Some will think it odd that the BBC has, this Christmas, chosen to give us the gift of Men Up, a drama about five Welshmen who join an early Viagra trial. Not me, though. I’ve always felt the word festive may be applied as easily to the bedroom as to bunting, for what is sex if not a celebration of all that it means to be human? This turns out to be the most delightful of presents: think The Full Monty meets Masters of Sex, with a few light top notes of Gavin & Stacey.
In his pitch-perfect screenplay, Matthew Barry probes a certain kind of British masculinity with utmost care and discretion, determined to discover in its underpants a burning emotional tumescence as well as, er, the more straightforward kind of engorgement. It is 1994, and in a Swansea hospital a compassionate and bracingly straightforward doctor called Dylan Pearce (Aneurin Barnard) is running a small-scale clinical trial for a pill that will one day be marketed as Viagra. He has a sidekick in an equally kind nurse, Moira (Joanna Page), and a group of shy male guinea pigs, most of whom are impotent as a result of diabetes. Why are these men willing to submit to the good doctor’s humiliations? Wouldn’t it be easier, less embarrassing, to stay quiet?
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