Critics described the drama as moving and surprisingly life-affirming. Photo / Supplied
Critics described the drama as moving and surprisingly life-affirming. Photo / Supplied
With TV One happy to full its boots with exploitative documentaries and reality shows about the UK's stouter citizens, there seems a slight irony that this week its prestige Sunday Theatre slot is a drama about Britain's bulkiest bloke.
He's played by Timothy Spall, who isn't exactly svelte in reallife, but needed a heavy fat suit to play Georgie, a gargantuanly obese man who had not left his home since the death of his mother 23 years earlier.
He's egged on to become ever fatter by his unscrupulous manager, Morris (Bobby Ball), who advertises Georgie as "the eighth wonder of the world" and brings in tourists to gape at his monstrous bulk.
Soon he's in competition with another bloke also claiming to be Britain's fattest and so Georgie feels the urge to pile on even more pounds.
However, Amy (Aisling Loftus) - a community service worker who has come to weed his garden - desperately tries to persuade him to lose weight.
Co-written by Caroline Aherne (The Royle Family) and Jeff Pope, The Fattest Man in Britain was described by the Daily Telegraph as "a moving tale of a man trapped by his own fiendish addiction" and by The Independent as "a lot sweeter and life-affirming than you might have expected".
Spall actually lost weight while playing Georgie. "I had to be eating all the time on camera. The Viennettas [icecream] were a real challenge - I had to eat three of them in one sitting," he says. "But then at lunchtime I'd go to the catering wagon and couldn't eat a thing. Playing Georgie really put me off my grub."
The fat suit wasn't much fun either. "It felt horrendous - it was like wearing a skin-tight snood made of liver."
At one point he thought the experience would drive him mad, but then his wife Shane (to whom he's been married since 1981) pointed out to him that if he could survive leukaemia - as he did in 1996 - he could survive this.
LOWDOWN
When: Sunday, 8.30pm
Where: TV1
What: Yes another fat folk show, but with a point
