I love diaries. There’s something particularly scintillating about reading someone’s secret story of their own life, their own stylised perspective. You can imagine my joy when My Mad Fat Diary made its appearance on the silver screen. Not only is it an adaptation of a bona fide teenage diary, it tells the story of a girl’s frustrated experiences in Lincolnshire. Whilst I also spent an exasperated adolescence in the county that time forgot, there my similarities with the protagonist end. Sixteen-year old Rae has been in a psychiatric hospital for four months, and we join her on the first day of braving freedom.

Rae introduces herself as “sixteen and half stone” and her interests as “music, vegging out and finding a fit boy.” It’s the latter statement, of course, that we should really be noticing.  Her brazen, often bawdy narration is the lifeblood of the show, just as edgy tunes and hormones are to Rae. Sharon Rooney wears the role well, her face contorting into all the myriad forms of joy and terror so particular to those of a certain age. Her accent might not be pitch perfect, but considering she’s originally Glaswegian, I won’t mark her down too harshly.

There are some clichés: diary scribbles flash across melodramatic stills, lots of close-up and soft focus shots as you’d expect to convey the protagonist’s warped perspective. Yet, it isn’t trying too hard. The ‘90s setting is subtly referenced through a clever soundtrack and appropriate interiors (Rae’s Care Bear bedspread in particular evoked in me a rather unexpected nostalgia). The winning formula, though, seems to be a script that doesn’t squirm from honest teenage outpourings and a cast that can handle itself. In the case of the oldies, Claire Rushbrook makes a suitably distracted mother, a woman who will offer her daughter junk food and then explain her inexplicable diet plan almost in the same breadth. Oh, and let’s not forget the illegal immigrant boyfriend keeping her busy day and night.

According to Rae “there are zero cool people in Lincolnshire” and yet she finds herself an outsider of a group that more than attracts her attention. What follows is an all too familiar foray into lust and longing. On the spectrum of pizza portions, one young buck in particular makes the cut as “ultimate slice.” From rating boys, to eating disorders, to jukebox listening, to self-harm, Rae’s diary says it all. Yes, it’s been done before, but not quite to this tune.