Interview with writer and creator of Big Boys, Jack Rooke

9 January 2024

What is Big Boys?

Big Boys is a semi-autobiographical comedy drama, where I'm trying to make a sweet show about friendship with some bitchy, funny, and catty jokes and an underlying feeling of why family and chosen family is so important and how friends can often become just as important as family members. And how when you're trying to learn about yourself, sometimes it's nice to choose the people who go on that experience with you and help you to define and become who you are.

How did you find the response from series one? Was there anything that surprised you or made you see the show in a different way?

I always knew if I could find a channel that were going to support the show and let me write the jokes that I wanted to write and let me have the niche references to Gamu from The X Factor and Alison Hammond as a fish, and if they had the confidence to not just see Big Boys as just a gay show or just a mental health show - Channel 4 were so amazing at understanding the whole show and all the different types of representation within the mix. I always felt like I was backing a strong horse, but I definitely did not expect for the response critically to be as good as it was and then to have six BAFTA nominations for a series one! I love when people I've really admired in comedy are writing about their love for the show but really my favourite reaction is just from geezers that are so happy to see themselves in Danny, whether it’s those sorts of struggles being articulated in a way that's funny, and not just drenched in a kind of trauma porn. I think that to me is always the nicest thing when somebody says “oh, my husband really liked it” or “my male straight friends really got it”, because I never want to limit myself as somebody who just writes about the gay experience, I want it to be as broad and open as possible. And I think series two comes off the back of all of that lovely reaffirming praise for series one where I've just tried to make it bigger and better and more inclusive than ever.

Big Boys is so universal in dealing with real topics - from broken homes to grief and everything in-between, how do you instil comedy into those moments?

I'm a real sitcom, comedy drama fan. Growing up me and my dad would just constantly watch sitcoms, whether that be Father Ted, or the Vicar of Dibley or Only Fools and Horses. Comedy was such a huge part of my cultural experience growing up, I never went to the theatre. I never watched plays, or opera or dance or never went to art galleries, never went to museums, but I saw every sitcom. And to me that's just as culturally important and relevant, and I felt like it's such a good space to bring difficult topics into the forefront and to bring things that are almost quite polarising. For me, when I went through losing my dad, I certainly felt like there wasn’t much stuff that I could watch where I felt like I could really relate to that experience. I felt like the only rule I really had with Big Boys was that if I was going to do something that was very emotionally charged, or potentially dealing with traumatic themes, that there still had to be loads of jokes in there. That for every sad moment, it had to have a massive gag after it, because I still want to write a comedy.

We get to see a lot more from the other characters in this series, what made you expand on their stories?

In series two, I’ve written up the character of Cousin Shannon, played by Harriet Webb, because for me, it was really important that there was one character in their 20s who didn't go to uni, and who wasn't pursuing higher education but was still just as ambitious even when they're starting a family and having a baby. Like so many working-class women in my life who've helped bring me up and who have played a huge part in you know, even my cultural heroes, there are women that weren't necessarily afforded the opportunity to go to uni, but still had phenomenally successful lives. And for me, it was just very important to have a character like Shannon in the mix, who is maybe Danny's age, and is just pursuing a different route to getting her goals. I wanted to write a working-class funny woman who's still daft and still mad and still saying outrageous stuff, but ultimately has a bit of drive and a bit of determination to her. I really wanted that other option in life to not go to uni to be just as valid as the people who do.

The same with Laurie. When we were filming the scenes with Ian Burfield and Harriet they had such good chemistry. I mean, Harriet can literally have chemistry with a glass of water. She is such a phenomenal, comedic and dramatic actor, and the chemistry between her and Laurie was so nice. It really made me cry because it just took me back to losing my dad and realising that my dad was obviously my parent, but to my cousins and to my friends, and to loads of other people he was such a paternal figure. And for me, it was really lovely to watch him say things like you're a go getter, you're beautiful and to have all of that reaffirming stuff.

Who was you most excited about developing?

Dylan and Jon did such a phenomenal job with Jack and Danny in series one. I didn't just want to repeat the same dynamic. I felt like we had such brilliant supporting cast and supporting actors and I wanted to build those stories. Olisa is such a brilliant, quite iconic queer comedy actor. He's played parts in Chewing Gum and Am I Being Unreasonable? and he really is a phenomenal talent. The character of Yemi was important to me because I wanted there to be one queer character that wasn't struggling and was talking from a place of emotional maturity. Yemi comes in as a much more self- assured, queer person who's really ambitious and wants to have the best fashion collection at the Uni and then with Corinne, it was very important to have a character in the mix who is clearly trying to play by the rules, but loves breaking them, and is really uptight and very sort of socially conscious, but really is just as much of a hypocrite as we all are. And to kind of laugh with that. I think Izuka is the only actor who wasn't in the pilot because I hadn't written the part of Corinne yet. When I started doing the series, I really struggled to find Corinne’s voice and her place in the show - Izuka has made that character what Corinne is because she's an actor who really elevates everything on the page. And just like her character, let's say she wears the trousers. She tells the boys what to do.

