Worried About The Boy: tomorrow, BBC2, 9pm.

NO sooner had Douglas Booth been cast as Boy George in a BBC2 drama than he got a message on Facebook from the singer himself.

“The title was ‘Well!’, and then he just said, ‘I hear you’re going to be playing me, I’m certainly not complaining! Just want to wish you all the best, I can’t wait to see it – just don’t be camp… I’m not camp!’,”

recalls the 17-year-old actor.

“That was followed by more excitement on my part, then I realised I was in every scene so I’d got quite a few lines to learn and I was starting shooting two weeks later. So it was about cracking on and researching the part, and just getting on with it. I didn’t really have much time to think.”

Being born after the Eighties, Booth had little knowledge of George, yet has always been intrigued by him. He knew who he was, but didn’t really know anything about him.

“I knew he was this very colourful character and I’d seen him on TV, in interviews, and I’d always had quite a bit of fascination with him. I don’t know why, I just always thought he was very interesting.”

Booth wanted a focal point for his research, while being wary of just doing an impersonation of George. The first section of George’s autobiography Take It Like A Man brought him up to the point that the script of Worried About The Boy begins.

“I wanted to find out who George is as a person, what’s made him the person he is up to the point when I start playing him,” he says.

“I looked at a lot of interviews of George. Obviously they started a little later when he was already famous, but I just took on as much information as I could. I kind of processed it all, but then I put it to the back of my mind.

“I didn’t want to obsess over trying to imitate George. I just wanted to get a very strong flavour of him and then let this person become real, bring my interpretation to him.”

Having Boy George’s own make-up artist on set helped make the actor look uncannily similar. But dressing up in tribal outfits, outrageous tailoring and over-the-top make-up wasn’t as much fun as it sounds. “We shot over a period of four weeks and it was just ridiculously tough – we were doing five looks a day and that’s tiring,” says Booth.

“Sometimes for one look it took an hour and a half just sitting in the chair, so sometimes I did 16-hour days with five or six hours in the chair, which was very tough.”

He got to wear some vintage pieces of clothing, including many of George’s original clothes.

“One of my favourites was a leather jacket that George used to wear when he was younger. It’s amazing, it’s so heavy you can hardly lift it. It’s got loads of metal studs in, with loads of really cool designs. George made the whole thing himself – it’s priceless.

“And then the things that weren’t in existence any more or we couldn’t get hold of, we had them specially made. George had the original prints for lots of them and actually did some of the printing that he used to do on them himself. So we were having George making clothes. He was really getting into it, and loving it.”

Worried About The Boy, written by Tony Basgallop, focuses on George’s journey to becoming one of the most iconic and famous pop stars of the Eighties.

Central to George’s life in the drama are his relationships, including one with Culture Club bandmate Jon Moss (played by Gavin And Stacey star Mathew Horne), which Booth describes in the drama as “very passionate – it was beating each other up and then kissing and making up afterwards”.

Towards the end of the shoot, George visited the set and Booth, in his costume and make-up, met the man he was playing – an experience he describes as “fantastic, although I was a little nervous”.

“He was absolutely charming, lovely.

He said they’d got the looks so right, which was amazing to hear because I’m sure if George didn’t think it was right, he would say.”