Timewasters: definitely not a waste of time

The British comedy about jazz musicians who're transported to the 1920s makes its America debut on IMDb TV.

Review: Why ITV2's Timewasters is worth your time.

With the ability to transport its characters to any time in the past or future, Timewasters has endless possibilities, and its black central cast allows for a new, interesting spin on the time travel genre.

Timewasters is no waste of time

Daniel Lawrence Taylor's sitcom about a time-travelling jazz band is well worth your time.

The third series of this comedy about a gobby group of schoolgirls draws to a close with the end of school prom. Amber (Alice Felgate) has been meticulously organising the foursome's plans for months, but her pals are stressed: Viva (Adelayo Adedayo) is lumbered with the task of making the event into a "tropical paradise" and Saz (Mandeep Dhillon) is fixated on taking a special someone along. Meanwhile, an ill-advised selfie derails Holli's plans to retrieve her mum's jewellery from the pawn shop.

One programme that outstayed its welcome almost as soon as it began was BBC3 sitcom Some Girls. Regular readers of the site will know that I've had a rocky relationship with the show since it first debuted back in 2012. Although I'd really like to see a sitcom that deals with the problems that modern teenage girls face, I've never felt that Some Girls is based in reality.

I'd even be willing to forgive it its lack of laughs and thinly-drawn characters if it had been brought to us by a first-time writer. But instead Some Girls is created by Bernadette Davis, who wrote Game On in the mid-1990s, and therefore has little knowledge of what life is like for teenagers in the 21st century.

The comic mishaps that befall our young heroines in this episode include one of them getting her hand stuck in a letter box and another believing that her sometime boyfriend had gone on witness protection.

Some Girls's saving grace was the central character of Viva (Adelayo Adedayo); a level-headed young woman who I feel was a fine example for teenage girls. But I feel that Davis has somewhat spoilt the character after she agreed to marry her dopey college dropout boyfriend. As we are now in series three, it's also getting harder and harder to believe that our quartet of female protagonists are still only eighteen.

I know that not many teenage characters on TV are actually portrayed by teenagers; but the lead actresses in Some Girls all look like they should at least be at university now rather than hanging round sixth form college. Thankfully, as the foursome are set to depart college in the near future, it looks like this will be the final series of Some Girls and I for one won't be mourning its departure.

The sparky schoolmates sign off their second series of sharply observed comic adventures and there's a sense of growing up and growing apart in the air. For with Viva (Adelayo Adedayo) discovering it's possible to meet a boy who might actually understand her feelings and where she's coming from, the adult world is approaching fast.

Still, before things get too heavy, there's always time to gatecrash a party.