Inside Men Up – the Viagra drama determined to get men talking

The writer and stars of the brilliant BBC One film tell Katie Rosseinsky about delving into the origins of a drug that is so often associated with a punchline, but has irrevocably changed many people’s lives

Writer Matthew Barry hopes the film will be a ‘conversation starter’ for men (BBC/Quay Street Productions/Tom Jackson)

When screenwriter Matthew Barry first learned about the 1994 clinical trial for Viagra at Swansea’s Morriston Hospital, his initial reaction was: “This is The Full Monty with Viagra.” His next thought? “This has to be made into a drama, and how has nobody done it before? Let’s move quickly, because someone [else] will do this.”

You can understand his surprise that the true story behind Men Up, Barry’s BBC One film based on the trial, was still there for the taking. It’s one of those heartwarming, couldn’t-make-it-up tales that the British entertainment industry does so well, the kind where you might be laughing one moment, then weeping the next, about a group of everymen doing something a bit, well, snigger-inducing, only to find that it changes their lives irrevocably. “I think British storytellers are very good at starting from a human place that people relate to – and to do that in a story about a drug that gives you an erection is quite unique,” says Aneurin Barnard, who plays Dr Dylan Pearce, the (fictional) medic overseeing the trial. 

By 2025, an estimated 322 million men will be affected by erectile dysfunction; Viagra is now available over the counter in the UK, and is thought to have earned billions for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, but it’s still spoken about in innuendos. “People hear the words ‘Viagra’ and ‘impotence’ and they wait for the punchline,” Barry says. “But men kill themselves over this. It’s at once hilarious and tragic.” For the cast, it was striking to see just how awkward the subject made others feel. “People take an inhale first before they then respond,” Barnard notes. “When people say, ‘What are you doing next?’ and I say ‘I’m doing this film about Viagra’, everybody giggles,” adds his co-star Mark Lewis Jones, who plays trial participant Eddie. “I don’t know whether people are still embarrassed about that kind of thing and it’s a way of getting over that? Everybody makes jokes: ‘Have you got any samples?’ It’s still [something] that we have to joke about in order to talk about.”

Like so many medical breakthroughs, the discovery of Viagra was entirely accidental. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, chemists at a Pfizer lab in Sandwich, Kent, were exploring whether the compound sildenafil could be used to treat angina, a form of chest pain caused by reduced blood flow to the heart. The results, however, were disappointing, and by 1993, the company was debating whether to pull the plug on the project altogether. In a last-ditch attempt to get things back on track, researchers organised a trial in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales; many of the paid participants were former miners, unemployed after pit closures. They were encouraged to report any side effects, and before long, one bold volunteer revealed that he’d been having more erections than usual, then a whole load of his peers piped up with similar stories. Sildenafil had been developed to relax blood vessels around the heart – but it also increased blood flow to the penis.

Pfizer then set about launching clinical trials to specifically focus on erectile dysfunction, including the one held at Morriston Hospital in 1994. Presiding over the Swansea trial was Dr David Price, the man on whom Barnard’s character is loosely based. He was involved in Men Up “from the very beginning”, Barry says, bringing a “wealth of factual knowledge” about the process itself: first there was “a double blind trial with a placebo”, in which the men had strain gauges attached to their penises to measure the effect, then the participants were able to take the tablets home and record their effect.

Reading Price’s published work helped Barnard understand “the feedback he was getting from the health community at that point in time, which was very childish in some ways. They didn’t see the importance [of research into impotence] as much as he did… It was an elephant in the room, nobody wanted to talk about it.” After meeting Price on set, “the one thing I took from him was his passion for the patients… [His work] was all about making sure that he did everything he could within his profession to make sure these men and their partners came away with something greater than what they came in with.”

And as well as providing all the medical details, the doctor was also “a great storyteller” with plenty of stranger-than-fiction anecdotes, Barry adds. Sadly not all of his tales could make it into the final script, though – including the fact that the trial “was meant to be run at a hospital called Sancta Maria, but that was run by nuns and they realised it wouldn’t be a very good idea”. Or the fact that Price himself had to make a late-night dash to source some better quality pornography for his participants to, erm, avail themselves of during the study.  “Pfizer had originally FedExed the porn on VHS,” Barry says. “[Price] put the kids to bed, he turned it on and realised that it was just terrible quality. He called Pfizer up and said, ‘We can’t use this.’ And they said, ‘OK, well go and buy your own.’ He was too embarrassed to buy it in Swansea in case anybody recognised him. So he had to travel with his wife, under the cover of darkness, to Newport to buy the porn.”

