Big Boys You’ll laugh, you’ll cry: Big Boys is uncool but unparalleled
The first series of (Channel 4, Sunday) ended so perfectly that I feared series two would be an anticlimax. Luckily, that hasn’t turned out to be the case. It remains one of the most joyous, heartfelt shows out there.
Now, if you’re going to delve into it for the first time, I warn you that there’s lots of sex talk. Some of it is very rude. But there’s an underlying sweetness to this coming-of-age tale about a shy boy who heads off to university after coming out as gay. There is none of the dead-behind-theeyes hedonism of a show such as Euphoria, which deals with the same age group and considers itself achingly cool. Big Boys is uncool in all the best ways.
It is based on the experiences of writer Jack Rooke, who also acts as the narrator. Jack (Dylan Llewellyn) is grieving the death of his father, but has the support of his lovely family – mother, grandmother and cousin Shannon, who in this series gets unexpectedly pregnant by a next-day delivery driver – and the close friends he makes at Brent University (“138 out of 139 for student satisfaction”).
Jack is the endearing centre of
Big Boys, but the performance that raises this show to dramatic heights is provided by Jon Pointing as Danny,
Jack’s seemingly happy-go-lucky housemate who is battling depression beneath his laddish exterior. Pointing deserves all the awards going for the way he can switch in a second from comedy to pathos.
There are comic turns from supporting players that will make you laugh out loud. Derry Girls actress Louisa Harland makes a cameo as a manic midwife, and there’s a wickedly accurate send-up of life in a lads’ mag office, where two of the students go for work experience. But there are also serious moments that will reduce you to tears (well, they reduced me to tears anyway), in flashbacks to the death of Jack’s father and the illness of Danny’s grandmother.
One theme of Big Boys is that you can create your own family. But it also illustrates the importance of parenting. Danny’s father shows up in this series played by Marc Warren, and he’s an abject failure as a parent. But Jack’s mother (Camille Coduri) has so much love to give that she becomes a surrogate mum to Danny. Above all else, it’s a show filled with kindness.
Never has a show said “ITV” like It took the panto thrills of Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks, added shiny Lycra and industrial amounts of hairspray, and delivered top entertainment on Saturday nights by letting the show’s resident beefcakes pummel members of the public with giant cotton buds. It ended 23 years ago yet I can still remember Jet, Hunter, Wolf and co.
Now the show has been resurrected in all its tacky glory – by the BBC. This does somewhat make a mockery of the corporation’s claim to produce “distinctive content” because it still looks 100 per cent ITV, especially with ITV stalwart Bradley Walsh as presenter alongside his son, Barney.
If you were a cynic, you would take this as a sign that the BBC is so bereft of ideas that it’s reduced to dredging up a 30-year-old ITV show. But, you know what? Children are not cynics. Children will love Gladiators and all generations can watch together. And even if you don’t have an eight-yearold, you may derive pleasure from watching a man called Legend trying to keep a straight face while describing himself as “a cross between Gandhi and David Hasselhoff ”.
Almost everything is the same as before. The action takes place in an arena (Sheffield this time), we still have Duel, Hang Tough and the Eliminator, plus the theme tune and the red/blue colour palette remain. The new Gladiators, meanwhile, are a bunch of giants. The ones who stood out were the baddies: Viper, in particular, contributed a glowering silence.
As for the presenters? Old pro Walsh was great. Next to him, Barney was a lightweight. He looked nervous, and so he should, because this is prime-time Saturday night and he’s been given the gig on account of his famous father. But it shouldn’t matter too much; John Fashanu and Jeremy Guscott didn’t exactly set the screen alight when co-hosting with Ulrika Jonsson.
For those of a certain age, there’s a nostalgia attached. Or, as Bradley put it in Saturday’s episode: “This comes from an era when you were judged not on how well you could bake, or how you fared eating the private parts of a kangaroo, but how long you could stand on a podium whilst being battered around the bonce by a bloke called Rhino wielding a fluffy lollipop. Better times in many ways.”