Bryan Elsley, co-creator/writer

It was 2006, and I was trying to up come up with ideas for shows. My son Jamie, who was at university at the time, read them all and told me that they were all boring, middle-class, middle-aged rubbish. “If you’re so clever, what should I do?” I asked him. Jamie said: “Write a show about teenagers, but one that actually means something.” I didn’t quite know what that would be, so I said: “You’d better tell me.” We sat at the kitchen table and came up with Skins in about half an hour. It went off to Danny Cohen, head of E4, who, amazingly, liked it. Back then E4 was still this tiny, experimental digital channel, and in a daring feat of audacity, Danny commissioned the show. We were shooting six months later. He just handed over a huge proportion of his budget and said: “It better be bloody good,” and that was the last we saw of him until the premiere.

We went to youth drama clubs and found teenagers like Daniel Kaluuya, and held open auditions where we found Kaya Scodelario, Hannah Murray and Dev Patel. Our casting director showed me a newspaper with the headline: “About a Boy all grown up,” and a photo of Nicholas Hoult looking very striking, so we invited him to audition. He lacked confidence but he was very interesting and very composed. He still today maintains supportive friendships with everyone from that era, regardless of their status or success. He is a gentleman to the core.

Jamie said: “As it’s my idea, I want to be a writer.” He’d just dropped out of university, so after a rather heated conversation, he joined the writing team, along with every member of his student flat. We got into this groove where everyone was young and inexperienced – apart from the tired old hack who was nominally in charge, who was me. At the end of the second season, I was at an industry gathering and somebody said: “How are you going to develop the show into the third season?” It literally came to me in a moment. I said: “All the characters are leaving and we’re getting new ones.” Once the characters had been through what was then the lower and upper sixth, they’d have left school. Everyone went, “What are you thinking?” but the more I thought about it, the better an idea it seemed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kaya Scodelario and Kayvan Novak in the final series. Photograph: Hal Shinnie/Channel 4

Jamie Brittain, co-creator/writer

My dad was most famous for adapting the Iain Banks novel The Crow Road for television in the mid 1990s. It was a big thing for us as a family, because after that we started going on nice holidays. He and I had always bonded over TV and films, so it felt pretty easy to work with him. He was a writer in his mid 40s, very stubborn and set in his ways. Sometimes we did butt heads, but generally it was a really pleasant working relationship, certainly different to what you might expect between father and son.

When we started making Skins, there was stuff that we sort of punched together from other shows I liked. Lost was on at the time and I stole loads from that. Focusing on one character per episode is straight out of Lost. Loads of the episodes in the first series of Skins start with someone’s eyes opening – that was also stolen from Lost. We remixed the theme tune every year. That idea was from The Wire. When we decided to switch the cast, Channel 4 really weren’t ready for the idea.

It didn’t occur to me that Skins was dark, but of course it was. I was always into dark and bleak things as an adolescent. Hubert Selby Jr was my icon. I just assumed that if you were making a drama, you had to include lots of dark stuff like death, although there is lots of light in Skins too. The thing that had always got my back up about shows about teenagers was how they all seemed to be written by adults for adults. I was 21 and things were changing quickly. Social media was arriving.

We brought in my younger sister, who was still a teenager, and accosted her friends, this very chaotic crew from Bristol. We tried to fill the space with young people to make the show as authentic as possible. I think it was a great victory for creativity that we managed to make Skins work second time around. I don’t think we quite pulled it off the third time, but two out of three ain’t bad.