Men Up

The mid-1990s. The era of cool Britannia, Blur, Oasis, New Labour and an emerging sense of optimism about the fast-approaching new millennium. It’s a mood reflected in Men Up, the BBC’s buoyant dramatisation of the first trial in Swansea of the drug, which would become Viagra. While the film is composed of a concentric conveyor belt of characters who have given up hope, writer Matthew Barry and director Andrew Way refuse to indulge in their hopelessness, never giving up on their semi-fictional subjects’ chances of happiness.

Barry’s screenplay attempts to pool the experiences of the trial’s participants into the drama’s nucleus. As disparate as they are, they all suffer from the same sexual dysfunction and coalesce at the feet of Pfizer, who offer them a comparatively easy route out of their respective nuptial doldrums. One of the aims (perhaps the central aim) of the film is to show the importance of camaraderie and communication in the rebirth of these men’s lives. It is an element that feels somewhat undercooked amongst the effort to dissect each character’s relationship and complex inner life, while the various strands that the film takes on can make it feel more like a selection of well-played, but at times hurried, vignettes, rather than a totally cohesive whole.

The terse runtime also seems to leave some of its other themes a little pink in the middle, such as the relatively hastily played breakdown of Pete and Alys’ (Phaldut Sharma and Alexandria Riley) marriage. Meurig’s marriage to Ffion is arguably the most developed of the many stories, and their dynamic of a couple, beautifully and subtly performed by Iwan Rheon and Alexandra Roach, whose intimacy has been disrupted by illness, feels as though it deserves a feature of its own.

In spite of its stretched threads and broader failure to place the trial in any greater context than its immediate subjects, Men Up is an admirably quaint affair. Whether it should be is perhaps another question. 

Matthew McMillan

Men Up is released on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on 29^th December 2023.

Watch the trailer for Men Up here: