TV review: The Inbetweeners

Ah, THEY grow up so fast don't they? One minute they're just cheeky little tykes, sneaking up under the radar to win an unexpected Bafta. The next they're, well, cheeky little tykes who with three successful series about being unsuccessful with girls are now too late-20s-ish to get away with it any more (apart from the inevitable spin-off movie).

Shame, because it's been a good run for The Inbetweeners, a cheerfully vulgar, painfully recognisable trot through the pain of being a middle-class schoolboy from a nice family. And in painfully earnest Will, hapless romantic Simon, bleedin' liar Jay and deeply dim Neil, the show had a classic sitcom quartet.

But they had to end before it became too ridiculous that none of them could manage to persuade even one girl to snog them. Over this last series, there were almost-girlfriends and near-encounters, culminating in Neil's surprising revelation that he had managed to actually have sex, with some menopausal woman from the meat counter in Asda.

The series could have ended with some of them going off to university, but chose instead to have Simon's family decide to move to Wales, inducing an unlikely amount of pained tantrum on his part - surely at his age, he'd be moving out soon anyway?

But it did allow for one final twist in the astonishingly nefarious scheme secretly run by the love of his young life, family friend Carly, who throughout has been cruelly keeping him on a string, while insisting that she doesn't think of him that way.

On hearing that he's moving away, she magnificently dealt the final blow by implying that if only he were staying, they would finally have got together - which would never, ever happen, unless the people making the film really screw things up. This induced the last of his demented freak-outs, as Simon climbed up the wall of her house, into her room and plighted his love to what turned out to be her traumatised little brother, almost winning him a place not in her affections but on the sex offenders register.

Pretty funny, and well played by Joe Thomas who is adept by now at pulling anguished faces, but not quite as gaspingly excruciating as this series' over-the-top opener, in which Simon's efforts to woo her resulted in accidentally exposing himself in front of the whole school. And maybe that's another reason that it's for the best that The Inbetweeners has ended, because there's only so many times that gross-out comedy can keep lowering the bar.

So, when the four friends decided to celebrate his last weekend before moving by going camping, it inevitably ends in disaster. There was going to be mass puking (from undercooked sausages, not booze) and obscene joke texts sent from each other's phones and of course the car was going to end up in the lake.Even the characters hardly bothered trying to stop it, having understood the laws of hapless lads in sitcoms.

Still, it may have been predictable, but there were still some funny lines, like Neil's complaint that the countryside was boring: "It's just a load of fields and rivers and that and they just sit there, it's not like London Dungeon where things jump out at ya."

True, much like most adolescence, but they'll miss it when it's gone.