The Inbetweeners 2

So what really goes on in a teenage boy’s mind? Well, I have been one – and I urge you to think twice before asking. As Oscar Wilde said with glorious understatement, ‘The truth is rarely pure’.

It is nevertheless a question that The Inbetweeners series, first as a sitcom and subsequently in two feature films, has long been answering in gut-wrenchingly graphic detail.

The television series followed the hilarious lows, lows and further lows of a quartet of smutty schoolboys stumbling through that awkward transition from childhood to adulthood. That spawned a hugely successful feature film, which took the lads on an alcopopfuelled odyssey to Crete, and now this, its sequel, in which now university-aged Will (Simon Bird), Jay (James Buckley), Simon (Joe Thomas), and Neil (Blake Harrison) head Down Under – and no, they certainly don’t waste that gag.

Let me be clear: if you are of a nervous, sensitive or squeamish disposition, The Inbetweeners 2 is absolutely, categorically not for you. You will never look at your sons or grandsons in the same way again.

But if you really do want to spend 90 minutes trapped in the young man’s mind – even just as an experiment – book now. For while the humour is tripledistilled, rebooted Benny Hill – in one extended sequence, Will, his rising panic palpable, is chased down a flume at a water park… by a sizeable nugget of human stool – it is genuinely, painfully funny. I laughed so much that I forgot to eat my ice cream.

For what sets The Inbetweeners aside is its truth. Yes, the characters ultimately are grotesque caricatures, but their fantasies and humiliations, delusions and despairs are often painfully, cringingly real. Beyond all the boob jokes and bluster, each Inbetweener in turn reveals his soppy, lip-trembling vulnerability: that he really just wants to be accepted, respected, loved. Ahh. It is the plight faced by every teenage boy – and the film is all the funnier for it.

In one excruciating scene, for example, Will, encircled by an audience of painfully earnest backpackers, serenades his love interest (Emily Berrington) with a falsetto, almost-in-tune rendering of Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I saw Your Face. You literally can’t look; it’s just too terrifyingly believable.

Despite the films’ massive, and largely unexpected boxoffice success, it seems unlikely that there will ever be a third film.

Age creeps up on us all and the four actors can’t play an ‘Inbetweener’ forever. It is a pity. One can only wonder – with a shudder – what will happen to Will, Jay, Simon and Neil when they finally enter the world of work.

Just hope and pray that they don’t apply for a job near you.