'I don’t want to have to apologise again' says star James Buckley

Channel 4's Inbetweeners reunion night was so disastrous it has killed any chance of a third movie in the franchise.

Star James Buckley has admitted that he doesn't want to risk the same furious backlash that greeted the car crash that Fwends Reunited by making another movie.

On the night he told host Jimmy Carr that he would be up for another big-screen outing. But following fan's angry reaction to the reunion show, he admitted: 'I don't want to have to apologise to a bunch of people again.'

In a melancholic discussion on his Complete Load of Podcast, Buckley admitted the two-hour reunion was a huge disappointment, adding that even he 'couldn't watch it'.

'I didn't like it,' he confessed. 'It certainly wasn't what I thought it was going to be… I'm disappointed in it. I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that. I don't think I should be putting on a PR face and rolling with it and ignoring it and carrying on with the next thing because it hurt me that that it wasn't good enough.

'The last year or so I have been like, "I do like the Inbetweeners and I do like those boys and we have fun making it, and I wonder if there is one more film in us?"

'But after doing that reunion thing it feels to me like a lot of people are now not interested in The Inbetweeners because of it, and also a lot of people are so passionate and have such a high opinion of it, I don't think we will ever be able to live up to that.

'So for me now the position is that there definitely will never be any more Inbetweeners. I don't want to have to apologise to a bunch of people again.'

Fans attacked the 'awkward' show for its 'cringe interviews' and bizarre celebrity guests such as Peter Andre, and suggested that the cast gave the impression that they did not want to be there,

Buckley said he got on with his co-stars, but otherwise was forced to agree with the poor reaction.

He said that while he was used to criticism: 'The worst thing is when people criticise you and you go, "Yeah, you're right." It's really hard to take.'

And he explained that he was uncomfortable about the tone of the night, saying that he was expected to act like his character Jay through the show, rather than just chatting about the comedy with his friends and former co-stars Joe Thomas, Blake Nelson and Simon Bird.

'It became a thing that wasn't a celebration of this good thing I did in my life, it was me being taken the piss out of for hours on end,' he said.

'I didn't have the personality or the intelligence to cope with it, especially when you're up against someone like Jimmy Carr [who hosted the night], who's super quick and super funny. So I come across as a complete moron through the whole thing.

'I got caught where I was acting up as Jay because there was an audience there of Inbetweeners fans and I got caught in this spot between Jay and myself where myself was going, "You're acting like a fucking idiot, you're being a moron, you're being a dick". And there was this bit where it was like, "Well they're all here and they want you to be Jay, so do it."… I didn't want to seem like a stick in the mud.

'I didn't want to go, "Can we stop for a second cos I don't know what the fuck's going on here – you're talking to me like I'm Jay from The Inbetweeners. I'm really not.'" So that was another one of the reasons why it was a disaster.'

Some viewers were under the mistaken impression that the reunion show would be a new episode, which further fuelled their disappointment in what the special actually was.

Here's the full podcast:

Published: 29 Jan 2019