Radio Times review

E4's big drama of the week, My Mad Fat Diary (Mondays) was about the agony of a teen whose struggle to be normal has made her sanity bend and break. Sharon Rooney was Rae Earl, whose real diary has been dramatised and moved from the 80s to 1996. The benefits of this weren't obvious: it made 32 the ideal viewer age, which is a bit old for E4, you'd think, and it wasn't a very careful period piece. Rae lusted after Archie, a hot geek whose spectacles, hair, speech ("Style it out!") and ironic pop covers on choppy acoustic guitar were all completely 2012.

Rae emerged from psychiatric hospital and tried to make friends, with the twin stigmas of her medical history and her size representing the teenage shame of not being able to hide that you're a freak. The "mad" and the "fat" were treated differently: Rae's shape got her into harmless, cartoon embarrassments, like getting stuck halfway down a slide at a pool party, which were immediately forgiven by her suspiciously compassionate new mates. She was better at fitting in than some teens ever are. She got invited to a pool party!

Much more acute were the scenes in the hospital between Rae and her tiny tomboy friend Tix (Sophie Wright). When Rae lost her nerve and broke back into the ward, Tix was tenderly furious that she would think of giving in. That this reaction came from a deep affection, forged by having admitted their terrors to each other, was vividly conveyed by Rooney and Wright and a lot more affecting than the drunken scrapes and lagered Britpop soundtrack in the outside world. We need to get Tix out of there.

Brilliantly holding this Frank-Spencer-In-The-Bell-Jar mash together, though, was future star Sharon Rooney, totally convincing as a teen, as a soul determined to avoid self-destruction, and as the sort of wildly libidinous beast young females rarely are on TV. Rae was the hunter and Archie was the prey: "I'd shag him," said Rae in one of the many salty inner monologues Rooney delivered with extra relish, "till there was nothing left except a pair of glasses and a damp patch." My Mad Fat Diary would be better telly if all the best stuff wasn't going on inside Rae's head, but Rooney created a vibe in which you forgave that and wanted her to win.