There is a hard truth at the heart of BBC One’s new drama, Men Up. “Men kill themselves over this,” a doctor solemnly informs a conference of his peers, “and the numbers are astonishing.” He’s talking about erectile dysfunction, the subject of a thousand blue jokes, and a thousand and one late-night commercials on golfing channels. This is the story of a medical innovation that changed the world and gave a generation of men their mojo back.
Swansea, 1994. Against a backdrop of newspapers celebrating Torvill and Dean’s success at the Lillehammer Olympics, a group of Welshmen struggle with impotence. Among them are Meurig (Game of Thrones’s Iwan Rheon), a 40-year-old hospital porter struggling to convince his wife, Ffion (Alexandra Roach), that his bedroom disappointments are unrelated to her double mastectomy. “She thinks it’s all her fault,” he laments, “and it’s not.” But a Pfizer-backed drug trial offers the chance of a miracle respite, both for Meurig and a ragtag cohort of underperforming gentlemen. Among them are Tommy (Paul Rhys), who must hide his sexuality in order to get on the trial, and burly Eddie (Mark Lewis Jones), who cannot be open about his condition. Rounding out the hospital ensemble are widower Colin (Gavin and Stacey’s Steffan Rhodri), repressed accountant Pete (Gavin and Stacey’s Phaldut Sharma), bubbly nurse Moira (Gavin and Stacey’s Joanna Page – in case you’d missed it, this is set in Wales), and Aneurin Barnard as the baby-faced doctor in charge of the study.
When The Full Monty was released in 1997 – to global acclaim, a $258m box office run, and an Oscar nomination for Best Picture – it proved to commissioners that there was an appetite for film and TV showing working-class men stepping out of their comfort zones. Spiritual sequels, like 2005’s Kinky Boots, about a midlands shoe factory that targets drag performers, and Pride, a 2014 film about Welsh miners supporting LGBT rights, followed. And Men Up is in that same vein, showing men grappling with the discomfort of emotional (and physical) availability. “If it works,” Meurig whispers, when he finally confides in his wife, “it’s going to make everything normal again.” Along the way, and via some post-trial pints, the group of men come to offer each other the support that even the little blue pill can’t provide.
As a 90-minute TV film, Men Up doesn’t have much opportunity to explore the lives of these men in detail. The characterisation is rather thin: Pete’s wife has started her own business and might be growing away from him, Tommy’s long-term partner is a teacher who can’t discuss his sexuality publicly, and Colin is in a new long-distance relationship with a crossword-obsessed lonely heart he’s never met. Each exists more as a sketch to show the challenges of fragile masculinity predicated on an act that is far harder than it looks. The pill itself – which is not named as “Viagra” until the closing titles – offers them hope. “If this is real…,” Barnard’s Dr Pierce says with awed restraint, “it’s penicillin.” But the problems of manhood cannot be solved with a boner, it turns out. And so, the pill becomes a tiny blue prism through which their pains are refracted.
Rheon, best known for his turn as the evil Westerosi lord Ramsay Bolton, is an engaging lead (insomuch as the film has a protagonist). His character is the everyman, while the rest of the group are the specificmen. Writer Matthew Barry’s script is just about funny enough (“She wants to buy shares in Pfizer,” confides Colin of his girlfriend, after she sees the pill in action) to compensate for the men’s existence as useful archetypes. Because, as the film disclaims from the off, while the inspiration is true, the “characters have been fictionalised”. That fictionalisation is all rather convenient – the gay man negotiating the fact that the drug is made for, and marketed to, heterosexuals, or the garrulous labourer dealing with suicidal ideation – and shows little interest in the real detail of the drug’s creation. Viagra, as it would become, was one of the most important inventions of the late 20th century, even if Men Up is surprisingly uninterested in that side of the equation.
What remains is a tale of men bonding in the face of a shared misfortune. The core message – a somewhat preachy one – is the value of sharing these fears. Optimum stiffness, Men Up seems to say, requires not just a pill but an open mind. The result is a sweet, if trivial, story of men standing firm in the face of adversity – something that should warm all but the stoniest of cockles.
