Simon Bird: ‘Was The Inbetweeners sexist? The joke was always on the boys’

Simon Bird thinks Friday Night Dinner is “oddly appropriate” for the coronavirus lockdown. “It’s about being at home,” says the 35-year-old, “and how crazy and unhinged it can become when you spend too much time together.”

Bird, who shot to fame more than a decade ago as the nerdy teen Will McKenzie in The Inbetweeners, was supposed to be meeting me in a London hotel. Instead, of course, we’re talking on the phone. The UK is about to go under lockdown. “I can’t even imagine what it will be like,” he says with a mix of dread and amusement. He’s going to be stuck at home in Hackney with his two kids, aged two and four, and his screenwriter wife Lisa Owens.

Still, it’s probably going to be a less stressful set-up than the one that plays out on Friday Night Dinner. “It’s like the four of us are in self-isolation trying to keep out a dangerous pathogen – ie Jim,” says Bird about the new Bafta-winning comedy, which returned to Channel 4 last night for a sixth series, reuniting the Goodmans, a suburban Jewish family of eccentrics.

Bird plays the goofy eldest son, Adam. He and his brother Jonny (Tom Rosenthal) share Friday night dinners at the home of their parents, Jackie (Tamsin Greig) and Martin (Paul Ritter). Something always goes wrong. Especially when their weird neighbour, Jim, and his german shepherd dog drop round (although this series, a new pet is being introduced: as if there wasn’t enough bad news in the world, the dog that played Wilson died).

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“It feels like it’s going to be oddly relevant for people in the months to come,” says Bird, “which is not to suggest that the global health crisis is in any way similar. But at the same time, it’s important to look for comic relief anywhere you can find it and hopefully we can provide that.”

Will McKenzie is never from your mind as Bird plays Adam Goodman – although this is a far less offensive role. He mouths his words in an over-exaggerated way and bares his teeth Austin Powers-style. He’s still the butt of the joke – this time he’s called “pussface” by his brother rather than “briefcase wanker”, which fans of The Inbetweeners still shout at Bird in the street – and he doesn’t have much luck with women.

It’s the closest we’ll get to seeing him as Will again. Last year, Bird dashed any hopes of an Inbetweeners reboot, saying it would be “depressing for everyone” because “no one is going to buy us as teenagers any more”.

“I started my career relatively young,” says Bird, who landed his role in The Inbetweeners at 24. “I was still fresh-faced. I’m sure as the years pass, and I pile on the pounds and go grey, other roles will come my way.”

He’s been playing Adam, who is in his late 20s, for nine years. But with “no character development”, he says age isn’t a problem. “The truth is that however old you are, when you go back to your parents’, you revert to being a child. I guess his age is about 12 when he walks through that front door. That joke still works for decades to come. It’s just as funny – as long as the parents are alive.”

Written by Robert Popper, who also worked as a script editor on The Inbetweeners as well as Peep Show, Friday Night Dinner sticks to the classic British sitcom format of resetting every week. “It’s a bit like The Simpsons,” says Bird. “We are the same every week.”

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In the new series, Adam’s dad, Martin, has just bought a caravan. Much to the disgust of Jackie – who, in the hands of Greig, is as seething and saucy as ever – he has parked it in the front garden. She refuses to go inside, instead communicating with him via a walkie-talkie during mealtime. Things soon escalate as the family dinner turns into a “hostage situation with a chicken” before the caravan blows up.

It’s outlandish, but it’s not half as absurd as The Inbetweeners was. The four boys – wannabe lads of middling popularity at Rudge Park Comprehensive – fantasised about girls, got drunk, masturbated, tried to lose their virginity, and made jokes about pubic hair. In the two spin-off films, released in 2009 and 2011, they took their antics to Crete and Australia and ramped things up a notch.

Both the show, and those films, were huge hits – but they have been criticised by some for being misogynistic and homophobic. They were littered with derogatory language: “There’s some tidy minge here” (referring to a group of girls); “Charlotte big tits”; “Bring your wellies, because we’re going to be knee-deep in clunge”; and “Piss off, you bumder” – a cross between two homophobic slurs. How does Bird feel about that? “At the time, I think it was supposed to be an accurate reflection of the way teenagers talk to each other before they have realised what is actually appropriate and offensive.”

The show appealed to teenagers, he adds, “because we weren’t talking down to them. It wasn’t prescriptive – it was a show for and about you. When I watched it, and I am slightly older, I could see these boys are sweet and good-natured but actually also idiots. I’m sure that is how most of the fans feel as well. Or they will feel that when they are older.”

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Does it treat women as sex objects? “I think they are in the characters’ heads but in real life – in the TV series and in the films – it was the four of us boys who were forced to get naked. Barely an episode goes by without one of us having to get our bums out or seeing Jay’s penis in the first film, so I feel that the joke is always on the boys, ultimately. Women are built up by the characters as being sort of untouchable and it’s the boys who end up making fools of themselves, embarrassing themselves, and humiliating themselves.”

Bird doesn’t think it’s particularly useful to wonder if they could get away with this sort of humour now. “I think it is important to make films, TV and books that are truly reflective of the way things are,” he says, “but also in no way do I condone the use of offensive language about people. It all totally depends on what the piece of work is and how to tread that line. It’s very hard for me to talk about something that we made in 2011, but they would probably treat it differently now. But I think most people see that those characters are 15 and clearly have not figured life out. I think that the show gets away with it because you can laugh at Jay. If Jay was in his forties saying those sorts of things, then it would be a totally different proposal and much less funny.”

As for his own similarities to Will, Bird – who was raised in Guildford, Surrey – says he had a “classic suburban upbringing, quite similar to the ones you see me in on TV”. A little more privileged, perhaps. One of four children of two academics, he was privately educated before he went on to read history at Cambridge, where he was president of the famous drama club Footlights. It was there that he met Joe Thomas, who played Simon in The Inbetweeners. After performing sketch shows at Edinburgh, the two both ended up being cast in the show in what Bird describes as a “fluke”.

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“Damon Beesley and Iain Morris were writing The Inbetweeners at the same time as we were writing sketches for their Channel 4 podcast,” says Bird. “We kept asking to audition for it and they kept saying, ‘No, you’re far too old.’ They wanted real 16-year-olds. But basically, they just ran out of time and cast us a week before we started filming. We just happened to be in their phone book and were closer in age to the characters than anybody else they knew.”

He had no idea it would become such a cult show. “It was the first comedy show that E4 ever made – I suppose nobody had really heard of E4. We just assumed it would fall by the wayside.”

But it didn’t, and it has shaped Bird’s career. In an attempt to change direction, he’s now turning his hand to working behind the camera. He made his first short film, Ernestine & Kit, in 2016 – a darkly comic road movie about two elderly women who travel the countryside of rural Ireland. His debut feature film, Days of Bagnold Summer, a comedy about a metalhead living with a single mum, is due out in May. It’s based on the book by Joff Winterhart, with a screenplay by Bird’s wife. With cinemas shut, he’s hoping it will be released online.

Though Bird maintains that sitcom is “my home”, he wouldn’t mind reading some Hollywood scripts. “Britain has an amazing tradition of making comedy, but I don’t know if that is totally specific to Britain, as people claim – there are a lot of incredible American sitcoms out there.”

What makes a successful sitcom funny? “It’s not alchemy or magic chemistry – it’s all in the script,” says Bird. “It’s just very clever and funny people sitting down and writing scripts that people love and enjoy.”

Friday Night Dinner is on Channel 4 on Fridays