Ten years ago this week, a comedy about a quartet of hapless sixth-formers debuted on E4. The channel’s first original sitcom was met with a dismissive review by the Radio Times and tiny viewing figures. Just three years later, The Inbetweeners Movie was breaking records at the box office, the show had a Bafta award and the critics were fully on board the banter bus (the show has a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes). A decade on, The Inbetweeners has established itself as one of the most successful UK sitcoms of the 21st century. So how did this puerile tale of four idiots on the pull earn its place in the canon of great British comedy?

When The Inbetweeners pitched up in 2008, there hadn’t been a hit British sitcom about teenagers since The Young Ones. In the US, teens existed in glossy California dramas or gross-out coming of age movies. In Britain, they featured in gritty films and series about crime and, more alarmingly, Skins – E4’s romp through the untowardly eventful lives of a gaggle of pill-popping, sexually reckless 16-year-olds. It was into this lopsided landscape that The Inbetweeners arrived and injected television’s teenage narrative with a dose of pure, unadulterated ordinariness.

Narrated by goody-two-shoes teenager Will (Simon Bird), the show follows his move from private school to bog-standard comprehensive, where he makes bog-standard new friends. He meets perpetually lovelorn Simon (Joe Thomas), chronic bullshitter Jay (James Buckley) and nice-but-dim Neil (Blake Harrison). Iain Morris, who co-created the show with Damon Beesley, said he wanted suburbia to be the show’s fifth main character, and the overwhelming mediocrity of The Inbetweeners’ grey-skied commuter-belt setting is reflected in everything from the soundtrack (landfill indie) to the characters’ ambitions (try to get served in a pub).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fantastic four … Jay Cartwright, Neil Sutherland, Simon Cooper, Will McKenzie. Photograph: Allstar/Film Four

In many ways, The Inbetweeners was a very conventional sitcom, complete with slapstick scrapes and slickly concluded storylines. Cleaving to British comedy tradition, its on-screen leads, Bird and Thomas, were alumni of the Cambridge Footlights, and it stuck to age-old sitcom tropes like antagonism-glazed male bonding and romantic humiliation. But into this template, Morris and Beesley injected real life. From Simon’s humiliatingly yellow car to Jay’s pretend sexual exploits, the creators packed the show full of their real-life experiences (fans of Morris’s and Jimmy Carr’s mid-00s XFM show will remember the writer as a source of superb adolescence anecdotes). They also took care to mimic the way teenage boys spoke. Doing so meant The Inbetweeners broke new ground when it came to the level of crudity you would expect from a prime-time sitcom. But it worked. The Inbetweeners Movie took £13.22m at the UK box office on its opening weekend. (The most successful TV comedy spin-off before that was Borat, which managed £6.24m.) Its success was staggering and triggered a Gaelic TV and film renaissance when its Skye-based producer Chris Young used the money he had made to start Gaelic-language projects.

This puerility made The Inbetweeners easy to dismiss, however its juvenility belied not only expertly constructed comedy, but lexical joy. Like every great sitcom, The Inbetweeners created its own language – popularising terms such as clunge, bus wanker and “friend” (the latter is all in the high-pitched delivery). It feels as if The Inbetweeners was the last comedy to permeate the cultural consciousness of young Britons in this way. Its dialogue passed into common parlance and its characters became archetypes (Jay, in particular, is useful shorthand for a whole category of human). That’s probably because it was broadcast at a time when the TV comedy as a unifying cultural touchstone was steadily disintegrating. Digital channels hadn’t totally poleaxed the concept of the national-treasure sitcom yet (Gavin & Stacey, which debuted the year before on BBC Three, was similarly big news), but in the coming years streaming soon would – Netflix was introduced in the UK in 2012 – and viewership would fragment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Derry Girls … wouldn’t have existed without The Inbetweeners. Photograph: Jack Barnes

The turn of the decade was a pivotal moment for television in general, but it was especially important for comedy. As blockbuster sitcoms died away, a new style of comedy was taking its place – one that focused on the people who always played the boring characters: women. As a show about failure, disappointment and rejection, it feels faintly ridiculous to view The Inbetweeners as a tale of four middle-class white men and their privilege, but it is true that the show seemed to put more effort into thinking up slang terms for vagina than giving depth to its female characters. Which makes one facet of The Inbetweeners’ legacy even odder: it created a template for the female-centric sitcom to thrive. Shows such Derry Girls, Some Girls and Drifters (whose leads appeared in the first The Inbetweeners Movie, and is executive-produced by Morris and Beesley) have all been referred to as the “female Inbetweeners”, while Caroline and Caitlin Moran’s sister-sitcom Raised By Wolves picked up where the masturbation-obsessed teen boys left off. Without the original, these shows might never have been possible – they flipped the script that The Inbetweeners wrote.

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The Inbetweeners also existed at a particular point in teenage life. When it began in 2008, Facebook had just about taken root in the social lives of teenagers; the show’s final episode aired 12 days before the launch of Instagram. The latter overhauled teenage life, making adolescents cautious curators of their own image. Teen years no longer seem like a place for fashion sins and horrendous character-building scrapes but a prime time to start building your brand. You probably couldn’t make a show about teenagers today without having social media at its core. For that reason, The Inbetweeners seems like a harbinger of the end of two eras: both as one of the UK’s final sitcom phenomena, and a portrait of a humiliating, awkward and tedious paradise lost.

The Inbetweeners is available on All 4 throughout May