Joe and Simon’s deep love of the world they helped create, and the characters that inhabit it, is blindingly obvious; they refer to themselves as fans of the show on more than one occasion, and talk about their characters’ antics as if they are incredulous onlookers, one step removed from these hapless teens. In bringing these characters to the big screen, they manage to lose none of the naive charm that makes the series so endearing.
“We tried not to change too much,” Thomas explains of the jump from small to big screen. “We wanted to preserve the dynamic of the four boys and that banter-y style, and also to ensure the fans of the show would see what they liked about the series, in this film.”
It seems like a pretty obvious strategy – but the history of UK television is littered with disastrous movie spin-offs that have foregone the original appeal of their series to either broaden the content in order to scoop up a larger (read: American) audience, or to attempt to match the newly-increased screen-size with an appropriately epic tale. The Inbetweeners Movie nicely avoids both these common gaffes, maintaining the easy blend of charm and crude naivety that has seen the series become one of the highest rating comedies in the UK.
For the uninitiated: The Inbetweeners follows four teenagers as their navigate their ways through a world of raging hormones, outrageously misplaced confidence, and embarrassing attempts to attract their much more mature female classmates. The film transports this scenario to Greece (where the four go on a post-high-school-graduation holiday) but the core elements remain. It’s both shockingly offensive and innocent, and it’s a credit to both the writing and the acting that the four protagonists can say the most horrendously un-PC things, while remaining likeable and sweet.
“None of these things are deliberate, and this is all in retrospect, but we looked back on the third [and final] series and saw it was a bit more ‘gross out’ and a bit less of what made the show what it was in the first two series, which were based around the naivety and the innocence of the characters,” explains Bird of walking that stylistic tightrope. “I think the writers deliberately tried to redress that balance for the film. And I think they did that very well, it was important because a) it’s suppose to be realistic and b) the gross-out aspect doesn’t work unless you like these characters and find them sweet and charming.”
Writer Iain Morris (who created and wrote the series and film alongside Damon Beesley) later tells me, “We felt we needed more scale in everything: higher emotional peaks, bigger troughs, and bigger events. We never try to be ‘sweet’ as such, it was more that the way of achieving more scale [in the film] was by getting more emotional depth than we would normally go for. We don’t tend to go for that because my memory of being that age wasn’t that every week you had some deep epiphany, so we didn’t see why it should happen every week in the show.”
Achieving this emotional depth meant that a lot of the funniest material actually ended up on the cutting room floor. “Although those scenes were funny, they were delaying the next important point in the story,” explains Thomas. “I think it was also important for these boys to have a crisis on this holiday that they think is going to be so epic, but is actually just a bit shit, and then they fall out and have to try to bond a bit and come back together.”
Although the movie is intrinsically tied to the series, its genesis was actually another film idea that Morris and Beesley had previously toyed with.
“The film was always something we’d had in our heads,” explains Morris. “We wanted to write a teen comedy about a lads’ holiday abroad, and then as the show became more successful and we enjoyed working with the boys more and more, and saw how talented and rare they were, it made sense to make The Inbetweeners Movie.“
The slow reveal of the boys’ various talents makes sense when Bird explains how they were cast in the series. Morris and Beesley met Thomas and Bird after a show and hired them to write sketches for a radio show the pair were producing. “While we were writing these sketches, over the period of a year or so, they were talking about this sitcom they were trying to cast and how badly it was all going.”
“They were like, ‘Do you know anyone?'” laughs Thomas. “We said, we could come and audition,” continues Bird. “They said, ‘Oh no, you’re totally wrong for it’, then they rang up a week before filming started and said, essentially, ‘We’ve ran out of time. Do you want to come in and read for it?'”
In fact, Blake Harrison, who plays lanky simpleton Neil, was the only cast-member to come out of an audition process that encompassed thousands and thousands of hopeful teens.
“They did a pilot with a different cast years before they made the series, and James [Buckley – the crude and happily deluded Jay], was a hangover from that,” says Bird. “So one hangover, two last resorts and one genuinely good actor,” laughs Thomas. “They were holding out for better things,” adds Bird. “So let that be a lesson, settle for what you’ve got.”
