The laws of physics are challenged early in Kevin & Perry Go Large, when Harry Enfield’s sullen, spotty teenager foils a bank robbery with his erection. Later on in the film – one of the most successful British movies in UK box office history – the camera is splattered by the gloop from an infected belly-button piercing, Kathy Burke cops off in a sand dune while dressed in full Gallagher-brother drag, and a third-act cameo is provided by EastEnders’ Phil Mitchell. Kevin & Perry Go Large, about a pair of sex-starved mates attempting to lose their virginity in Ibiza, is absolute tosh. But it’s our tosh: the product of a nation that invented Viz, Lucozade, and Denise van Outen. And 25 years ago this month, it was the sort of slapdash, locally made and proudly creaky tosh that British audiences regularly flocked to see. Today, though, things are different. And it begs a simple question: did the movies change, or did we?
The year 2000 is often considered a nadir in the story of the British film industry, with too many nascent production companies – each flush with National Lottery funding – trying to make their own Guy Ritchie movies, or their own spins on Richard Curtis, or films designed to capitalise on the (questionable) allure of the Primrose Hill set. Numerous releases became punchlines in their own right: the office romcom Janice Beard 45 WPM with Patsy Kensit and Rhys Ifans; the grotty gangland turkey Rancid Aluminium with Sadie Frost and Rhys Ifans; the… err… equally grotty gangland turkey Love, Honour and Obey with Sadie Frost and Rhys Ifans. Others have been largely forgotten: Kelly Macdonald’s bingo hall comedy House!; the clubland murder mystery Sorted; the unholy union of disco music, psychic powers and a naked Stephen Fry titled Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?
I will not lie and declare these films any good, likewise many of the Britflicks that came and went through cinemas soon after the millennium. Even if you wear the thickest of nostalgia goggles, you won’t find a secret cult classic in Honest, Dave Stewart’s infamous Swinging Sixties crime thriller in which three members of the pop group All Saints dropped acid and took their tops off. But to watch any of these films again is to be immersed in work that could only ever be made in Britain. And – with that in mind – it’s staggering just how expansive the term “British film” used to be. At the other end of the quality spectrum, homegrown cinema meant that year’s Purely Belter, an endearingly chintzy Geordie comedy about teenage Newcastle United supporters. It also meant Wonderland, Michael Winterbottom’s tender ensemble drama about lonely, alienated Londoners. We had range.
Upon its release, Kevin & Perry Go Large was often contrasted with the previous year’s American Pie, another sex comedy about prurient teens, albeit one with a far less grubby bent. It was “more sophisticated fare”, as Empire magazine put it at the time – some claim for a film built around a scene in which Jason Biggs has sex with a dessert. But I suppose it’s accurate: whereas American Pie cast nebbishly handsome men and some of the most beautiful women of 1999 to play its horny yet earnest adolescents, Kevin & Perry is almost overwhelmingly ghoulish-looking.
Enfield and Burke, who originated the characters on the Nineties sketch show Harry Enfield & Chums, transform themselves into greasy-haired monsters; tantrum-throwing grotesques with craven libidos and a wardrobe of sagging shell suits. American Pie boasted Barenaked Ladies, Third Eye Blind and Norah Jones on its soundtrack. Kevin & Perry Go Large is built around a novelty dance track in which the pair repeatedly chant: “All I wanna do is do it – big girl, big girl”. It went to No 16 in the UK Top 40.
A Variety article in 2000 reported that Paramount Pictures did pick up Kevin & Perry for US distribution – with plans to position it as a British spin on Beavis and Butt-Head, apparently – but an actual release didn’t seem to materialise. It’s largely unthinkable for America to ever have “got” the film, though, with its “top shelf of a newsagent magazine rack” set pieces and laddish frivolity. Its entire creative approach is as British as bangers and mash, its aspirations admirably local.
Over time, British films like Kevin & Perry – meaning ones devoid of obvious global appeal – have become increasingly unusual, and rarely trouble the box office like they once did. Think Mike Leigh’s mesmeric Hard Truths, Molly Manning Walker’s holiday-from-hell drama How to Have Sex, or the little-seen 2024 comedy Seize Them! with Aimee Lou Wood. Think queer dramas Layla and Unicorns, or the Christmas movie Boxing Day, or recent film versions of TV series including Bad Education, The Inbetweeners and People Just Do Nothing. All worthy slices of thoroughgoing Britainalia, and satisfying to varying taste levels, yet few of them found a deserving audience.
The possible reasons for this are tenfold. The internet age is one defined by homogenisation and an Americanisation of creativity, while the genres that for years British film seemed to champion (comedy, romances, gritty character studies, even costume dramas) have largely migrated to television. Cinema tickets are expensive, and audiences are conditioned only to want to pay for blockbuster spectacle – something that is rarely financially viable for the UK film industry, and that, arguably, we’ve never been particularly good at making anyway.
Still, it is concerning for the future of British cultural identity as a whole. Numerous industry power players have spoken in recent years of the crisis in UK film funding, and the increasing threat to specifically British storytelling. Statistics last year from the BFI were a sobering read: the overwhelming majority of film production spend in 2024 (87 per cent of it, in fact) was on “inward” productions such as Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, the live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon, and the next Knives Out sequel – films with largely American casts, American backers and global reach. “Domestic” productions – meaning films with a more overtly British bent and British backers – made up just nine per cent of spend.
Is it any wonder, then, that Britain is in such a cultural drought when so many of the films we make might just as well have been made anywhere? And that while movies including Barbie and Wicked – which were shot at Warner Bros Studios in Hertfordshire – helped inject millions into the UK economy, they barely spoke to British culture or British society, or reflected anything about our everyday existence. For all the criticism levelled 25 years ago at British cinema’s Class of 2000, it’s impossible to deny that films like Kevin & Perry, Purely Belter and Rancid Aluminium were ours. It was easy to see our humour in them. Our lives and foibles. Our teeth. Someone get Rhys Ifans’s agent on the phone and tell them we need him pronto.
