Boon
Stay Lucky made me appreciate an entire genre of television I’ve been missing out on; the casually-bewildering hour-long dramedy of the late 80’s. Like probably half the country, Boon — with its 11 million viewers — was on in my house, my mum one of millions of mums content to spend a precious hour of free time watching Michael Elphick huff about in a fringed leather jacket. A big bruiser of a man, Elphick’s best remembered by me for forcing a distressed Elephant Man to dance with Pauline Quirke, and perhaps the cultural zenith of a 30-plus-year career came in the final 18 months of it, with a role whose incestuous abuse would trigger EastEnders‘ iconic “You ain’t my muvva!” “Yes I am!” scene. If there is a comparison to be made with Dennis Waterman, it’s that he’s another you can’t imagine getting the same roles today, labelled as one of those ‘brilliant performer, but an alcoholic’ actors whose condition was, unfortunately, often physically apparent onscreen.
Boon ran from 1986 to ’92, with one further episode delayed and released as a one-off special in ’95. Let’s jump in at the beginning, with the scene-setting debut, titled Box 13. Gimmick here is that Ken Boon (brilliant name) is another man who likes American things, and opening titles have him sat forlornly at a desk crammed with books about the cowboys he idolises, plus a set of wind-up joke shop teeth for some reason. Boon’s fantasies of his motorbike as a horse and helmet a ten gallon hat play out over the theme; one of two I wrongly assumed as a child were sung by Tina Turner, along with that of Taggart. Alas, it’s actually Jim Diamond, with the quasi-reggae Hi-Ho Silver that’s been playing on an endless loop in my head since I thought “maybe I’ll write about Boon” rightly peaking at number five in the charts.
Boon’s a fireman, and the lads are celebrating his mate Harry’s retirement to Spain when they get a sudden call-out, and not to be cruel, but Elphick doesn’t look in any state to be going up and down ladders. You certainly wouldn’t want to be at the bottom when he’s sliding down the pole. 1986, you tell yourself, is recent history, yet the firemen’s big yellow helmets look like stag night costumes, and every car in street scenes might as well have a fucking crank handle on the front, as the sands of time fall away at an alarming pace. A house fire’s where Boon demonstrates his heroism, rushing in to save the owners as his colleagues scream “it’s gonna go up any second!” He gets lung damage for his trouble, meaning his fireman days are over, now stuck living in a caravan in a field, unable to even dig a hole without collapsing.
Then he’s woken by bailiffs — “who’s a naughty boy then and not paid his bills?” — and given until Friday to pay up or be homeless. The unattainable sum he spends the episode chasing, too large for anyone to loan him, is £300, which in modern terms is probably a week’s meagre groceries if you forget your club card. With Harry now back from Spain to run a hotel after his wife left him, Boon shows up to be mistaken for a removal man and brazenly stare at the arses of female staff. Every scene from here has the constant drinking and offering of cups of tea, to the point Boon feels like a psyop by PG Tips, and adds to the familiar brown colour palette of the era, so foul as if to encourage viewers to downgrade their licences back to black and white.
Everyone aware he’s down on his luck, Ken Boon is a proud man, moping about and refusing hand-outs, a life of scivvying now all “a dud man” is good for. Compared to Get Lucky, this is morose viewing about sad, empty men; Boon with bad lungs, Harry a broken heart, the pair endlessly sat round comparing miseries over cuppas. Come on, Ken, ride that bike over a ramp! It’s so under-edited and baggy, when Harry fills out a newspaper ad on behalf of his pal, he reads out the full credit card number. “Ex-fireman seeks interesting work, anything legal required, no job too small.” After screwing up the paper in anger, Boon concedes to give it a shot; “if we get any replies, nutters aside, I’ll eat my helmet.” Well, that’s one way to celebrate.
Sweetening the offer with a tenner in the envelope is a reply from Barney Spitz Promotions, aka John Sessions with a ducktail hairdo, quirkily eating a hamburger through the scene, which reeks of something Sessions brought to set — “I shall steal the show with some comedy chewing!” The manager of a band, he wants Boon to clamber up a gasometer and hang a banner promoting their single Inflammatory Statements. Boon backs out on the day as it’s not safe, causing the singer — leather jacket, skull earring — to climb up instead, snarling “I’ll do it myself, poofter!” Sessions calls the rocker a “wally” and true enough, he gets stuck up there, forcing Boon to mount a rescue in front of the local papers, ending up on the front page, and birthing a new career as a sweaty fixer.
Ken Boon’s life really grew over the following series, expanding from the PO box into a motorcycle courier business, two concurrent detective agencies, and a security firm. Harry goes from one hotel to a pair of them, plus a country club and ballroom. After a dead boring first episode, the silliness kicked in pretty quickly, and a cursory glance through the history of Boon reveals classic hour-long dramady plots of insanity. By the third episode, he’s searching for the cat of a husband and wife circus act, and after that, it’s off to the races, with egg smugglers, porn barons, Hell’s Angels, and various dodgy businessmen and corrupt local politicians played by an anyone-who’s-anyone in British television, with the sort of on-point casting which sounds made-up. Go on, guess which one of these I’ve invented:
Stephen Rea as “a dishevelled Irishman.” Richard Griffiths as a businessman with amnesia. Peter Blake as a director of mucky movies. Tony Slattery as the Spanish boyfriend of Harry’s ex-wife. Two McGann brothers as Irish Gypsies. Matthew Kelly ‘as himself’. Hugh Paddick as a gangland boss. John Savident a restaurant critic. Robin Askwith “yobbish rock star Bograt,” whose agent is Karl Howman. Brian Blessed as Lambert Sampson, a Cumbrian sheep farmer. Dexter Fletcher a wild radio DJ. Tim Healy a washed-up comedian. John Hannah a Scottish footballer. Sophie Thompson a “mouthy feminist student.” Jane Horrocks a female snooker player. Christopher Eccleston a man who kills a doctor in a hit and run. Bill Nighy a radio DJ accused of sleeping with underage girls. Dennis Waterman as the robber of a lingerie factory. John Nettles a shady businessman. Brian Murphy an ex-cat burglar. The answer is of course, none; they are all featured in Boon.
