Latest news with #Funboys'FunClub
Telegraph
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Funboys, review: imagine This Country transported to Northern Ireland, and you're halfway there
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.
The Guardian
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
TV tonight: a cracking new Northern Irish offbeat comedy
10pm, BBC ThreeA very funny and original four-part series based on an offbeat Northern Irish comedy short about the members of the Funboys' Fun Club – 'a playgroup for childish young men to engage in wholesome mucking about'. Life is a perfect ride of video games for the lads until Callum (Ryan Dylan) gets his first girlfriend and Jordan (Rian Lennon) reacts very badly. Will she fit into their way of life at the club? Hollie Richardson 7.30pm, BBC OneMultimedia artist Jack Dickson has 12 weeks to create a portrait of life-saving London Underground worker Rizwan Javed. Dickson's holistic approach takes inspiration from his subject's wider world, from cricket team photos to local street art. It's time-intensive stuff, but both men take a break for some birdwatching with Bill. Graeme Virtue 8pm, Channel 4 Claudia Winkleman ditches her Traitors dark side for another series of this quizshow in which contestants are asked just one question – but must choose from a possible 16 answers (OK, perhaps she is still a bit devilish here). First up, Leeds flatmates Yuz and Scott give it a go. HR 9pm, BBC OneWhen wellness business founder Susie Montagu (Georgia Maguire) dies from anaphylactic shock at the launch of her new skincare product, the cause is soon discovered: peanut oil in her throat. But she hadn't eaten anything, and there are no traces of it on the premises. DI Mervin investigates. Ali Catterall 9pm, BBC TwoThe Shadow Man was a 7ft figure that terrified Julian, his family and friends in his Wakefield home in the 1990s. Half sceptic, half believer Danny Robins attempts to make sense of it by investigating the cultural history of shadowy figures, starting with Inuit folk history. HR 10.40pm, BBC OneNorton last interviewed Pamela Anderson more than 20 years ago in his V Graham Norton days, and now she's here promoting her film The Last Showgirl. She'll be joined by fellow actors Stephen Graham, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Sean Hayes and – talking about his return to EastEnders for its 40th anniversary – Ross Kemp. HR Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993), 7.55am, 11.50pm, Sky Cinema GreatsIt's the film that brought Matthew McConaughey to public attention, but Richard Linklater's effortlessly rewarding 1970s-set Texas high-school drama is very much an ensemble piece. After their last day of class before the summer holidays (to the sounds of Alice Cooper's School's Out), next year's seniors – nerds, stoners, jocks et al – subject next year's freshmen to hazing rituals, while cruising around, flirting, indulging in minor vandalism, getting wasted and worrying about their futures. One of the great teen dramas. Simon Wardell Premier League football, Brighton v Chelsea 7pm, Sky Sports Main Event. At the Amex Stadium.