I also want to mention Camille Coduri and Annette Badland who play Peggy my Mum and Nanny Bingo because for me, they give such a beautiful portrayal of loss and grief and being women of a slightly older age who perhaps at times feel quite invisible, but they're so present. I really liked that about Peggy that she's trying to chat to other men and explore what her future might be because she's in her mid-50s. She has just as much of a future as the boys do, and as much as the Uni gang. I think it's so important that we see characters of a certain age, having new first times because that is just reflective of life. And then something happens like grief or trauma, and you find out something different or you go on a different path to the one you thought you were on. I think Camille plays that so beautifully. And Annette Badland in episode six, I think gives maybe the performance of the series! I think she is one of the classiest actors I've ever worked with. I really feel like as a huge ensemble, I'm really proud of it. And of course, Katy Wix, she is one of the funniest people I've ever met, she just makes such a high impact anytime she is on screen.

Was series two something you considered when writing series one, was it always a pipeline dream?

Series two is definitely a big dream because I've always felt in my career, a bit of a one trick pony, because I went to Edinburgh for the first time in 2015 with the show about grief, and then went again in 2017 with a show about grief and I just felt like I would get the odd kind of cheap shot or a little kind of dig being like “you just write about one thing”. But actually, it took quite a lot of courage and ambition to write something that I suppose could have been seen by 15-year-old me when my dad died and something that could be a tool to help young people going through those sort of mental health struggles and not even young people, but people of all ages. Those experiences of grief and loss happen to people at all different ages. We have normalised it happening to people in their 30s to 50s but actually so much more it's happening to younger people. And when I say so much more it's always happened to young people but we've never culturally explored it and it's where I'm really proud of teenage me because when I was like 15 or 16, I just kept a diary on my computer of things that happened related to grief. And from at that point, it was just an emotional outlet. I found writing to be such a hugely cathartic escape. Then when I was 18, I started writing funny, silly poems about grief and about my dad, and you know, come turning 26 I've made that into a TV series. When I was a teenager in the midst of it all, I remember thinking like, no one's told a story like this about what it's like to lose someone at this age, and how it teaches you what mortality is at such a formative period of your life that does shape how you then become an adult. It shapes your relationships and your friendships. It makes you cherish people so much more. And it does make you realise the importance of chosen family, which I think is ultimately the theme of series two, these people who are all kind of misfits, who shouldn't necessarily all like each other, but who just find a really deep affinity and love and care. I've been so chuffed at how broad the response has been. So, series two was always a bit of a pipe dream and I'd like to write more. I feel like I have taken these stories from literally performing them above pubs in little theatres. That journey to me is something I'm incredibly proud of and it's made me feel like it was worth it.

A lot of the first series is based around your own experiences how much does series two deviate from that?

I think series two is still heavily drawn from my own life. There's definitely stuff that's very fictionalised and that's the stuff I really enjoy. Writing is coming up with new sort of storylines or new kind of exciting adventures, but a lot of the stuff that I think resonates with people, it's the stuff that's real, like, you know, I did live with someone who was webcamming to make money and I'm very sex worker positive and so it's fun to try to write that sensitively but make it really funny because it is funny. Even the work experience stuff I used to work on a youth phone in radio show when I was in my early 20s, and we used to get mad people calling up. Then there’s the blue shed which is based on the property guardianship I lived in. In most of my 20s it was the only way I could afford to live in London. So that blue shed stuff is kind of drawing on communal living and non-house environments where everything's kind of falling apart, there's never any space for anything and there is a table tennis table in the middle of the hallway and that sort of madness. So, a lot of its drawn from personal experience still, but it is fun for me to come up with other narratives. I really love that Big Boys is a sort of 50/50 drawn from real life but also just a creation of fumbling around.

We get a few more cameos from you, what is the story behind that?

The whole narrator device is directly taken from my 2017 Edinburgh show, where I spoke to the audience as ‘you’. For me, it's looking back at something nostalgically and I like having a narrative device that's quite ambiguous. The narrator to me is often the function of the things that sometimes we wish we had said or realised at the time. When you get to your late 20s or early 30s, you're like, ah, yeah, I wish I had said that. I wish I'd recognised that behaviour, I wish I'd pulled somebody up on this thing or I wish I'd been a bit more there for this.

What is your favourite line from the show?

‘I for one will not be calling her Cheryl Fernandez Versini’ – there’s so many but all my favourites are Shannon or Jules lines.