An appreciation by Taylor Parkes

In the old days, when ordinary people got on TV, it was as murder victims or game show contestants. Humiliated by circumstance, or by some wig-wearing mansion-dweller. After a decade of docusoaps and dubious reality shows, little has changed: the general public are interchangeable (except for those whose mental problems might amuse you), there to be sniggered at by gutter-press gutbuckets, sworn at by jumped-up cooks, exposed in the limelight as peons who don't know their place. It's always been the way.

Except that in 1992, there was a series called Teenage Diaries. The BBC handed high-end video cameras to mouthy adolescents, told them to film their lives, then edited the results into 45-minute shows, each subject getting final approval of the finished product. No one was dropped into some contrived situation and poked until they cried, although some cried anyway; Teenage Diaries lurked in the everyday lives of averagely-extraordinary young people and just... watched. The results were painfully real " that is, hilarious, touching, absurd, worthwhile. There was, however, only one star: the unforgettable Chris Needham, whose astonishing programme passed instantly into legend. If anything better has been on TV " ever " I must have missed it.

Everyone between the ages of 14 and 25 watched In Bed With Chris Needham, or that's how it seemed at the time (when the BBC repeated the show shortly afterwards, heavily trailed, anyone who'd missed out caught up). We all recognised Chris, or thought we did, the heavy metal freak in wire-rimmed specs, skinny jeans and jumbo trainers, taking A/S levels in Loughborough and struggling to put a band together with his loyal, hapless mates. Of course, it was easy to laugh. That hair, hanging in clumps like spaniel ears; the proto-moustache, frothy and diaphanous. The callow pomposity and self-importance of youth. The fact that every single second was breathtakingly, painfully funny.

But Needham fans, those of us who've kept the faith for the last decade and a half, wearing out VHS tapes and passing on the legend to new generations, haven't curated this cult because we like to snigger at awkward kids. In Bed With... is better than that. It doesn't just reconnect us with our past " because we were all Chris Needham once " it nails the tragi-comedy of adolescence, like nothing else, fact or fiction, before or since. And just as you can't disown your former self, it's impossible not to like Chris Needham, even as your jaw hangs open and your eyes bulge. Some of this is down to the superb editing, which sharpens the hilarity without scoring cheap points at Chris' expense, but it couldn't have worked without a subject so improbably charismatic, so perfectly imperfect. “I guess I'm just a bit angry,” sniffs Needham, playing air guitar in his darkened cellar. “I'm a bit of an angry young man.” Years pass, and In Bed With Chris Needham just gets better and better.

It's beautifully, brutally authentic. Flat lighting brings out bad skin and hair grease; wintry-pale on unprocessed video, Loughborough looks like Krakow in the 1970s. Chris lopes through a hideous shopping precinct, under skies the colour of a switched-off TV screen. He sits in a Wimpy bar and thrusts a floppy burger at the camera, crumbs falling out of the side of his mouth: “Hey vegetarians " cop this!” He swaggers up to the front window of a terraced house, and his nan's face peers out from the murk of her front room and barks back at him: “What about that bloody fish?” It's set in those last few years before the internet left us over-informed and immobile, before coke orgies for musclebound 14-year-olds, the last time everyone smoked with the windows closed and tried to be self-effacing. A different Britain, pre-dating that simultaneous buffing and cheapening of our culture (achieved in part through reality TV). A place where young people still respond to the sight of a video camera by covering their face in embarrassment. It already looks like another age.

Chris' band " they're called Manslaughter, later changed to Manslorter after too much mispronounciation " are truly horrible, and utterly unaffected. The songs he writes are beautifully generic, substandard metal, their monumental ambition undermined by circumstances (being young and powerless, being a product of the English class system, being no good at music). “Now feel sudden death... from my guitar,” growls Chris on 'Hate Song', raising his Woolworth's Strat copy and launching into a riff so tinny it wouldn't fell a gerbil. When they finally perform, a lunchtime gig in the college hall with the curtains drawn, they are, simultaneously, an appalling shambles and the absolute, ultimate perfection of rock and roll.

At first, half the people I've lured into the Needham cult have refused to believe the thing wasn't scripted. What finally convinced them is that it's just too good. The scene where Chris and then-girlfriend Jane perch on his narrow bed under the Artex ceiling, exchanging Christmas cards, is an odyssey of discomfort, that flurry of furtive glances far too awkward to have been choreographed. Slumped against a chest of drawers, Chris addresses the camera on the subject of climate change: “There are times... and I will say it now... look, you can burn this planet, it's your fault. With any luck, we won't be havin' another generation, OK? I'd rather have the planet burnt, and all you Greens burnt with it... Don't think I don't understand it. Indeed, there are solutions I've come up with myself. But I don't see why I should share these ideas, for the simple reason, impracticality one, and two...” - a slight shrug - “nobody's liable to listen to me.”

Quoting this stuff does not do it justice - you have to watch. The magic only works in context: the scrawny, strange-smelling world of teenage boys, perfectly captured, that inescapable tangle of hope, hopelessness, heartfelt doziness and buggered ambition, flashing between a howl and a horse-laugh. With its startling blend of shabbiness, hilarity and genuine hurt, and its utter lack of glamour, In Bed With Chris Needham is the only authentic document of the British teenage experience, and we can all learn something from it.

Because unlike you or I, this 17-year-old was not a twat. He was a twat savant.

Recently, Quietus writer Al Needham, no relation, interviewed the now thirty something Chris Needham for his excellent magazine Left Lion. For the full story click here.