When his father walks out on his mother and himself, bespectacled, nerdy Will McKenzie is forced to leave his private school and enrol at the local comprehensive, where his accent and appearance make him an easy target for the school psycho. Seeking to make friends with 'normal' boys he pals up with Jay, Neil and Simon, but none of them are exactly winners, as is evidenced when they try to buy alcohol in a pub

The four bunk off School and get drunk. Simon tells Carli D'amato he loves her by writing it on her drive way in big letters. It ends badly when Simon and Will's parents find out what they've been doing all day.

Simon passes his driving test at the first attempt, less on account of his skills than the fact that Tracey, the saucy examiner, finds him cute. As promised, he agrees to take his three friends to Thorpe Park, where he can get in free as he knows the man who clears up the sick. Once on the road, Will, Jay and Neil realize that Simon is a rubbish driver. (Until The Happy Foundation Shows Up)

To the amazement - and annoyance - of the other three boys, Will wins a Blind Date competition which pairs him off with Charlotte Hinchcliffe, the most desired girl in the school, and he even ends up in bed with her though he keeps his socks on.

Following a disappointing Valentines Day a mix-up in the work experience programme means that Neil gets to work in a newspaper office whilst Will is stuck in a garage, where he gets stripped and thrown in a pond as an initiation ceremony. Unwisely he inadvertently invites a work colleague to the school disco, where Simon gets a pleasant surprise from a female admirer.A run-in with a younger boy, however, means that ultimately the boys end up facing their customary public humiliation.

It's Will's seventeenth birthday and he is planning a dinner party but it clashes with a more popular bash so that his only guests are Neil, Jay, Simon and Simon's exchange student Patrice. Out of boredom they gate-crash the other party but only one of them is asked to stay and then bedded by the hostess as a sex object. The other four are sent packing. Needless to say none of those four are French.

Will decides the boys should reinvent themselves as trendy clubbers and they drive to London in Simon's car, though to gain entry to the best club in town Simon must swap his trainers for a tramp's filthy old shoes. Neil cuts his penis weeing into a can and when Jay inspects the damage they are ejected as perverts. Can things get any worse for the lads? The wheel-clamping of Simon's car might provide the answer.

Exams are looming, and Will is getting stressed. Simon at last seems to be making some headway with Carli - he's helping her revise (albeit at the expense of his own revision).