TV writer Bryan Elsley wanted to create an authentic teenage drama - so he got some youngsters to help him.

Good news for teenage viewers everywhere: television drama is making a rare attempt to portray teenagers as they really are. Bryan Elsley, the distinguished TV writer whose credits include The Crow Road and 40, was trying out his latest script ideas on his son Jamie one evening.

Jamie was not impressed. "It’s all turgid, middle-aged bollocks, dad," he said, and suggested writing about teenagers instead. "But don’t do it in the usual way. Let me help you do it properly."

To his great credit, Elsley said, "OK, but why don’t we get lots of people?" He duly started a young writers’ group that is unique in television and rapidly turning into a sort of National Youth Theatre for scriptwriters.

The result is Skins, E4’s first commissioned drama series. Shot entirely on location in Bristol, the show is a good-humoured, moral and comic celebration of teenage life, its parties, car crashes and grapples with virginity. The series is produced by Company Television, which made Shameless and so has a track record of glorifying previously unsung areas of British society.

With a few honourable exceptions, such as Grange Hill, television generally shows teenagers in one of two ways. "They are either dying of a drugs overdose because they have been f***ed by their father or they are impossibly bland," Elsley says.

He suggests that there are two reasons for this. First, teenage parts are all written by adults. "Obviously you can’t have a 45-year-old guy like me writing about teenagers," he says. "A lot of the defining principles of Skins were created by Jamie, but I could get the commission so I was kind of necessary in there somewhere."

In no time Elsley had set up a talented young writers’ group with 16 members, all in their teens and early twenties. "The rule is that everyone gets paid for their ideas and writing in the group, but all the material discussed or written at the meeting can be used by the designated writer of the episode."

In this series, five episodes were written by Elsley and four by the twentysomething writers, including his son. "We have a mentoring system where the more experienced writers, the 23-year-olds, help the 17- and 18-year-olds. The 17-year-olds have written six-minute spin-off films for the website, but if we get a second series we want them to write their own episodes supported by the group."

There is, however, a second reason for TV’s unsatisfactory depiction of teenagers. "Seventeen-year-olds are at school all day, so on television they are actually played by 26-year-olds. In The OC, the 26-year-olds playing 17-year-olds look like women in their mid-thirties, and the women playing their 40-year-old mums have all had plastic surgery and look 17."

To solve this problem, all the young characters in Skins are played by actual teenagers who have mostly never acted before, but were chosen from the 1,000 who attended open auditions. In the series they act alongside the likes of Harry Enfield, Arabella Weir and Sarah Lancashire as the parents.

"We wanted to show that teenagers have interesting, complex lives," says Elsley. "Most teenagers are intensely moral people, but they are given absolutely no credit for this because their parents are all so busy behaving disgracefully. I wanted to portray these kids as the true inheritors of happiness.

"Kids in our show are attractive not because they have got blonde hair like in Hollyoaks, but because they are funny and interesting."

Skins therefore joins a small tradition of good TV writing about teenagers. "Brookside opened up teenage life in terms of what we could show, but Grange Hill is the key series. Teenagers were presented as fully rounded individuals with complex problems."

Thanks to the writers’ group, he now understands the genius that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "In the group, we watch television and they love Buffy. It is in our tradition. Even though she is sticking staves through the heart of a demon, it is actually about the difficulty of being young."

Unlike the raucous characters in Skins, Elsley was a quiet teenager who grew up in Dalkeith, a Scottish mining town with one closed cinema and nothing to do. The son of a professor at Edinburgh University, he had no contact with drugs, sex or drinking. "I was blameless."

He went to York University and noticed the young Harry Enfield at parties being funny and getting girls. "In the third year I thought maybe I could get some girls too and suggested writing a show. Harry had never set foot on stage at that point. It had not occurred to him."

Together they wrote and performed Dusty and Dick’s Lucky Escape from the Germans, which was a send-up of stiff-upper-lipped British war films. "I was Dick."

In no time the BBC asked them to become writers on The News Review, a topical radio show that was a nursery for young talent. "It took us three months of non-stop work to get a 27-second sketch broadcast for which we were paid £7.38 each."

After years on the alternative comedy circuit they were broke, but then came their TV breakthrough. Dusty and Dick were invited to have a spot on Saturday Live, a ground-breaking Channel 4 series that brought alternative comedy to mainstream television.

"I went round to start rehearsing and Harry said, ’I’m doing it alone.’ I was devastated. I didn’t speak to him for a couple of years and retired hurt to Scotland."

Elsley took up a trainee theatre directorship and later became the artistic director of the Pocket Theatre Company in Cumbria, touring church halls for a pittance. Ever helpful, the Sun ran a story headlined, "Former partner earns in a year what Harry earns in a day".

Married with three young children, he needed to make some extra cash and wrote a drama for Scottish television called Govan Ghost Story. It was so well received that a new career dawned.

In Skins, as elsewhere in his work, the central preoccupation is fathers and sons. "One day I woke up at home to find that my father was dead. He had a brain tumour but had been brought up not to make a fuss. He just soldiered on. I would like to have known. He did not even tell my mother."

In the series, a bargain is struck. "The deal is: we show teenagers as rounded people, but eventually their parents come into focus as real people, too.

"Jamie’s episode has a bad-tempered father who never stops shouting and will not let up on his son when his own life is falling apart. Peter Capaldi is the father. It’s like watching yourself played by someone better looking." # ’Skins’ is on E4 at 10pm on Thurs.

TV’s top five yoofs

Adrian Mole (Gian Sammarco)

The ultimate ’80s teenager. From the first diary in 1981 to the TV adaptation with Gian Sammarco and Julie Walters, Adrian exposed an anxious new world of depression, miners’ strikes and Clearasil.

Tucker in Grange Hill (Todd Carty)

From the very first episode of Grange Hill, way back in 1978, it was clear that Peter "Tucker" Jenkins was the star. Although the spin-off Tucker’s Luck proved short-lived, Carty has gone on to enjoy a long career in EastEnders and The Bill.

Damon and Debbie in Brookside (Simon O’Brien and Gillian Kearney)

The teen romance that was too big for Brookside Close; runaways Damon Grant and Debbie McGrath got a spin-off series that lasted just three episodes until heart-throb Damon died in Debbie’s arms. Like Romeo and Juliet in trackies.

Saffy in Absolutely Fabulous (Julia Sawalha)

She wears cardigans, drinks herbal tea and spends Friday nights with her homework - what kind of teenager is she? A usurped one, that’s what. It’s her mum Edina (Jennifer Saunders) who gets to throw the tantrums and do the drugs.

Kevin the Teenager (Harry Enfield)

Enfield’s pitch-perfect creation is the archetypal abusive adolescent, whining insults at his parents and slouching around with his dim sidekick Perry (Kathy Burke). As Kevin would say, "So unfair!"