Irish series that’s mix of Father Ted and Hardy Bucks returns to TV tonight

Check out JOE's interviews with the creators and stars of the hilarious comedy.

Airing on the BBC, the comedy show follows the "soft-bellied boys of Ballymacnoose", a fictional Northern Irish rural village, as they "flounder their way into adulthood".

The official plot synopsis for S2 of the sitcom states: "After last year, tackling the weight of grief, suppository drugs and being a bastard, the gang have come out the other side all grown up.

"Callum (co-creator Ryan Dylan) is trying out a lovely perm, Gemma (Ele McKenzie) and Lorcan (Lee R James) are smooching seven times a day, and it's been four months since Jordan (co-creator Rian Lennon) got in a full-throated screaming strop with his Daddies. Things are bright in Ballymacnoose.

"But dark clouds loom! The gang belatedly get involved in Irish history, and it's all downhill from there.

"Bigotry, balding and competitive robot combat, if they aren’t careful, the funboys are about to become the doneboys."

JOE caught up with creators and stars Rian Lennon and Ryan Dylan ahead of Funboys S2. You can watch the conversation above or read a transcript of the interview below, which has been edited for clarity and length:

JOE: We tend to start interviews with Irish actors by asking if they have a favourite Irish movie of all time and if they could say a few words about it. Would you have one off the top of your head? We'll also take any recommendations. 

Ryan Dylan: I don't even know if you'd classify it as an Irish film, but The Wind That Shakes the Barley. I watched it a week ago. I just love that movie so much. 

It's like a documentary, almost. Maybe that's more about [its director] Ken Loach, but that's just amazing. I don't know what to say that hasn't already been said about it, but yeah, that'd be my favourite. 

Rian Lennon: I wouldn't say this is my favourite, but I watched it recently, and it's very weird and cool. It's called The Outcasts. 

I think it's set in the 18th century, but there's all this magic realism and bizarre stuff going on. I would recommend it. It's very atmospheric. 

It's just this weird little low-budget, kind of like a medieval horror about this farm girl, and her imagination converts into actual magic reality, so it's very strange. It's kind of like The Witch, but with about 1% of the budget and shot in '80s Ireland. 

I saw Hokum last night. It's amazing. 

JOE: Hokum's awesome, isn't it? I think it's just a great story. It's a great whodunit on top of spooky. 

Rian Lennon: I don't know if you've ever played like Silent Hill, or any of those like old horror games, but... it feels very Silent Hill-y.

JOE: You need to go down into the basement...

Rian Lennon: Go down to the basement, and there's like a puzzle with the clock. 

JOE: I've been recommending Funboys to everyone in my life, and I've been trying to sum it up to them. I say: 'Where it's set is very cosy and the music and the acting are very sincere, and it sort of lulls you in, and then it just hits you with like the most funny, surreal, often R-rated comedy you might have ever seen on screen.

Is that a fair description? How have you been summing it up to people? And were there any shows you watched growing up that inspired Funboys?

Rian Lennon: That's a very good description of it. Yeah, definitely that sincere approach, with our acting as well. The characters are taking it very seriously, and they're absolutely never in on the joke. 

Shows that influenced it... something like Trailer Park Boys. Hardy Bucks is a massive one, actually. Hardy Bucks was the first time I saw something where I thought: 'Oh, that's a type of specific humour that I've never seen on TV before. I think we wanted to try and do the Northern Irish version of that...

It was always things like Father Ted, Hardy Bucks, or Brass Eye, The Day Today, The Limmy Show, things like this. Yeah, it was taking those weirder sensibilities, but applying them to our own local experience. 

JOE: Is that how Owen Colgan has ended up in your show? 

Rian Lennon: Yeah, we just thought, why not ask? The famous clip of him talking about fighting his own father, I sent that to the exec producer. It was an easy sell, though. He's so good. He just fits. 

JOE: Speaking of people guesting in this show, Steve Coogan is in season two, which is incredible. Could you describe for people... a bit about the role he plays in the show? Because it's really, really funny. And it's also him doing another great Irish accent after Martin Brennan on Alan Partridge. 

