TO Inbetweeners fans, James Buckley will always be Jay Cartwright, the loudmouthed lad obsessed with the opposite sex and booze.
And 15 years on from the record-breaking movie version of the hit TV comedy breaking box office records, the London-born actor is not trying to change that image.
Even though he’s now a 38-year-old father-of-two, James still loves to make people laugh with near-the-knuckle humour.
That includes winding up his former glamour model wife Clair on their hit podcast The Buckleys, where she gives as good as she gets as they discuss marriage and parenthood.
It’s not unusual for her to joke “‘I’m going to punch you in the f**ing jaw’ or for James to say with a laugh, “Clair, put your t*tts away for two minutes” as they share a sofa while chatting away.
Next week James can be seen getting blind drunk in British comedy movie Mother’s Pride, about a group of locals trying to save their pub.
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Now there are rumours that The Inbetweeners could be coming back.
The Channel 4 sitcom’s creators Damon Beesley and Iain Morris are “writing something”, according to Joe Thomas, who played Simon Cooper in the show — and later appeared as Noel Gallagher in a 2025 Comic Relief sketch with James as Liam.
While James insists he has not been asked to return as Jay, he does think Britain could do with a dose of this antidote to woke.
He tells The Sun: “I think the temperature at the moment is that people would like an Inbetweeners. It would release some sort of pressure.
“I think Inbetweeners could be a real tonic.
“If we were to do more it would be our last go around. So maybe we go in a blaze of glory.
“Just make sure we keep all that silly, disgusting humour. That’s what I assume people would want.”
When The Inbetweeners first hit our screens on E4 in 2008, the boundaries of good taste were tested as four school boys from fictional Rudge Park Comprehensive suffered one humiliation after another.
Jay, Simon, Will and Neil used terms that would get you cancelled these days.
Even though it only ran for 18 episodes, The Inbetweeners became a beloved part of British culture and turned its cast, including Emily Atack, into household names.
Now Beesley and Morris have signed a deal “to bring The Inbetweeners back for new audiences”.
James admits he has “flip-flopped” as to whether he wants to play a mature version of Jay.
But he does think the tide is turning against the snowflake tendency to get offended every time someone says anything politically incorrect.
James says: “I think we are coming back to having a laugh again.
“It was cool for a while to take everything very seriously and to take things the wrong way when you know they are not intended to be taken that way, but you do it anyway because you might get some attention.
“I think we have decided that’s not cool any more.
“If you were to going to say, ‘I am going to bring a mate to the pub. You’re going to love him — he gets offended by everything,’ they’d be, ‘I’d rather not, to be honest’.”
The first Inbetweeners movie broke records for a British comedy when it hit cinemas in 2011, taking an astounding £65million worldwide.
Since then, James has starred in various TV shows, including the BBC Two sitcom White Gold and 2014 horror movie The Pyramid.
Next week he can be seen in crowd-pleasing film Mother’s Pride.
James plays good-natured Jake, who tries to keep The Drovers Arms afloat in a Somerset village despite his grumpy dad, played by Men Behaving Badly’s Martin Clunes, driving away customers by insulting them.
It is a timely story, as eight British pubs are closing every week as they battle rising costs and rising taxes.
Like many people, saving our boozers is a cause close to James’s heart.
He says: “I practically grew up in a working men’s club in Dagenham. It was the centre of the community.
“On Friday and Saturday nights, my parents would be there, all my parents’ friends would be there. All my friends were there from school.
“To this day, I still love going to the pub. It’s my most favourite place on the planet. It is sad to see what is happening to our pubs.”
One of the problems is that Generation Z — those born between 1997 and 2002 — are less likely to get hammered than in James’s era.
While the father of sons Harrison, 14, and Jude, 12, thinks being “sensible” is a “good thing,” he reckons Gen Z could do with acting “stupid” now and again.
James explains: “I think there is a stage in your life when you have to make mistakes, be a bit of an idiot.
“They’re not given the opportunity because we are all monitoring each other — everything is recorded and ends up on the internet.”
Old-fashioned terrestrial telly is also struggling at the moment, with YouTube overtaking ITV to become the second-most watched entertainment source in the UK.
James got involved with streaming early on, launching a gaming channel on the Google-owned platform a decade ago.
He has earned an estimated £2million making personalised greeting clips for the Cameo service, and his video podcast The Buckleys can get around 700,000 views per episode.
It is the brutal honesty of the show he co-hosts with his wife Clair, who he married in 2012, that has made them a hit on YouTube.
They have written a book and are going on tour next month, including a night at the London Palladium.
James reveals that Clair, 37, has no interest in being an internet celebrity, but jokes he is planning to create “Brand Buckley”.
He says: “The most interesting thing about me is my relationship with my wife — how I am enjoying pushing her buttons, winding her up and how she doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
“She enjoys it but she’s not really fussed about doing it.
“She doesn’t want to be famous. Once we had children, all that she wanted was to be the best mum in the world she could be. That’s what drives her.
“She’s not been on stage before. She’s like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ and I’m,
“I am going to make Brand Buckley a big old thing and Clair will have to go along with it.”
In Mother’s Pride, there is a gag about James’s character potentially having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Watching him chatting away enthusiastically during our interview and bouncing with energy on his YouTube show, I’m curious to know if anyone has suggested James himself might have ADHD.
He replies that “they have”, and then reveals: “When I was a kid, I was struggling with writing. I was getting letters mixed up in words.
“My parents and my teacher took me to a clinic to check if I was dyslexic and they did some tests and it was like, ‘He’s not dyslexic, he’s just an idiot’.
“If I was to try to justify the way I am, to have a test for ADHD or something like that, I feel they would just come back and say, ‘He’s just a bit of a pain in the arse’.”
Such self-deprecating humour is rare in showbiz these days, where actors are unlikely to risk even a light joke about such conditions.
But James is the kind of celebrity who refuses to change his personality just because people recognise him on the Tube.
He hopes that films like Mother’s Pride and his tour offer a moment of release from the relentless churn of bad news.
James adds: “I don’t think any of us are having a great time. The last time people felt good was in ’97 when we had just come off the back of Euro 96. A lot of my generation haven’t experienced that.
“I just want to make people laugh and this film is just feelgood fun.”
- Mother’s Pride will be in cinemas on March 6.
