Because, let’s not split hairs, Extras was and indeed remains a quite clear cautionary tale about the lure and subsequent perils of fame. Not just fame either but fame for fame’s sake, both of which are areas Gervais’ show touches upon the deeper it propels into its narrative over the course of two six part seasons and a feature-length Christmas special finale.

Extras turned out to be much like The Office, its predecessor that took Gervais from a memorably offensive supporting player on late-90’s edgy Channel 4 comedy and made him a star of international, indeed Hollywood proportions. Not in style, not even in story, but in the sense of how it constructed a story arc around a concept and concluded in strong, often quite dramatic fashion.

Though it lacked the iconic nature of The Office, Extras had the heart, many of the laughs, and certainly had the point of why it existed, right up to the very final scene.

Coming just a few years after The Office, in many respects Extras was a natural, organic evolution of storytelling for Gervais & Merchant. If you examine The Office, it was as much about seeking fame and adulation as it was about unspoken love, friendship and loneliness. David Brent, Gervais’ still iconic comedy creation, was a figure of deep pathos but right up to the two-part finale, his story arc was all about wanting to be “a chilled-out entertainer” as he once described himself.

Granted, for Brent, it was more to do with his own psychology about self-esteem and human companionship as needing the limelight—a lesson he truly learns in Life on the Road, the sequel movie which came in 2016—but much of the comedy surrounding Brent, from which most of the comedy inThe Office itself stemmed, came from Brent turning an office meeting into a stand-up gig, or a training day into a guitar session, through to memorable embarrassing Red Nose Day dance-offs and roping poor receptionist Dawn into carrying his sweaty clothes while doing motivational speaking after work, which again he turns into a one-man show more about him than his messages. Always on, always entertaining. These were writers fascinated by the attraction and drawbacks of fame and performance.

It therefore made sense for them to explore this in Extras and, to some degree, parallel Gervais’ own rise to fame. Many have commented how Gervais always plays himself to some degree—whether as Brent or even an Irish terrorist in American TV spy show Alias (no, really, and believe it or not he’s actually rather good)—but never has this been more apparent than as Andy Millman, the middle-aged, ex-bank clerk from Reading who saves money, quits his job and becomes a film/TV extra who hopes to shop a comedy script and get his big break as a writer/performer.

Andy, certainly in the first series, is often the straight man surrounded by eccentrics – be they his amiably sweet and dim best friend Maggie (Ashley Jensen), his loud, ignoramus of an agent Darren (played by an often scene-stealing Merchant) and any number of A-list celebrities sending themselves up beautifully, whether it’s Patrick Stewart as a pervy director or Daniel Radcliffe as a horny teenager. Andy is frequently the outsider looking in at a bizarre, funhouse mirror world, often filled with people who may be rich and famous but are either depressed, loathsome or bewildered.

Extras is one of the more fascinating British comedies in recent years precisely because it seems to be a channel for a great deal of Gervais’ own psychology, not just about fame but about existentialism and the realisation of potential. He has talked at length about his own long-held absence of ambition and how retrospectively frustrated he ended up because of it:

I never tried hard at anything. I was born smart on a very working-class estate. A couple of people I knew went to university apart from me, but all the way through I was the smartest kid in the school. That’s luck, but I was proud of it. And I was also proud of doing well without trying. As you get older, and it took me a long time to realise it, that’s a disgusting attitude, revolting. It’s ignorant and it’s a tragic waste, and I realised that the work itself is the reward. The struggle itself is the reward.

Andy essentially embodies this philosophy, only he hasn’t learned the last part, or has rejected it. He is the smartest man in the room most of the time and he knows it, precisely because he surrounds himself with buffoons and idiots. There is a central contradiction in his character which plays out in the second series (when Extras really begins to figure out the story it’s reallytelling), where Andy manages to make a BBC One prime-time sitcom but in order to chase ratings, sell merchandise and appeal to a mass audience, his original piece of work is strip-mined by producers who turn it into a throwback to 1970’s, corny, audience-baiting catchphrase excess – the exact opposite of what Gervais made his career on.

Yet despite hating the fact the ‘stupid’ mass public watch the show, it gets six million viewers. It makes Andy famous, and rich. And when, in the episode ‘David Bowie’, he rejects moronic fans who court him in a local pub only to be ridiculed openly by bigger celebrities and middle-class people in a London wine bar, he returns to the bosom of the original lowest common denominator he rejected for validation and respect.

Ego drives Extras, as you sense it drives Gervais. He consistently attempts to underplay his own abilities and insecurities, or throw a sense of self-awareness on his words, yet he equally plays up to the very accusations he denies. His third stand-up tour is even called ‘Fame’, has him come on stage wearing a crown and King’s robes, and he spends most of the set talking about his Golden Globes. He’s both self-effacing and yet not, just as Andy is. He is self-aware but at the same time seems to believe in the very things he mocks, or is distrustful of them. You wonder, indeed, just how tolerant of minority groups Gervais is given the sheer volume of jokes about gay people (especially gay people), black people, dwarves, the disabled, Down Syndrome, the homeless, Japanese people, Jews, and on and on and on, you find in Extras. It’s really quite remarkable with distance. The episode ‘Sir Ian McKellen’ is really quite hard to watch these days in places, as good a sport as McKellen is.

It’s an inherent contradiction that helps Extras, if anything, because the very point is that Andy doesn’t really know what he wants out of fame, bar the sheer fact he achieved it. Through the first series, as an extra, he chases opportunities to ‘get in’ with the right people and Gervais/Merchant’s comedy is frequently built around how spectacularly Andy (often with Maggie as his sidekick) unwittingly digs the deepest hole he can’t get out of and messes up his chances. It’s part of the three sides to Extras’ comedy – the embarrassment, in the same manner Gervais pioneered in many ways in The Office; the stupidity of Maggie, which only increases as the series goes on for comic effect (sometimes to the detriment of the character) and the aforementioned bizarre behaviour of the celebrities in each episode, playing extreme versions of themselves usually. The episode ‘Les Dennis’ (possibly the best episode of Extras overall) is a great example of all of these things.

Yet its the second series when Gervais & Merchant truly give Extras a level of commentary which touches deeper into the very history of situation comedy itself, and the evolution of the art form. By anchoring each episode with scenes from the set of ‘When the Whistle Blows’, Andy’s fictional sitcom within the series, Extras manages to pick apart retrograde studio comedy from the inside, with all the terrible jokes which abandon the very concept of narrative and structure.

In the episode ‘Chris Martin’, when Andy and his producer meet the Coldplay singer at a charity shoot, Martin casually claims he’s a fan and wants to be in the show and, despite the protestations of Andy, Martin ends up appearing as himself and singing a song to promote his album. In a scripted series about factory workers in Wigan. It’s as ludicrous as it sounds yet Andy feels like he’s the only person who can see it, the only person frustrated the integrity of what is supposed to be a fictional construct is being abused in order to chase ratings and appeal to bigger stars.

Gervais certainly has choice words about the place of such comedy, which still exists today in shows such as Mrs Brown’s Boys, which if anything have seen a more populist reversal toward retro-British fare that the writers of Extras may have seen coming:

I just wouldn’t do it, and I know that I wouldn’t be happy doing it, because it’s too easy. There’s nothing wrong with it. Those shows still exist in England, they have for 30 years, there’s no change there, but you know what? On one side, there’s people wearing wigs and doing smutty innuendo and shouting a catchphrase, and on the other side, there’s Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development and Larry Sanders and Christopher Guest. I don’t sit through shows and go, “Damn them, why do they put that on?” I just don’t watch them. It’s not a crusade. It’s a source of comedy for me. That those shows exist is better for me, I think. That’s great. Long live them! Unfortunately, I’m compared with The Office. I can’t win. That’s what’s unfair. I want Extras to be compared to When The Whistle Blows. For every wacky postcard, there’s a million people waiting to buy it, and for every $10 million of those things, there’s one Rembrandt. Purposely, I think I want to aim at doing something that a lot of people won’t like. You want a door policy on your club. It’s as simple as that. I’m just worried that it looks like I’ve compared my work with Rembrandt. “Gervais says he’s better than Rembrandt!”

It all comes together in the Christmas Special finale of Extras, in which Andy’s flash new agent Tre Cooper, in trying to convince Andy not to end the sitcom, describing it as “like killing a cash cow”, gets him to produce a special episode set in Spain, against Andy’s better judgement. He’s us, because he’s seen this all before. Much like many tropes inside the fictional ‘When the Whistle Blows’, the staff outing to Spain was a common, lazy piece of storytelling employed by some of the most retrospectively questionable sitcoms of the 1970’s and 1980’s – Are You Being Served? even got a big-screen version out of the concept! Gervais & Merchant seem fascinated by dissecting why these comic tropes were lazy, are lazy, and yet why people remain consistently entertained by comedy they—and Andy—consider inferior, even to this day. They’re like social comedy scientists, attempting to understand the same audience everyone is chasing: the mass audience.

This becomes Andy’s central problem, especially by the final episode. He’s famous. He’s rich. He could make a comedy the public love but the critics regularly pour scorn upon for years. He could be on panel shows, date well-known celebrity women, appear in guest spots on popular BBC shows such as Doctor Who and Hotel Babylon. Yet what he wants is respect. He wants critical admiration, which he sees in the smug rise of his casually undermining nemesis (and fellow former extra) Greg Lindley-Jones as a serious theatre & film actor. Andy is consistently restless about his place in the landscape of fame, and what it means. In the end, he wants both critical respect and fame & fortune, and his new agent spells it out: “there are only a few people in the world who have both of those things… and you will never be one of them.”

