Review of BBC's new Northern Irish comedy

Funboys is made by Simon Mayhew-Archer, formerly the producer of This Country. And he hasn’t deviated much from his winning  format, basing the BBC’s new comedy around directionless, immature young people in a forgotten small town, socially awkward except when sharing in-jokes with each other… and all shot in mockumentary style.

The accent has changed from West County to Northern Irish, and cousins replaced by three emotionally stunted friends: Callum (Ryan Dylan), Jordan (Rian Lennon) and Lorcan (Lee Dobbin) killing time in the fictional Ballymacnoose. The calendar will tell you they  are in their twenties, but they have the maturity of teenagers.

‘Twenty-four years old and I’ve never seen a pussy in real life,’ wails Jordan at one point. The source of his anguish is that against all odds Callum has acquired his first girlfriend, and he feels that the group – defined by playing video games and talking nonsense over fried chicken – will never be the same again.

Later he laments to Lorcan: ‘We made a pact when we were 12, either all of us get girlfriends and have 24/7 blow-job parties, or none of us do’ – as if that were a binding contact, growing up having never occurred to him. 

There’s a lot of such talk about sex in the show – and a memorable (and pixellated) climactic encounter on a swan pedalo – all of which is superficially crude, but detoxified to the point of pathos given how inadequate and naive our trio are, afraid anything physical could trigger crippling ‘post-nut depression’. A fear, incidentally, that has a pleasing narrative payoff.

With their lowbrow sense of humour and lack of ambition, another parallel might be with Beavis and Butt-Head, with these mates even sharing the sofa-bound cartoon duo’s guttural laughs. Funboys is likely to find a similar cult audience.

The trio (plus Ele McKenzie as Gemma in the opening episode) dependably deliver relatively dumb laughs, performed with authenticity even when they’re outrageous, which gives the Funboys a sense of identity, obvious This Country comparisons aside about the portrayal of boredom in isolated communities. 

Binding this all together is a commentary, never laboured, about young male bonding – and how uncomfortable if often is to express the meaning of those friendships though anything but the medium of mucking about.

• Funboys is on iPlayer now, BBC NI at 11.10pm and BBC Three at 9pm on Thursday.

Review date: 10 Feb 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett