Like so many great comedies, Funboys is an idiosyncratic, gently nurtured, quietly horrific thing. The creation of RyanDylan and Rian Lennon, who also play two of its main characters, it began life as a 14-minute film – small but perfectly formed – that premiered at the BBC Two comedy festival two years ago. Now, with cast nicely broadened and content nicely deepened, it has become a series. We follow the three “emotionally unassembled” twentysomethings – Callum Brown (Dylan), Jordan McCafferty (Lennon) and Lorcan Boggin (Lee R James) – whose earnestness belies their self-chosen funboys moniker, as they attempt to assemble and entertain themselves with the sparse resources on offer in the tiny town of Ballymacnoose, Northern Ireland.
Callum is no longer engaged to his ultra-religious fiancee Morgan (Emer O’Connor), but the gang is disturbed and astonished when an English girl, Gemma (Ele McKenzie), arrives in town and promptly makes Callum her boyfriend. “Strong, rugged, good-looking,” she tells him. “I’m sick of that rubbish.” Jordan quickly gets very drunk to cope with his friend’s absence from their group gaming sessions. “I’m worried about Callum’s post-nut depression,” he insists. “I don’t want that for you, Callum.”
I must pause here to give Gemma and McKenzie their due. I haven’t seen a character written or performed with such fearless monstrosity since Julia Davis was last on screen. The masturbation scene on a swan pedalo in the middle of a lake in apark is nightmarish, but the kissing that precedes it may actually make you temporarily blind. Unspeakably, brilliantly awful.
Let’s move on. Lorcan, who amounts to the group’s philosopher king – perhaps thanks to his familiarity with life’s entrances and exits from his work on the Boggin family’s artisanal abattoir (“We look them in the eye”) – offers Jordan solace away from the bottle. But the wheel of fate continues its cruel turning, and soon Lorcan has replaced Callum in Gemma’s bananas affections and the group must reconstitute once again. On top of which, poor Callum must face the wrath of a park caretaker every time they meet in the supermarket: “You killed seven of my ducks with your jism.” Forgive the pun, but this is a difficult situation to row back on.
Funboys shares some DNA with This Country, with its fiercely naturalistic portrait of even smaller town life, shot through with moments of pure surrealism. It also explores the difficulties of young people managing their frustrations, or even identifying that they are frustrated in the first place. Limited opportunities and narrow horizons bedevil the trio just as they do Kurtan and Kerry, and they don’t even have a friendly vicar on their side. But the three-man setup also allows a little light commentary on modern masculinity too, as the boys navigate Jordan’s neediness, Lorcan’s unexpected sexual prowess (at least as far as Gemma is concerned) and Callum becoming the enraptured mentee of Boggin Sr, who promises to teach him how to become one of “the bastards who rule the world”. A natural-born doormat, Callum begins to assert himself at home and at work. “When you didn’t clean your cereal bowl this morning,” Boggin Sr says with pride, “I knew something had begun to shift.” “I did my time in nice-guy prison,” says Callum. “I ain’t going back.”
Funboys won’t be to everyone’s taste and that’s fine because it is patently not trying to be. But if you like your comedy gentle yet harrowing, charming yet brutal, light but insidious, these are the guys, and the Gemma, for you.
• Funboys aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.
