Inbetweeners hold off all box office challengers

The Inbetweeners Movie is still the UK's top film after retaining its position at the top of the box office chart for the third consecutive week.

The sense of truthful recognition is at the heart of the success of The Inbetweeners, a cultural phenomenon worthy of serious scientific study. As the television series moves to the big screen and becomes one of the fastest-grossing British comedies ever, it has kept at its heart the relationship between four likely lads on the prowl, trying to make sense of sex and relationships in Britain today.

Beneath the gross language, the poo jokes, and the childish behaviour, it is an extremely accurate and almost emotional study of the relationship between teenage boys, the way they find it hard to express affection except through abuse, their abiding loyalty to their mates, their essential difficulties in growing up.

The showing I attended was full of women, presumably seeking the key to masculinity. What they saw was surprisingly soft-centred and tender - men who find themselves and happiness by beginning to grope their way towards relationships with women, rather than simply groping around their flesh. In a sequence that wonderfully deflates the boys' apparent swagger, Jay and Neil visit a packed nightclub, complete with a very explicit male stripper. They start out pumped up by the sheer outrageous decadence of it all, but gradually their embarrassment becomes more and more intense. "Do you want to go somewhere not decadent?" Neil asks sweetly.

It would be easy to be depressed by the world view expressed by both Outnumbered and The Inbetweeners, the one apparently so shambolic, the other so squirm-makingly crude. But that would be to miss the other quality that, I think, accounts for their popularity. Both start from the premise that family life and growing up is difficult, especially in a fractured world where roles are not clearly defined.

Yet both then offer a model of living that is filled with love. In The Inbetweeners, for example, the boys are sympathetic to Jay, whose father is vile to him. They understand that his actions are conditioned by the lack of love in his life. In Outnumbered, the family functions, providing support and strength for all its members.

We are watching people who love each other cope with an imperfect society, doing their best in a muddling, amoral world. I hope the anthropologist of tomorrow finds that as oddly consoling as I do.

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