This year Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging turns 10 – the same age I was when the film was first released in 2008 (in cinemas that still sold reasonably priced tickets). It only seems like yesterday that a large audience of pre-teen girls discovered this homage to the travails of teenage life. Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging was the lovechild of two novels by Louise Rennison: Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging (1999) and It’s OK, I’m Wearing Really Big Knickers (2001). Despite the elaborate title, the film realistically schooled girls on what life was like: we were about to become spotty, hormonal teenagers but we would learn to love ourselves.
Why is it that 10 years later, we millennials are still talking about a film that followed the life of a normal girl and not much else? In fact, 2008 was a boom year for coming-of-age films. Disney Channel debuted Camp Rock, which drew 8.86m viewers on its first day. (Ask the majority of 20-25-year-olds and they’ll remember the agonising final scene, where Demi Lovato sings This Is Me and we all cry because we know Joe Jonas is going to come on stage and sing with her. It was a big deal.) Wild Child was released the same year, and a large numbers of pre-teens begged their families to send them to a boarding school so they could be like Emma Roberts.
Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging showed up in July, the start of the summer holidays – but it was no Cliff Richard singalong, it was the real deal. No going to a summer camp and meeting rock stars, no going to boarding school. Fourteen-year-old Georgia Nicholson (played by Georgia Groome) wants a boyfriend … and that’s the plot of the film. A conventional teenage girl who goes to a typical high school, set in harmonious Eastbourne. She does’t have a famous father or a model mother, she was simply one of us. And when it comes to coming-of-age films, that’s what the audience wants, a connection between the main character and themselves.
There’s an elephant in the room with coming-of-age films: none of the characters really want to grow up. Angus centres itself on the burning issue of body image, and confronting puberty straight on with a Venus razor in hand. One of the key moments in the film is when Georgia and her friends, who label themselves “the ace crew”, take part in “The Physical Attractiveness Test”. This lighthearted act is damaging and very common within friendship groups. Watching the film as a 10-year-old, unaware that someone might care to rate my nose out of 10, I was puzzled.
Viewed with hindsight, the film presents the upsetting truth of how appearance-conscious young people are, while teaching us not to give a flying one what other people think – even if the graphic slurping sounds of Georgia’s snogging lessons put a lot of 10-year-olds off making the move. Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging taught me, that while I might argue with friends, take boys out of the equation and we might get along better. At the end of the film, Jas rips another girls breast pads out of her dress for being horrible to Georgia and their friendship is rekindled. It’s not a fairytale where all girls are magically friends with one another, but it does reveal how girls can fall out over petty things and still reconcile by the end.
Ten years on and the film is still inspiring audiences to dress up as olives and not to shave their eyebrows. What did the film teach us millennials? To be ourselves, have a laugh and ignore all the seriousness of adult life until we were at least 16. But what it never taught us, was why Libby puts Angus in the fridge. I guess that’s something for the sequel, if there ever is one.
