Gap Year (TV series)

In english class we watched the first chapter of a TV serie called Gap Year. Gap Year is a comedy about young boys and girls who are into a gap year, starting in China and travelling through Asia. It tries to capture the feelings of the young people who travels innto an unknown place, specially young people, because young people discovers things about themselves and not just about the world. The series has moments of happiness, of crazyness, of pain and of disperation.

Here there are two reviews of the series: 

Theguardian

Ugh, travellers. As in young people who go off round Asia or South America or wherever, with their Lonely bloody Planet guides, in search of mind-broadening new experiences. Like these people in Gap Year (E4).
I had one once, a gap year – actually about five years – and I hated myself, too, as well as all the other people doing it. But I have often thought that it’s been neglected as a source of comedy. Now Plebs (huge guilty pleasure!) writer Tom Basden is putting that right.

“You’re all into the same shit,” the older, drunker travel writer lady tells Dylan and Sean on the plane to Beijing. Exactly, though some things have changed since my travelling days. There are mobile phones and the internet, so everyone is basically in touch wherever they are.

Some things seem to be the same though, reassuringly – such as travellers are still obsessed with their own bowel movements, literally into the same shit, the consistency and frequency thereof. And ticking stuff off, attractions, experiences. And finding the real India, Vietnam or Bolivia; so it becomes a kind of competition about how far you can get away from other people just like you in search of authenticity. I once spent a night in a filthy hovel on a very untouristy (possibly because of the adjacent oil refinery) island off Venezuela while a burly, rummed-up fisherman attempted to have sex with me. All night. Very real, but also really horrible. And his boat was the only way off the island … Anyway, that’s a different story.

Basden has put together a nice cast of characters. Sean’s an amiable English lad, on a lad’s trip, with his old mate, escaping from the humdrum of his life at home. He’s actually a wheely suitcaser, as opposed to a backpacker, and would be better off in Thailand than China, as the travel writer on the plane said. But Dylan has brought him to Beijing, on false pretences as it happens: he’s stalking his ex (on her “track my run” app, ha, nice touch).

Read more at Theguardian

Chortle

Part of the reason they end up unfamiliar places is because Dylan (Anders Hayward) is going to quite extreme lengths to stalk his ex-girlfriend, dragging his unaware pal Sean (Ade Oyefeso) halfway around the world under false pretences. The pair quickly encounter a couple of girls, May (Alice Lee) and Ashley (Brittney Wilson), and the central characters are set… although there’s a little more fleshing out to be done.

If you didn’t know the people behind Gap Year, E4’s new comedy about students backpacking around East Asia, you might expect a broad parody of some upper-class Tarquin blundering around like a culturally insensitive tornado.

But Tom Basden’s script feels a little more like the genuine experiences of twentysomethings setting out on their first big adventure. The fact it was genuinely shot on location adds a travelogue element, and further underlines the authenticity of the scripts and the largely unknown cast.

If clichés are present, it’s more along the lines of these youngsters vowing to experience the ‘real’ Asia and keep off the beaten track – ‘it’s not a holiday, we're travelling’ they insist – only to find themselves at exactly the same places as everyone else. They get irate at the tourists spoiling their perfect shot of the Great Wall of China, unaware of the irony of being part of the same problem, and substitute missing Glastonbury by attending their own rave.

Read more at Chortle





I absolutely agree with Sam Wollaston, the writer of this page of : silly and puerile, but in a good way. Gap Year is totally not the TV series I could watch at home, because it's just like losing time, you learn nothing new, and all with absurde situations, that couldn't happen in real life. Well, depite of all the bad thing I can tell about it, it has a point. I ca think that watching it is just losing time, but at the same time it's funny. I say that's like losing time because you can have fun doing something more productive than watching Gap Year, but if you just want to relax, it's OK. (I wouldn't do it, but I accept that I'm a bit weird about this thing of losing time like this). The craziness of the serie can get you out of your world for a while, and this is the objective of a TV sries (even if it's sad).