compared to the dark and surreal turns that the show would take in its second series.
Brittain cites the dreamlike episode 2.6 - which follows Tony on a most unusual university open day - as the purest example of how wild the show was allowed to be.
"I wrote that one, it was the second episode I'd written, and at the time, because the show was so successful, we had leeway to do whatever the f**k we wanted and no-one gave a shit.
"There's all sorts of strange shit going on... and even though, looking at the episode now, it doesn't quite get to where it's reaching - I am not David Lynch - it's nice that we could try things out and be a bit weird and a bit strange.
"We had this real privileged position, which can't be understated, and I'm still very grateful for it. We were afforded so much freedom and it was only when our audiences started dropping in series five and six that anyone started to interfere at all, really."
Pearson says that the same sense of freedom and unfettered creativity applied to the show's young cast, too - which gave their performances a sense of naturalism amidst the madness.
"I think the beauty of that series was finding these actors who had no experience and were just putting themselves out there and being completely vulnerable on-screen. If someone asked me to play Michelle now, it'd be really hard to find that character again, without overthinking it and being too actor-y about it."
"Bringing in a new cast started to feel like a distinct possibility..."
All good things...
With the original Skins cast only contracted for two years, Elsley decided to reinvent the show entirely for its third series - a decision part-inspired by the casting of Kaya Scodelario as Tony's younger sister Effy.
"We had someone else as Effy right at the beginning and then things didn't quite work out with that actress," Brittain recalls. "So we ended up casting Kaya, who was a little bit older than the person we'd had, and we realised that after two series, she'd be the right age to be leading a cast of another Skins.
"I think the idea frightened Channel 4 a little bit, because they had a very popular hit on their hands and wanted to keep everyone there, but Nick wanted to go off and do Hollywood films and Dev Patel was shooting Slumdog Millionaire by the time series two ended.
"Bringing in a new cast started to feel like a distinct possibility - and then, in the way we always did on Skins, we just thought, 'Ah, f**k it, let's just try it!' and that was that, really."
Pearson remembers that the decision to revamp Skins was made "without [the cast's] involvement" - but calls it "the best decision [the programme makers] could've made".
"We were told at the beginning of series two that we wouldn't be returning for a third, and actually I think it was a really brave decision. On shows like The OC and Dawson's Creek, once they're not a friendship group anymore... what's the point of the show?
"The dynamic and the beauty of the show is how the main characters interact with each other. So changing it every two years kept things fresh and meant the show kept finding a new audience. There was always a younger audience waiting for their generation of Skins."
"I think there's a good chance it'll come back one day."
10 years on and Pearson says she continues to receive hundreds of messages from Skins fans, from all over the world: "Every. Single. Day. It's absolutely crazy."
But the world in 2017 looks very different to how it did it 2007 ("We were using flip-phones, for God's sake!") and while fans remain passionate about the series, she doubts a Skins reunion reuniting Generation One will ever come off.
"The problem is, we can never recreate what it was. We're all so much older now, so it could only ever be... hopefully not a disappointment, but it would be a very different show. I think some things are best left where they are and I think Skins might be one of those."
But Brittain - who saw his original idea spawn seven series, online shorts, spin-off novels and a short-lived US remake - is more optimistic. While he emphasises that there are absolutely "no plans" for a Skins revival right now, he thinks the show's format is "flexible enough" to be revamped again.
"One of the great things about Skins was it existed just before social media really started taking over things, we didn't have to deal with that as much as shows now do...
"It's just a different world we live in now. So there would have to be a significant amount of reformatting of what Skins is, beyond its basic remit. But I think there's a good chance it'll come back one day. There's no discussions at the moment... but things are always coming back, aren't they?"
All 7 seasons of Skins are available to watch now on All 4 at http://www.All4.com/programmes/skins.
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