The title was enough. I would have watched it just for the perfect title. This WAS my So-Called Life. (More like existence.)
But then there was the TV ad, too. A family sits around the table, talking about nothing, the parents asking the kids how their day was. A teenage girl is staring at her plate, unenthusiastic about the food and the conversation, unable to relate to her mother’s enthusiasm for either. “Sometimes,” we hear her think, “I just want to stab my mother in the hand.” Beat. “With my fork.”
With that one brutally honest pause-interrupted sentence, Angela Chase stole my heart. And she never really gave it back. (Not that I was an angsty teenager or anything.)
My So-Called Life book-ended my sixth form experience. It hit British screens in autumn 1995, and then, after a campaign by J17 magazine (thank you Sarra Manning), Channel 4 deigned to show the series one more time in the summer of 1997, so we could all record it.
Anyone who missed that (or subsequently jettisoned their VCR) found themselves facing a lot of MSCL-less years until it was released on DVD in the late noughties.
And they missed a lot.
This show summed up the teen experience like no other: the hope, the boredom, the disappointment, the hormones. I identified with Angela so much I ached. Not just her boy dramas (I too briefly dated a really good-looking guy who was kind of a cad), but her relationships with her parents, her introspection and worry, and of course her friendships and self-esteem issues (my primary preoccupations as a teenager).
My favourite episode, The Zit, perfectly addresses teen self-consciousness. Like all the episodes, it should be studied by anyone interested in storytelling in any genre. Ostensibly about a pimple which everyone keeps commenting on, thus making Angela more and more sensitive about it, the ep skewers the idea that physical perfection is important and shows our heroine tentatively come to terms with who she is and how she looks (no makeover required - revolutionary, even 16 years later). Even though my own zits were ten times worse than Angela’s, I didn’t resent her: I totally related to her. Claire Danes was uncommonly beautiful, but I couldn’t hold it against her because MSCL showed that life wasn’t easy for any teenager. (Or any adult - her parents are remarkably fleshed out as well.)
Despite what Dawson’s Creek tried to make us believe, most teens aren’t overly loquacious about their deepest fears and feelings, so while I usually see voiceovers as the last refuge of the poor storyteller, in this case, it was a genius decision: the only way we would ever grasp the depth of Angela’s success and failure was to know what she was hoping for.
Angela’s aesthetic also appealed to me: with her deep burgundy bob, baggy plaid shirts and clashing floral or paisley skirts, Angela made my previous “want to be her” crush, Party of Five’s Julia, seem insignificant. I bought a JanSport backpack because of Angela. And a secondhand denim waistcoat.
Then, of course, there was Jordan Catalano. What teenage girl (or grown woman, probably) didn’t swoon when he walked by. “You want to have sex with him,” Rayanne Graf accused Angela. Angela was flabbergasted and stuttered. “Sex… or a conversation. Preferably both.” And we knew, because we knew Angela by this time, that a conversation would be both much more likely, and much more significant.
Angela’s alienation from her best friend Sharon (of her own choosing, because she could no longer relate to Sharon’s simplistic view of the world, her interest in popularity, jocks and cheerleading, her insularity) was a classic teen girl dilemma: how to move on without hurting old friends? Not easy, and Angela didn’t achieve it. But who could blame her for wanting to hang out with the precocious, encouraging, sometimes scary but always interesting Rayanne Graf – and who didn’t want to join her?
I totally related to the desire to cast off old friendships that were hanging on by a thread. By the end of my secondary school experience, I was done with Sarah Swordbill.* True, she was a bigger bitch than Sharon – when she made friends with some of the popular girls, she never invited me to hang out with them – but we kept this veneer of friendship going (which on my part at least was completely fake, just a way to make sure I still had someone to sit with in Spanish class). I didn’t have a friend like Rayanne or Rickie, who wore eyeliner and shocked Angela’s parents with his very existence (“He’s BI? He’s too young to be anything!”).
I did have Linda*, and Charlotte, and Nancy – kind of. When they weren’t hanging out with their boyfriends or their other friends or having one of the hobbies my life always lacked.
And I had a bob. I pulled at my hair while frowning and leaning, on the off-chance this made me look like Angela, or would attract my own platonic Angela. You could say I was lonely, and that the people on TV made more sense to me and understood me better than anyone I had ever met.
You would not be lying.
Every Wednesday afternoon, I worked at a charity shop. It bored me almost to tears and I hated pawing through other people’s old (often dirty) clothes, or ironing them, or having to sell furniture. Any time I was put on the till, it was always the “homewares” till: dealing with customers who wanted wardrobes delivered, plates carefully wrapped in brown paper, or for me to convert centimetres to inches so they could buy some curtains. “WE WENT METRIC BEFORE I WAS BORN, GET WITH IT!” I wanted to scream.
A couple of times a mentally disabled man came in and pawed through the stock (cassette tapes for 25p, silverware 10p apiece etc) before shouting that everything was too expensive. When I shrunk back in alarm he told me to smile “or you’ll never get a boyfriend”. Once a man in a sheepskin coat and sunglasses asked me if we ever “got any coffins in”. I studied his face, sure he was joking. I couldn’t see his eyes but his expression seemed serious. “No,” I told him.
When he came back a few weeks later, I silently slipped off my stool and began tidying the wrapping paper on the shelves underneath. I would wish away the four hours I spent there every week, my reward the next episode of My So-Called Life at 6pm.
My mum sometimes got mad if I didn’t want to watch it with her, thought I was being anti-social. What she didn’t understand was that I could no more enjoy watching the show with her than I would enjoy having her read my diary. MSCL was so intense, so intensely personal, I wanted to keep it a solo experience, not share it with someone who had the ironic detachment of adulthood and thought Angela was over-dramatic and wore her hair in her face too much.
In one episode, Rayanne chastised Rickie for not being patient enough. “Haven’t you ever waited for anything?” And we know what he is going to say already: “Yeah - my life to begin.” I related perfectly. That was why I was working towards a place at university, so my life could begin. Which it did, before mental and physical illness brought it to an abrupt halt and left me stalled for a long time.
Now, age 31, I’m in that place again. Getting ready to study once more (successfully this time, I hope). Waiting for my life to begin. So it’s the perfect time to re-watch MSCL and maybe feel glad I’m not fifteen anymore.
Maybe.
*Possibly not her real name.
