Boyz Unlimited
A satirical comedy about a criminal forming a boy band.
Boyz Unlimited is a British comedy series that aired on Channel 4 from 5 February to 12 March 1999. The six-part satire about the music industry follows Nigel Gacey, a career criminal who gives himself a year to form his own boy band. Produced by Hat Trick Productions and written by Richard Osman, the show received poor ratings and critical reception and was not recommissioned.
Quick Facts
- Creator
- Richard Osman
- Matt Lucas
- David Walliams
- Starring
- Frank Harper
- James Corden
- Adam Sinclair
- Lee Williams
- Billy Worth
- Director
- Liddy Oldroyd
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Language
- English
- Company
- Hat Trick Productions
- Network
- Channel 4
- First aired
- 5 February 1999
Facts from the source article.
Background, production, and plot
In the 1990s, boybands such as New Kids on the Block, Take That, Boyzone, and 911 were popular. GMTV attempted to enter the market with its own boyband, The One, and 2point4 Children broadcast a storyline involving a teenage son joining a boyband called Boyband. BBC One aired an episode of Inside Story called The Band is Born, which launched the career of Upside Down. Inspired by that, David Walliams and Matt Lucas used their Comedy Central (then Paramount) comedy series Mash and Peas to satirise the genre. After Paramount broadcast the series, Hat Trick Productions invited the pair to produce a six-part series for Channel 4, and they began writing with Richard Osman, with whom Walliams had previously worked and whose brother was Mat Osman, bassist for Suede. Lucas and Walliams understood they would star as parodies of Gary Barlow and Howard Donald. Walliams wrote in his 2012 autobiography Camp David that Lucas and Osman did not get on, and that in December 1997, the pair and their agent were summoned to Hat Trick's Jimmy Mulville, who admonished them before instructing them to leave his office. Walliams alleged that they only signed the release after their agent told them they would never work in television again if they did not, and that for almost a decade afterwards, both he and Lucas refused to appear on any Hat Trick programmes. The programme was shot in late 1998, directed by Liddy Oldroyd, over seven weeks, with Phil Harding and Ian Curnow producing the songs. The show depicted Nigel Gacey, a successful armed robber and conman played by Frank Harper, who decides to form his own boyband, with James Corden playing Gareth Jones, a loose pastiche of Barlow that Lucas had written for himself.
Release, reception, and aftermath
The show was promoted with articles in the NME and The Independent, both stating that Osman had written and produced the show, with the latter claiming that Osman was inspired by the Inside Story episode about Upside Down. By coincidence, the show aired a few months after Bryan Elsley's The Young Person's Guide to Becoming a Rock Star and a few weeks after one of the tracks covered by Boyz Unlimited, "A Little Bit More" by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, topped the UK singles chart as a cover by 911. Osman used a January 1999 article to note that the song was selected for its graphic lyrics being "too tasteless for a pre-pubescent audience, and thus ideal for comic purposes". The show premiered on 5 February 1999 and received generally negative critical reception. W. Stephen Gilbert of The Times considered that The Young Person's Guide to Becoming a Rock Star made Boyz Unlimited redundant, criticised its documentary style, and opined that Hat Trick should have known better. The Herald described it as having about a quarter of the flair of that series. A Mark Lewisohn review, which described the show as a "savage and cynical attack", prompted Walliams and Lucas to lighten the tone of their subsequent writing. A retrospective 2007 Popjustice review was slightly more positive, stating that "a lot of the brilliant script is quite poorly executed, but the jokes are strong enough". The show rated poorly and was not recommissioned after its final episode on 12 March 1999. Osman later released The Thursday Murder Club in September 2020, achieving massive success, and in 2021 used a GQ interview to suggest that the failure of Boyz Unlimited dented his confidence for years. Mulville later apologised to Walliams after running into him at a dinner party, having recently run into him in Old Compton Street in Soho while with Geoff Posner and Lucas, and later wrote Lucas a letter of apology; by the time of Camp David, Osman had not apologised.
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