A six-part satire about the music industry, the show featured Nigel Gacey (Frank Harper), a career criminal, giving himself a year to form his own boy band and his attempts to do so.
Further storylines include Vickery's ex-headmistress carrying his baby, Jackson being pursued by debt collectors seeking the return of £20,000, Hornchurch's parents going on hunger strike,[11] and a rivalry with Boys Ltd,[10] who formed just before them.
[1] By a coincidence, the show was broadcast a few months after Bryan Elsley's The Young Person's Guide to Becoming a Rock Star,[12] and a few weeks after one of the tracks covered by Boyz Unlimited, "A Little Bit More" by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, topped the UK singles chart in the form of a cover by 911; Osman used a January 1999 article to note that the song had been selected specifically due to its graphic lyrics being "too tasteless for a pre-pubescent audience, and thus ideal for comic purposes".
[7] A retrospective 2007 Popjustice review was slightly more positive, and opined that "a lot of the brilliant script is quite poorly executed, but the jokes are strong enough to mean that the show's still worth half an hour of your time".
[11] Osman would later release The Thursday Murder Club in September 2020,[15] which achieved massive success, and which was described by The Guardian as "the biggest thing in fiction since Harry Potter";[16] in 2021, he used a GQ interview to suggest that the failure of Boyz Unlimited dented his confidence for years afterwards.