One evening in Wales, in the early 1990s, Dr David Price put his children to bed before sitting down to sample some pornographic films on his VCR. The cassettes had been express-mailed to him by American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had entrusted Price to study a potential impotence remedy called sildenafil – better known by its brand name, Viagra.
There was just one problem: the low-budget skin flicks were so awful that Price refused to let them taint his trial.
“No Welsh, red-blooded male would ever get aroused by these,” he told Pfizer, requesting a fresh batch of cassettes. Instead, the company instructed him to source his own erotica, for which he would be reimbursed.
“But [Price] is an upstanding member of the local community,” says Matthew Barry, the scriptwriter of Men Up, a TV dramatisation about Viagra’s first clinical trials. “So he and his wife, under the cover of darkness, went to a sex shop in another town to buy some new pornography. They tried explaining that it was for science but obviously, no one believed them.”
Dr David Price (fictionalised as Dr Dylan Pearce, played by Aneurin Barnard, left) led the way in making the medical community take impotence seriously.Credit: Alistair Heap
Because Men Up aired as a 90-minute film on the BBC, Barry didn’t have room to include such amusing titbits. Instead, he focuses on five men from Swansea, where the study was conducted in 1994 at Morriston Hospital.
Almost all the fictionalised participants and their partners are working class.
“I’m from down the road in Cardiff,” Barry says via Zoom from Los Angeles, where he is currently working. “I know these men; I know their cadence and mannerisms. We so rarely see working class portrayals on television and when we do they tend to have a dour, kitchen sink-style quality. A group of rugged Welshmen who go to the pub but never talk about their feelings was more interesting. Their sense of humour, which I grew up with, is baked in from the start.”
“I don’t think the NHS should be financing people waving their potency at a disco.”
Frank Dobson, former UK secretary of health
When a two-page outline of Men Up landed on Barry’s desk, his first thought was: “This is The Full Monty with Viagra.” Immediately, this ruled out a focus on jargon-spouting lab technicians peering through microscopes or Benny Hill-esque shenanigans.
“It could have been a bad comedy full of puns,” says Barry, who also acted as an executive producer. “The BBC made a companion documentary about the discovery of Viagra from a more scientific perspective, which is great, but it doesn’t move you or make you laugh or cry. The story I wanted to tell was about the human emotions of it all.”
Pete (Phaldut Sharma) blames his erectile dysfunction for the problems in his marriage to Alys (Alexandria Riley).Credit: Alistair Heap
In other words, Men Up is about male vulnerability and friendship, forged amidst the dominant lad culture of mid-1990s Britain and leavened with an understated comedic sensibility.
When Viagra was released in 1998 it smashed prescription drug sales records, led the opening monologues of late-night talk shows and was abused by thrill-seeking youngsters who combined it with party drugs. High-profile men including former US presidential candidate Bob Dole and Brazilian footballer Pele were paid small fortunes to front its advertisements. It even changed the terminology: thanks to Pfizer’s efforts, the medical-sounding “erectile dysfunction” has largely replaced “impotence”, with its connotations of weakness and failure.
Not everyone was impressed. The late Frank Dobson, who was UK secretary of health at the time, worried that media-driven demand for Viagra could drain the National Health Service’s budget. Besides, why should taxpayers subsidise blokes getting their rocks off? “I don’t think the NHS should be financing people waving their potency at a disco,” Dobson huffed.
“You hear the word Viagra and you wait for the punchline. But men do kill themselves over this.”
Matthew Barry, Men Up scriptwriter
Some critics claim Viagra’s success inadvertently fuelled “a narrowing in discourses of masculine sexuality in which the emphasis is increasingly on penile performance and enhancement”. At the same time, it helps millions of men and their partners – except those who don’t respond to the drug.
But how was it tested? Fortunately, the participants were spared the ordeal of having to stimulate themselves in a sterile hospital room while being scrutinised by clipboard-wielding researchers. Instead, they were fitted with a non-invasive device to gauge the strength and duration of their erections, then left alone to watch an explicit film. This allowed little opportunity for exaggeration and researchers even checked for evidence of sexual climax. (Wisely, Price shifted the trial to Morriston Hospital from its intended location: a facility run by nuns.)
“People thought this little blue pill was going to fix everything but actually, it doesn’t,” says scriptwriter Matthew Barry.Credit: Seri DeYoung
In Men Up, we follow five Welshmen: Iwan Rheon as Meurig Jenkins, whose wife blames her double-mastectomy for his inability to have sex with her; Phaldut Sharma as Pete Shah, who attributes the problems in his marriage to his erectile dysfunction; Paul Rhys as Tommy Cadogan, who conceals his gay relationship because the trial only admits married men; Steffan Rhodri as widower Colin White, too fearful to meet a woman he connected with through a lonely hearts column; and Mark Lewis Jones as Eddie O’Connor, outwardly jovial but tormented by his secrets.
“You hear the word Viagra and you wait for the punchline,” says Barry, a former actor who studied history and politics. “But men do kill themselves over this and I wanted to portray [that distress] on screen.”
As one UK reviewer put it: “The problems of manhood cannot be solved with a boner, it turns out. And so, the pill becomes a tiny blue prism through which their pains are refracted.”
According to Barry: “All drama is about change … what Viagra was able to do for these characters was become a pivot point for change in the sense they all had to face what they’d been running from.”
Loading
Among Barry’s colleagues in Men Up are executive producers Nicola Shindler, whom he first worked with two decades ago, and Russell T Davies (Queer as Folk, Doctor Who, A Very English Scandal), who incorporated one of Barry’s scripts into an episode of Banana, an anthology series focusing on LGBT communities.
Barry also worked with the real Dr Price – known as Dylan Pearce (Aneurin Barnard) in the film – to create composite characters that honoured the trial participants’ experiences without breaching their privacy.
Recently, Men Up was named best feature film at the Banff World Media Festival Rockie Awards. Before it aired in the UK, The Guardian gave it five stars, praising its “kindly but acute interrogation of the narrow definitions of masculinity we work within, the inflexibility and absurdity of them, the needless misery caused by falling outside the lines”.
Barry agrees.
“Yes, it’s the story of the first Viagra trial,” he says. “People thought this little blue pill was going to fix [everything] but actually, it doesn’t. This is really a story about mental health and learning to open up and talk.”
Men Up streams on BritBox from June 27.
If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact Lifeline on 131 114 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636.