One year after his hit Channel 4 series Big Boys finished its three-season run, creator and writer Jack Rooke reflected on the show, his approach to writing comedy and what’s next.
Speaking at Dublin’s Storyhouse screenwriting festival, Rooke said that while the series, which was based on his own Edinburgh Fringe shows, drew on his personal experiences, he found a liberty in exploring the fictional elements when writing the story for television.
“While it was an inquiry into the past, half of the show exists as a separate formation of characters and it is a sitcom,” he said. “It’s still a 23-minute Channel 4 comedy and so I was able to separate from the two. My line of work really informed all of the narrative device, but the fun bit for me and the skills that I learned were about writing classic copy and not just being completely confined by own personal experience.”
Big Boys follows semi-fictional Jack, played by Derry Girls’ Dylan Llewellyn, a closeted shy student who is grieving his father’s death as he heads to university. There, he lives with mature student Danny (Jon Pointing), a lad about town figure who is, in fact, trying to disguise his own mental health issues.
“I watched James McAvoy’s recent movie California Schemin’ and I was listening to him talk about it after and he was sort of saying that he wanted it to feel like a movie and not a film,” continued Rooke. “He wanted it to feel like there was an adventure and exhilaration, and it’s quite heightened at times, and silly, like a kind of American youthful movie. I think at times, with Big Boys, that is how I wanted it to feel. I wanted the narrative to be like an indie film but then I wanted them to go off and drink poppers in a gay bar and I want them to go and do mad, silly, caper things. I think the two can exist.”
When pressed about next steps, Rooke said he was “writing a couple of pilots” and had also recently taken some writing jobs on other projects. “I’ve never really written on anybody else’s show before so last year, when Big Boys was over, I was like, ‘I can’t just drum up some idea for me to write a new series.’ I needed some time, so I took some writing jobs, which I’ve never done, and I wrote for the show the BBC are currently filming, which is an adaptation of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole.”
He continued: “I’m working on an HBO project with Sharon Morgan and that’s been fun and now I’ve started writing some pilots of my own ideas, which have been exciting.”
Speaking to a room of writers at the Light House Cinema, Rooke said he had two, slightly contradictory rules: “Never write for the sake of it but also write as much as you can.”
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