Rian Lennon: Yeah, yeah... Writing in that episode, we went to the actual Ulster Folk Museum and walked around, and they have these staff members who are role-playing as, you know, 19th-century Irish townspeople. 

They take it really seriously. They're very enthusiastic about their job. There's a doctor there whose able to rattle off a list of ailments that you have.

Steve Coogan's character Philip is informed by that. He's sort of an am-dram actor who has high ambitions. He's got this job at the folk museum, but he's treating it like it's an HBO period drama. 

That mix of sort of entry-level acting job, versus Daniel Day-Lewis style method acting, I find that quite funny, and then Callum (Ryan Dylan's character) obviously gets wrapped up in it as well and falls into this method acting. But yeah, [Coogan's] character is a psycho, psychopath. 

What's amazing is that Steve Coogan is an actually amazing actor, so it's got an extra layer to it where the character is playing the character really, really well. 

JOE: What was it like, Ryan, working opposite [Coogan], because you have the lion's share of the scenes with him. 

Ryan Dylan: Obviously, it was terrifying to begin with, and we didn't really get chatting to him that much beforehand at all, actually. So, the first day of shooting was my first time meeting him, but it was good because the scenes are so aggressive at times. I think we started with a really aggressive physical altercation, and it really, really broke the ice. 

But I also got to see just how serious he is, in the sense that he took the character and the comedy very seriously, and it took me back... It was almost like he still feels a certain level of anxiety about shooting, and that just made me so comfortable, just knowing what he's done and how big a fan we already are of him. 

And then, after a while, it just became so smooth and enjoyable. He's just a really funny, warm guy. But totally surreal is the main answer. It was ridiculous, what we were doing. 

Rian Lennon: It was very bizarre. But yeah, I agree, it was just amazing. We never thought we'd be able to get someone like that.

It was the same thing with Jamie Demetriou [in S1], where it was someone you've watched for so long, and you love their comedy. And then you're acting alongside them or directing them, and you can't think about it too much, though, because you just have to do your job. 

That's sort of the good thing, that we had so much to do. It was two days with Steve, and so it was just a lot of scenes to get through. So we never had time to stop and reflect on what was going on. 

Ryan Dylan: Yeah, we didn't have to worry about the social anxiety of it either. 

Rian Lennon: No, no, just make a bit of small talk and then get back to the job. Yeah, it was good that way. 

JOE: How did he become involved? I know he's half Irish. He seems very down to be in Irish things because he was in Saipan recently, then there's obviously Martin Brennan [on Alan Partridge]. He was on Moone Boy as well. Do you think there's a bit of it: 'If it's Irish, I've got to support it'?

Rian Lennon: I think so. I think there is a lot of that. We left it open to him whether he would do an Irish accent or an English accent. And he wanted to do the Irish. It would have worked both ways.

He watched the show, and he gave a shout-out to it at one of the BBC comedy festivals. That was sort of the queue for us to broach the question, chance our arm and ask. It just kind of escalated from there. 

JOE: How do you think Funboys has changed between season one and season two? I feel that the scope of the show has gotten a little bigger. In season two, you are exploring more, maybe contemporary themes... and Ireland's past. Am I right in saying that? 

Ryan Dylan: I think at a base level, we're more confident actors, writers and director. We got a taste of it in series one. Series one was obviously very, very nerve-racking. We had the jitters. It was a very anxious thing that we were doing, just coming from being on YouTube and doing sketches. So there was a lot of anxiety around series one. 

This time around, we were just like: 'Right, let's just f*****g go for it.' We were just like: 'Oh, let's just do it and let's try and have as much fun as we can,' because you never know if you're going to get to do something like this again. So just go balls to the wall and see what happens. 

Rian Lennon: After season one, not that we were disappointed, but we felt like we'd only been able to transfer 60% of our humour or whatever percentage. And so I think there was a sense this time that we have to just go 100%... It's our last chance to get that on TV, and then if it goes badly, then at least we tried.

We just had that feeling and, you know, we hope we can do more, but if we don't, we're very happy with how it's panned out.

