Beautiful People

The Times Review

Beautiful People, like Gimme Gimme Gimme, is loud and brash. I got into a total decade and age muddle with it.

Beautiful People is funny and adventurous, breaking off for dream or fantasy sequences and Jonathan Harvey doesn't want to tell a conventional tale, so homophobia is not really an issue.

Jonathan Harvey made his name with Beautiful Thing, a play about growing up gay in unsympathetic working-class suburbia. Now he has written Beautiful People, a sitcom that follows suit, loosely based on the memoirs of the top Manhattan window-dresser Simon Doonan. This doesn't sound like much of an advance, and watching the first episode I had the sense of a talent in full retreat: a randy neighbour tries to tempt Simon's plumber dad round - It's right draughty round my gash. I mean, gaff. It is peopled with what are clearly intended to be lovable originals, but no lovability came over, and precious little originality. It's all rather ugly.

This new comedy from Jonathan Harvey (Gimme, Gimme, Gimme) is adapted from the novel by Simon Doonan (now creative director of New York's famous store Barneys), based on his childhood.

The enjoyably cheeky series, starring Luke Ward-Wilkinson and Samuel Barnett (who play the young and old Simon), explores Simon's recollections of his teenage life in Reading.

In case you don't know (and unless you spotted him offering style tips on America's Next Top Model - why should you?) Simon Doonan is the British-born window-dresser and creative director of the glamorous New York department store, Barneys. This new sitcom is inspired by his autobiography about growing up gay and working class in un-glamorous Reading.

Not having read it, I can't tell you how faithfully Jonathan Harvey's screenplay is to the book, but as Doonan is now in his mid-50s, it's a safe bet he wasn't a schoolboy in 1997 as he's depicted here (although his household did include a live-in blind auntie, played by Meera Syal).

Luke Ward-Wilkinson and Samuel Barnett play Simon, then and now, in the first instalment which works its socks off trying to be wacky. Describing his mum's attempts to entertain, Simon now tells us: Never, ever trust the word 'zany'. Advice the director might have done well to heed.

Beautiful People traces the life and times of an outrageous, unashamed teenage fashionista - played with great charm by Luke Ward-Wilkinson - growing up in Reading in the 1990s. His father is a plumber; his mother is a drinkers and his blind Aunty Hayley is as mad a March hare.

As an adolescent, the young man feeds off Tennessee Williams' films, dresses up in women's clothes and dreams of a glamorous world elsewhere. It is not a work of comic genius and - unlike the first series of Shameless - it doesn't give off the smell of authenticity, despite being based on the memoirs of Simon Doonan, creative director of Barney's department store in New York. But it does have an exuberant cast of characters, crazy fantasy sequences and plenty of good humour.

The beige boredom of suburban adolescence has produced a stream of anti-heroes. Now, to add to the notable likes of Holden Caulfield, Malcolm (in the middle) and Adrian Mole, we have Simon Doonan, self-styled star of Beautiful People and survivor of growing up in Reading. Which takes some doing for a teenage boy into frocks.

Gay-friendly would be putting it a tad mildly for Jonathan Harvey's boisterous sitcom-style adaptation of Doonan's original memoir. It's gay-delirious, spinning off in camp tangents - including a hilarious spoof on those crazy old Egoiste ads - at the drop of an escapist hat. Not all the jokes hit the mark, but its feel for the early 1990s, those dark pre-internet days, is spot on.

Told from the perspective of Doonan's present-day persona, a slightly fey New York window-dresser played by Luke Ward-Wilkinson, Beautiful People sidesteps soft nostalgia and skewers the past with waspish wit. Clutch it to your man boobs.

Preview: Beautiful People

There are, I'm sure, a number of responses to be elicited when told that the creator of Gimme, Gimme, Gimme has created a new sitcom for BBC2 - not all of them complimentary.

But Jonathan Harvey has done just that, and after the first two episodes of Beautiful People landed on our doormat recently, I have to say that it looks like it's going to be a finely crafted, rather sweet, and often incredibly funny series.

Meera Syal Interview

Meera Syal, star of the new sitcom Beautiful People, tells The Telegraph that there still aren't enough non-white faces on television.

A promising new sitcom, based on the best-selling memoirs of Simon Noonan, the now creative director of Barney's department store in New York. Growing up in suburban Reading of the 1990s, the young Simon dreams of escaping a dreary existence that is seriously lacking in glamour. Where, oh where, are the beautiful people? Quirky and fun, this might just do the business - the cast includes Olivia Colman, Aidan McCardle and Meera Syal.

Olivia Colman Interview

Olivia Colman moves from Peep Show to play mum in the mildly potty Beautiful People. The Times gets acquainted.