1999 Boyzone: When The Going Gets Tough

In my classroom, the equation Boyzone + Comedy is never going to = a happy ending. And so it comes to pass; as the 'official' song for the 1999 Comic Relief appeal, 'When The Going Gets Tough' is a rod straight run through of Billy Ocean's 1986 original with little deviation and even less humour (unless you count Ronan's ever thickening tongue - '"I've got shumting to shay" - he's going to choke on that one day). Humour? Humour was as alien to Boyzone as a snowflake in August and they deliver this up with the forced grin of an unwilling adult forced to join in a game of charades at a kids party. Ocean's woozy song was hardly a classic in the first place, but at least he had the grace to stamp it out with a good natured smile that Boyzone, just by being Boyzone, manage to exorcise 'till it's grey. Which means that, 'comic' video aside, 'When The Going Gets Tough' is business as usual and could happily stand alone as the 'next' Boyzone single in its own right. Which further means that I'm even less inclined to cut it any slack on the basis of its charitable status, and in delivering a forgettable song in such dull and uninspiring style, Boyzone prove another equation - that zero + zero is always going to = zero.