Funboys, review: imagine This Country transported to Northern Ireland, and you're halfway there

Telegraph

14-02-2025

Funboys (BBC Three) began life as a BBC Three Comedy short film in 2023. In its first guise, it featured a trio of emotionally backward Northern Irish lads who started the Funboys' Fun Club: a sort of playgroup for callow young men to free their inner baby and generally mess about.
Extended to a series, Funboys has ditched the Fun Club and instead just focuses on the messing about. Jordan and Callum (Ryan Early and Rian Lennon, who also write and direct), along with their tousle-haired friend Lorcan (Lee Dobbin) live in the fictional Antrim town of Ballymacnoose, where nothing much happens. Across the first series of Funboys nothing much happens either – a girl, of all things, arrives to upset the applecart; at one point they get a pet pig. It's a low-budget, low-concept comedy that lives or dies on the goofiness and kind-heartedness of our three emotionally-stunted manboys.
Perhaps because Funboys has been in the works for several years, the central trio work together very well. Clever people pretending to be stupid is a tough line to tread – there is always the danger of wry observation descending into ridicule and contempt. But there's an ease between Jordan, Callum and Lorcan as they gorge on video games and chug fizzy pop that does feel like real friendship. It comes with a sense that the writers love their characters, rather than looking down on them and mining them for lols. It helps that there are only four short episodes in this series, so in general you find yourself laughing with and not at the trio, as well as the out-of-the-way hicksville of Ballymacnoose.
Swap Northern Ireland for the Costwolds, however, and Funboys is ploughing a similar furrow to This Country, another BBC Three comedy that only ended in 2020. It's no surprise to find that the two shows share a producer, Simon Mayhew-Archer, as well as the mockumentary style and a keen eye for the comedy of social awkwardness. Funboys adds a dab of the scatological from The Inbetweeners and borrows many of the idioms from Derry Girls. It is hard to be distinctive when your antecedents loom so large; on the other hand comedy moves fast and it's possible that the 16-34 audience BBC Three is aimed at won't have a clue, or care, that we've been here before.
Funboys is at the very least funny and while it doesn't aspire too much more than some good jokes about pigs and masturbation, its main subject, in as far as it has a subject, is young men admitting to, and then dealing with, their feelings. Admittedly, this subject is approached with all the subtlety of a hammer drill ('It was as though my constipated heart finally took a big, big poo,' for example). But it shows that at heart, Funboys isn't only out to have fun. For that, it should be commended.