But the best piece of casting is a regular who makes his debut in the second series, episode six of which, Wheels of Fortune, I also watched; Neil Morrissey as long-haired biker and comedy sidekick Rocky. New titles show Boon literally pumping his fists with excitement imagining himself in a cowboy film, though the wind-up teeth have sadly been written out. This one’s by Anthony Horowitz, last seen on here as writer of the creepy Dramarama mirror episode, and picked for its similarly spooky-leanings. Things begin with some neighbours calling an ambulance for an old lady who’s had a fall, but told they’ll have to drive her themselves, as the ambulances are on strike. Turns out, it’s Harry’s aunt Lil, and he and Boon arrive at the hospital (or as Boon calls it, the “NHSS”) to find a protest for fair pay and against government cuts. We’ve wandered into a Political Storyline.
It takes a while to figure out which side the show’s on, as Harry moans about the trade unions “bumping up their pay packets,” and finds Aunt Lil’s bed empty, shunted off to another ward. Staff are half-arsed and short-tempered at every turn, like an eye-rolling nurse played by Sadie Frost doing the sort of Midlands accent your dad puts on when he’s moaning about Lenny Henry. It’s established Lil had a stroke because she didn’t get oxygen in time, which she would’ve in an ambulance, and it’s possible a young Wes Streeting was glued to the screen (liddle bid o’politics!) at such ineptitude. But Boon’s pro-union, and Harry gets put in his place by a female doctor eleven hours into a shift. “Look at this place, it’s a shambles!” “Yes it is, we’re overworked and understaffed.” The whole plot couldn’t feel more timely even if big Ken had wandered in to interrupt with “seen how old the Stranger Things kids look now? One of ’em’s got a beard!” as Harry tells the (Indian) doctor it’s alright for her, because “you people are used to it.” “By that,” she asks, “do you mean doctors, or Indians?” He learns that everyone’s suffering, his old aunt and the staff who rely on ambulances to transport blood, equipment and medicine, so as way of apology, offers up Boon’s riders to help out, free of charge.
Speaking of, at the office of the (Birmingham-based) Texas Rangers, Ace of Spaces blares from the headphones of Rocky, sat on the desk reading The Sun, and being he’s Neil Morrissey, almost certainly admiring the Page 3 knockers. On a job, he argues with a traffic warden while again listening to Ace of Spaces — ol’ Rocky one-song — then flirts with a horned-up secretary, who tells him “I was hoping you’d got a package for me,” meaning the penis which would go on to break Les Dennis’s heart. She sucks on a biro and actually unzips his fly in the middle of the office, and as the camera doesn’t venture below waist height, we must assume it’s just hanging out for the rest of the scene. Meanwhile, someone’s pinched his bike, which he can’t report as it was untaxed and uninsured. The thief takes it to his big brother’s bike yard (or “brig brother” as the actor fumbles it), and gets called a prat.
But the third plot strand’s the one I tuned in for. Harry’s hotel is now booming, though confusingly, Barbara Durkin’s behind reception, possibly establishing Boon as a shared universe with Alan Partridge. They’ve a celebrity guest staying, the psychic Phyllis Nichols, who’s taken a room to write her autobiography. When Boon hands her the key, their skin contact triggers a vision — “some day, there will be tabloid stories about Barbara Windsor nixing your romantic storyline in Easties because having to kiss you made her feel ill, and a year later you will be dead at 56!” No, not that, but that he’ll have an accident on his bike; an accident we see a premonition of, in flashes of him tumbling across the road. “I saw blood, a great deal of blood,” and Boon lying on an operating table. That could be anything! He might be getting his tight foreskin fixed. Final vision is of a policeman bringing bad news to the hotel (“It’s Boon. I’m afraid he died during the operation to loosen his foreskin”). “I saw it,” she warns, “and it will happen.”
He’ll be lucky to get in a crash considering Boon‘s glacial pace, enlivened only briefly by Roy Kinnear as a grieving uncle, in the worst dialogue he’s ever had to perform, including Eskimo Nell. But the grim portent of Phyllis’s vision hangs over Boon as he rides out for delivery. It’s like Final Destination out there, potential hazards everywhere; pedestrians, speeding cars, a reversing truck; a foreskin surgeon with the shakes. Death is near as Boon swerves to avoid a car, boxes of fruit flying as he tumbles, left face down on the road. RIP Ken Boon, you died as you lived, unable to fully retract past the glans and with every erection causing discomfort. Back from an ad break, he’s perfectly fine, yet what of all the blood and operating table?
On another hospital run, he’s asked to consider giving blood, cos they’re low on donors, and someone’s just been brought in from a crash; coincidentally, the guy who stole Rocky’s bike. The prophecy comes true as Sadie Frost takes Boon’s blood, though thankfully he doesn’t have a wank on top of the bed like she did when hers got drained in Dracula. If only I’d had a prophetic dream about not watching Boon, which up until now existed on here as an infrequent funny reference, but in reality is sadly just inept and boring. It took twice as long to write and watch as the average old telly, and on the second draft, I had to edit the dozen times I’d instinctively typed his name as Ken Book. All I’ve got to show for it is Hi Ho Silver looping in my brain until whatever next terrible earworm takes the reigns.
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