JOE: I was actually going to ask about the season 3...You also made a movie, right? Housejackers.

Rian Lennon: Yeah, there was Housejackers from a few years ago. Yeah, it was a Northern Ireland Screen. It was almost like a drama film, so it's not really in the wheelhouse of Funboys, but it was very good, very helpful to do that, especially just directing a feature film. It definitely was a teeth-cutting experience. 

Ryan Dylan: It is great. It needs to come out. It's really good. 

JOE: Any word on a release date? 

Rian Lennon: I think it's all just festivals and all that bullsh*t. 

Ryan Dylan: Yeah, I don't know. Hopefully it comes out soon.

Rian Lennon: It will see the light of day soon... We want to do more, though. We're working on a couple of different feature film ideas, and we would love to do one that's more in the vein of Funboys. We joked about this, that we would do the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me version of Funboys. 

Rian Lennon: Yeah. I'm always talking about that with you, Ryan. Yeah, I'd love to do that. 

I'd like to do a horror short film just to test the waters. I do think there's a comedy to horror pipeline. It's maybe just that the comedy ideas are at the fringes of your thoughts, and so are the horror [ideas]. The things that freak you out are not too far from the things that will make you laugh. It's just a slight tweak of tone. 

Ryan Dylan: We do sketches as well. Obviously, that's how we started. Super Lemon is our channel on YouTube, and a few of those sketches actually sort of tap into that a little bit. 

They're quite DIY. They're just made with us holding DSLRs and shoving them into each other's faces and stuff. A few of those end up, for better or worse, feeling like little horror skits. 

Rian Lennon: Especially doing the sketches where we just ripped music from anything, and if you just add the music from one of the Silent Hill games onto a sketch that was funny, it then becomes horrific. 

Ryan Dylan: And way funnier.

Rian Lennon:  [To Ryan] There's one in particular, where you're drinking boiling tea, and you don't want to admit that it's too hot, so you just boil your mouth.

We got this makeup artist, Denise, who's really good, to do realistic third-degree burns. 

Ryan Dylan: Then there's another one where the guy has tonsil stones, and he coughs them up, and then he smashes them, and then he snorts them, and he gets like this crazy trip. I hadn't even realised that, but we've definitely tapped into it. 

JOE: Save that for your Lynchian tribute. 

Rian Lennon: Funboys: Fire Walk with Me.

Rian Lennon: Yeah, yeah. It's great. Derry Girls probably opened the door for a lot of it. That was the first big one. There's always a sort of watershed moment where everybody else realises that: 'Oh, you can do this a different way,' and Derry Girls was probably the first big moment on Northern Irish TV. It found its own unique voice.

JOE: I'll end this interview by asking if you have a favourite comedy movie of all time?

Ryan Dylan: It's maybe a cop-out, but it's the Monty Python movie, any of the Monty Python movies. 

Rian Lennon: Maybe Four Lions. I think it's just amazing, just such a good film. 

A more obscure recommendation would be Windy City Heat, which is just insane. It's almost like a Nathan Fielder-type prank that they're playing on this one guy. It's all real and staged. 

This guy is a sh*tty actor. They host fake auditions for a fake film, and essentially shoot an entire fake film to convince this guy that he's got cast in a big production, and the guy's a lunatic. It's very, very funny. 

Ryan Dylan: Just delete my last answer. The answer is Kung Fu Hustle. Every part of that movie is so good. There's still nothing like it in my eyes. It's like live-action Dragon Ball Z comedy. 

Rian Lennon: They'll never make another. 

Ryan Dylan: [Kung Fu Hustle director Stephen Chow] has talked about it. Never say never, Rian!

Rian Lennon: The community is alive, and they're asking for it. The hustle heads. 

Funboys season two kicks off on BBC Northern Ireland with two episodes from 10.55pm on Monday, 15 June. The season's remaining two episodes will air from 10.40pm on Wednesday, 17 June.

All four episodes will be repeated on the same channel from 10.25pm on Saturday, 20 June. UK readers can also check out Funboys on the BBC iPlayer.