Last year, it took me a grand total of three weeks to make the olive costume, Georgia Nicolson’s papier-mache creation fromAngus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. Night and day, I slaved away, dipping strips of newspaper into a mix of flour and water, then patting it onto a giant-sized balloon. Never have I defined myself as anything close to arty. So why did I decide to dedicate a significant portion of my life to an elaborate craft project? The answer, of course, is simple. The olive costume is iconic, as the signature feature of the greatest teen movie ever made.
Just ask any girl who grew up in Britain in the noughties, and they’ll recognise the image: Georgia Nicholson, played by Georgia Groome, frantically running through the streets of Eastbourne dressed as a mammoth green hors d’oeuvre. Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, the film based on the first two books inLouise Rennison’s series, was studied at our teenage sleepovers. We pored over it, reciting its lines as if they were from a sacred text. Even now, I can reel off the classic quotes without thinking. “Boys don’t like girls for funniness,” if you didn’t already know.
Directed by Gurinder Chadha, the film encapsulated the essence of girlhood, with all its sweaty-palmed anxieties and humiliations. Fourteen-year-old Georgia is riding the rollercoaster of adolescence in all of its glory. There are birthday parties to plan, boys to “stalk” and fall head over heels for, and embarrassing mums and dads to control. To the 12-year-old version of me, these were the important issues. So, freshly released from our parents’ clutches, my friends and I joined the cinema queues to meet our soon-to-be idol. Georgia Nicolson spoke for all of us – about mistakenly shaved eyebrows and the horror of being caught wearing huge knickers; a hero of our age and time.
With its killer soundtrack, featuring the likes of the Maccabees, the Rumble Strips and Lily Allen, it became the film that defined the summer of 2008. We watched the film religiously, on our own or all together, copying the games Georgia and the Ace Gang played and rating our limited sexual experiences on “the snogging scale” they’d devised. The Ace Gang had characteristics that we recognised in ourselves: they were people ashamed of their very existence but desperate to climb into adult life.
Over the years, the film’s narrative became an easy point of comparison. When the first of my female friends got a boyfriend and became significantly less interested in the rest of us, she was a traitor “just like Jas” in the movie. Fake tan mishaps turned our skin a shade “even cheesier” than Georgia’s “Wotsits” legs. Recently, I heard that a boy I know was writing a song about someone he’s dating. “Let’s hope it is more Ultraviolet than Bitch in a Uniform,” I joked with a friend.
Why exactly did it seep into our vernacular? Maybe it was because it was the first film we saw that took our teenage problems seriously. While others treated girls’ stresses as something trivial, Chadha’s movie made them feel epic, on the scale we actually felt them. Watching Georgia worry about passing off as normal was refreshing, and in times of crisis – like if I had argued with one of my friends or the boy I was obsessing over that school year got a new girlfriend – I’d play the movie again and again.
Importantly, for our spiralling young minds, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging was not all doom and gloom and even provided us with glimmers of hope. Because, guess what? The ending proves that Georgia’s “sex god” boyfriend, Robbie, actually likes her “just the way” she is. This, somehow, meant that we might also be OK as ourselves.
The hormonal chaos of teenagehood now feels long ago. But a session watching Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging takes me right back to the era of Motorola Razr phones, fluorescent-coloured tights and when kissing with tongues felt like a terrifying milestone. It was a time that felt truly mortifying but gloriously eye-opening, too.
And so, I tried to relive it, for nostalgia’s sake. Like Georgia, I wore my olive costume to a fancy dress party, where many of the other guests were dressed as devils and cats. But, unlike Georgia, my outfit was well received – celebrated even – by basically every woman in attendance. That’s the magic of Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging for our generation. It reminds us of the joyous madness of our school days, when everything was awkward, messy and packed with heart.
Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is available on Hoopla and Kanopy in the US or to rent digitally or on Amazon Prime and Paramount+ in the UK