Beautiful People

I like Beautiful People, it has a really nice nostalgic sheen to it that, while not laugh out loud funny, is certainly watchable in a quirky way. Simon and best buddy Kylie are in raptures at the prospect of headlining the school's production of Joseph, and hysteria ensues as they prepare to audition. The best thing about Beautiful People is the divine Olivia Colman, who shows her range here beyond being a foil for Mitchell and Webb.

Review in The Stage

The humour is gentle rather than hysterical, but the jokes are clever, unforced and in plentiful supply. Great performances too, particularly from its young stars Luke Ward-Wilkinson as Simon and Layton Williams as Kyle, aka Kylie.

Beautiful People comes running on to the screen and licks you all over. It's a Labrador of a sitcom, so eager to please it's exhausting. It's like The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, except camp. Screamingly, thrashingly, life-threateningly camp.

Although there are many lovely moments where it seems to revive - I am afraid that it ultimately dies of camp. Such a pity! Some of the two schoolboys' dialogue is priceless (aspiring intellectuals, they pronounce 'epitome' to rhyme with 'gnome') and little Layton Williams as the lead's best friend Kyle (or as he insists on being known, Kylie) is just brilliant, a star in the making. Olivia Colman as the mother is fabulously warm. There are some killer lines (Two fashion pointers: never wear nylon, and never wear nylon bought for you by a blind person).

But as with Ugly Betty, the problem is that it tries too hard to bring a camp aesthetic overground; to deliver a mainstream version of camp when by definition camp is a secret, niche sensibility.

Beautiful People Review

When it wasn't trying so hard to establish itself (always difficult in a first episode) and when it wasn't trying so hard to be liked, it was actually very, very good. The scenes involving Simon's family, his friend (he only seemed to have one) and his neighbours, were delightful.

In Simon Doonan's autobiography Beautiful People, he escaped from just such a drab English environment. Camp and outrageous, he grew up in dull old Reading in the 1950s with his entertainingly dysfunctional family, but he longed to be with the glamorous folk. Getting his wish, he ended up in Manhattan as not only the world's most celebrated window dresser, but also a witty reporter of the fashion scene.

This dramatisation had a lot going for it. It looked lovely and had some fine comic actors. In the attempt to make it relevant to our times, however, its 1950s setting, its characters and even the plotlines were changed. His batty aunt became inexplicably non-white, for example.

Do telly folk think we have no imagination or interest in other eras? Details are everything in a joke and none of these rang true. That is why it was jolly throughout, but never actually funny.

Positive Blog Review

Don't look now, but I think something pretty amazing just happened. A new comedy show was broadcast, after an advertising campaign that made it look promising and - wait for it - IT WAS GOOD. Really good in fact!

As cheekily camp as Simon Doonan's recollections of his barmy family are, Jonathan Harvey's innocent adaptation looks oddly as though it should be broadcast in the middle of the afternoon.

The 13-year-old Doonan is gleefully played by Luke Ward-Wilkinson, who introduces us to his dipsomaniacal mum Debbie (Peep Show's Olivia Colman) and his camp best friend Kyle (Layton Williams).

But then that, perhaps, is the best achievement of this likeable, if light, comedy drama: it manages to make the adventures of a tender, cross-dressing teenager look like normal children's TV.

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.