Barnard as a doctor and Iwan Rheon as a trial participant in ‘Men Up’ (BBC/Quay Street Productions/Tom Jackson)

Price wouldn’t have been the only one to be left a bit red-faced by elements of the trial. Indeed, embarrassment, its near-relation shame, and the way those feelings might make men shut down emotionally are overarching themes in the film. The medical study is a “Trojan horse”, Barry explains. “Yes, it’s the story of a Viagra trial, but it’s really about men who are unable to talk to their friends and to their wives and partners.” And when Lewis Jones bumped into director Ashley Way in the Co-op in Cardiff before filming, he had a similar take: “We had a quick chat about it and he said, ‘You know, it’s about intimacy – intimacy for men, and with each other,’” he recalls.

Patient confidentiality meant that Barry couldn’t access details of the real men involved, so the film introduces us to five fictional trial participants. All of them are struggling, pretty much in silence, with the burden of their condition. “When we think about Viagra, we just think about people getting it on: we don’t actually think about the difficulties it must throw up [when] you can’t be intimate with somebody you love,” says Barnard. “It’s a horrible strain.” Our protagonist is Meurig, a 40-year-old hospital orderly with diabetes, played by Game of Thrones star Iwan Rheon (an estimated 40 per cent of diabetic men in their forties, Barry notes, deal with some form of erectile dysfunction). Meurig’s condition has caused him to become distant from his wife Ffion (Alexandra Roach). “It just makes it that bit more poignant that he is a younger guy, he’s got his wife and his kids, and he’s just completely flummoxed and embarrassed and full of shame [about his impotence],” Barry explains. It was especially important to foreground Ffion’s story, and those of the other men’s partners, “because you think of Viagra and think, ‘Well, it’s just the man who’s trying to perform,’ but actually there’s a lot of pressure on the partners as well”.

Lewis Jones as Eddie in ‘Men Up’ (BBC/Quay Street Productions/Tom Jackson)

We also meet crossword-loving widower Colin, played by Steffan Rhodri, who is holding back from starting a new relationship with a fellow puzzle connoisseur, and Phaldut Sharma’s Pete, who sees Viagra as a wonder pill that can revitalise his marriage. As Tommy, a gay man who must lie about his sexuality to secure a place on the trial, Paul Rhys has a particularly poignant storyline. “I have no idea if somebody tried to sneak on and lie, but I thought, ‘That would be interesting if they did,’” Barry says. “At the time, there was Section 28 [legislation introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government, which banned the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities and schools] and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in America [a policy first put in place under the Clinton administration, which banned openly gay, lesbian and bisexual people from serving in the military]. So even though the Nineties feel quite familiar and like they weren’t that long ago, in many ways, it was a different world.”

Then there’s Eddie, an odd-job man played by Lewis Jones, who seems to be all banter and bravado, until a mid-film reveal turns our preconceptions upside down. “Culturally, he’s inherited an idea of what a man is – what a real man is – and his condition [impotence] goes completely against that perceived idea,” Lewis Jones says. The trial, he adds, allows Eddie to form friendships that allow him “to become vulnerable”, something that he reckons men still find difficult even almost 30 years on from when the film is set. “I think what’s still prevalent today is this inability to show vulnerability. It seems to be the thing that’s inherited, generation after generation: that vulnerability equals weakness.”

Barry wanted to capture a “spectrum of masculinity” through his characters, but he was also aware of the need to show a range of responses to the drug, too. “There’s something called the Viagra myth, where people think taking Viagra, and having that Viagra work, is going to be a panacea,” he explains. “But actually, in a lot of cases, the man achieves an erection, but the problems are still there. So it doesn’t solve [everything]. I really wanted to tell that story as well.” For many of his fictional participants, he suggests, their emotional struggles could have been mitigated before the trial through a frank, honest conversation. And for that reason, he hopes that when Men Up airs, it prompts people to open up. “One of my hopes with this drama is people watching it at home and realising that, whether it’s erectile dysfunction or something completely different, reaching out and talking is going to help,” he says. “I’ve always said from the very beginning, my dream for this is that we end up on Gogglebox. I’d love that, because I think it has the potential to be a proper conversation starter.”

‘Men Up’ airs on BBC One at 9pm on Friday 29 December