Jack Rooke on the devastating Big Boys finale: ‘People told me to bare my soul. And now I regret it’

As Channel 4’s bittersweet sitcom classic reaches the end of the road, Nick Hilton meets the cast and creator of the show to explore its heart-rending conclusion. “The answer is no,” he tells me, cradling an Americano while his PR handler scrolls idly on his phone, just out of earshot. “I’ve often felt, this week, a little bit like slamming my head against a wall. A lot of this week has been like: ‘I couldn't have worked harder for a show that I’m not sure anybody knows has even come out.’”.

But for Rooke, who has graduated from precocious newcomer to coveted showrunner, the fawning 5-star reviews (including in these august pages) mean far less than the sense that people, out there in the real world, are actually watching. “It only takes like three people, unconnected to the show, to say they didn’t know it was out before you’re like, ‘what was the f***ing point of working my arse off for two years?’” He looks apologetic after this last judgement. “I’m probably being a bit miserable about it,” he confesses, “because that’s my current feeling at 8am in the morning.” (It’s almost 10am, but one must make allowances for the writerly temperament).

Big Boys’ final season – its third – has rounded out a story that began a decade ago. Despite living between Watford and Rickmansworth (a deeply unsexy corridor of this island nation), Rooke blagged his way into student accommodation at the University of Westminster’s Harrow campus (the proto-Brent Uni). It was a move that – in ways both linear and not – would eventually lead to Big Boys. After completing a journalism degree, he spent time as a teaching assistant and worked as a runner for live events, before winding up at Radio 1, manning the phones for their call-in service, The Surgery. At the BBC, he began to flirt with documentary filmmaking.

But the real source of professional inspiration was found away from New Broadcasting House. “I’d started doing quite naff comedy poems above pubs,” he recalls. “I think almost as an exercise in trying to gain confidence.” This hustle is immortalised in the final season of Big Boys, where the on-screen Jack bombs with a performance poem about Madeleine McCann. “I think that's the scene my friends have been most triggered by. None of the suicide s***. It’s me trying to be a poet.”.

The “suicide s***” to which Rooke alludes, is a spectre that has hung over Big Boys from the off and was at the heart of the material Rooke developed for the Edinburgh Fringe. The character of Danny is a hybrid of friends that Rooke made at university and in his early twenties, one of whom died by suicide. “I would say the character of Danny is based on three or four of my friends,” he says. “Three are still here and one is not. And it's a direct letter to the one who’s not, in a really earnest, emotional, autobiographical way.” Indeed, the show has always been addressed by Rooke – who serves as the narrator – to you. “You” being Danny, “you” being lost loved ones.

The final two episodes of Big Boys are the culmination, comedically and emotionally, of this story Rooke has been working on for a decade. A final sequence, in which Rooke (the man, not the character) enters the narrative, to speak to Danny on a bench overlooking the sea in Margate, is a moment that will stand alongside those rare instances when comedy transcends its genre constraints. Radar O’Reilly interrupting the 4077th M*A*S*H to announce that Henry Blake’s plane has been shot down, BoJack calling to Sarah Lynn at the planetarium, Fleabag, alone, at the bus stop. Add to that, now, a rumination on meal deal inflation.

“Jack always had that scene in his head from day one,” Big Boys’s director Jim Archer tells me via email. “What was tricky to get right was the balance of truth and story,” he says. “That's the genius of Jack’s writing in that scene. To balance truth and story and create a finale that satisfies both endings is an amazing tightrope to walk.” For the scene – one of the televisual moments of the year already – Rooke and Archer changed the aspect ratio to create a visual separation from the show’s widescreen, sitcom aesthetic and allowed the conversation to run for over seven minutes. The camera lingers plaintively on the Kentish coast, and Antony Gormley’s half-submerged statue, “Another Time”, stares back at Jack and Danny from the sunlit waves. “The day we shot it was lovely. Beautiful weather. I know it’s a sad scene, but we had a lovely day!”.

“I felt quite protective of Jack in those moments doing those scenes,” Pointing tells me. “I tried, always, to be really calm and be just sort of there and make him feel comfortable.” Theirs is a friendship that goes back to their days as writers and performers at the Fringe, long before Big Boys was a reality. It was there, back in the early 2010s, that Rooke knew he’d found his Danny. “We were in a kebab shop at 3am,” Rooke recalls. “And I just whispered in his ear – in this Danny Dyer comedy voice – ‘I dare you to get a pizza.’ And we laughed so much. In that moment, I was like: ’You’re Danny.’”.