It’s a hard lesson, and one Gervais never had to learn, because he is the representation of a successful version of Andy. As a middle-aged man coming out of nowhere with a script and a lead role, he didn’t make ‘When the Whistle Blows’, he made The Office. He made the comedy Andy believes he wrote originally in the pilot for the BBC. Andy is almost what could have been of Gervais and once you realise that, Extras as a whole falls very clearly into place as not just a cautionary tale about how the promise of fame may not be what makes you happy, but Gervais perhaps communicating how lucky he knows he’s been as a writer & performer to avoid becoming Andy along the way. Much as Merchant wrote co-wrote Extras (and his skills tempering Gervais’ excesses have always been a key reason why most of their collaborations work) and ends up playing a key supporting role, the show feels like an extension of Gervais himself, and his philosophy, even more so than The Office was.

Hence why, at the end of Extras final episode, Andy’s defining catharsis comes on Celebrity Big Brother in what remains perhaps the most powerful moment of comedy-drama Gervais has ever delivered, after David Brent begging to keep his job in the second season finale of The Office. He delivers a powerful and incisive takedown of facile celebrity fame, the British press, and mass entertainment, which prefigures Leveson, the fall of the News of the World, and the reactionary bite-back at Rupert Murdoch’s pervasive newspaper & media empire which has taken place over the last five or more years. Gervais talked fairly recently at where the culture has developed in the wake of these British media developments:

My career is sort of because of bad reality shows. When I wrote The Office, apart from working in an office for 10 years, the biggest influence on that was me watching those docu-soaps of the ’90s where it all started. It was quite quaint, then, and about a normal guy being famous for 15 minutes, and now he’s got a DVD to show his kids and that was the end of it. Now, it’s insatiable. Now, there’s a new breed of famous. They will do anything to be on TV and to be famous. They will live their life like an open wound, they will let the cameras into their lives 24/7. There’s no difference now between fame and infamy. They will do awful things if it keeps them in the limelight. You’ve now got trolls that are famous, that are so-called journalists, and they get invited to say awful things for clickbait. They do morning shows and Celebrity Big Brother. It’s a new breed of, ”I’d rather be hated, than not known.

These comments underline where he was afraid we were going in that final moment in Extras, brilliantly delivered by Andy while surrounded by a group of real-life vacuous D-list celebrities (Lionel Blair, Chico, Lisa from Steps), who you can’t help but wonder were themselves unaware while filming of the place in Gervais’ mindset they featured. Extras ended at the close of 2007, the same year Facebook launched and kickstarted the modern social media revolution which has consumed and changed our society. It serves as a last bastion warning, almost, of where this obsession with fame for fame’s sake would take us – in a world where YouTube stars are now disgraced for filming the aftermath of suicides or, of course, a repellent TV show pantomime villain has manipulated the media to become the most divisive, nay hated, President of the United States in decades. Extras didn’t see everything, but it sensed something.

For Ricky Gervais, it serves as, to date, his last truly great piece of work. His later collaborations with Merchant lacked the same potency and piquancy; Life’s Too Short, which focused on one-time Extras guest star Warwick Davis’ attempts to be a success in the entertainment world barely made a dent and Cemetery Junction, their auto-biographical comedy-drama movie set in 1970’s Reading flatlined when it should have sparkled.

His own personal projects have if anything been even worse; anaemic comedies such as The Invention of Lying, miscast major Hollywood roles in films such as Ghost Town, and his last British TV series—the old people’s home set Derek for Channel 4—can only be described as a powerfully misjudged piece of work, which only serves to prove Gervais is in a position Andy Millman would never reach – he can make anything, no matter how poor it is.

While people will always fete The Office as a British comedy classic—and it indeed is—Extras deserves not to fade into obscurity. Broad as it ends up becoming, replete with some incredibly awkward moments of stereotyping minorities for quite nasty comic effect, it is also a very keenly observed exploration of the price of fame, particularly in the pre-social media, post-reality TV period of the mid-late 2000’s. It almost couldn’t have been made any later. Gervais may have been too depressed by the state of the world around him to even then try.

Thanks for reading, please subscribe and remember… this is no laughing matter.

“Ohhhh what happened to you? Whatever happened to me? What became of the people we used to be?”

So sounds the dulcet tones of 70s singer Mike Hugg as Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? begins, thereby setting the thematic tone for what we are about to see across twenty-six episodes and two series. Dick Clement and Ian le Frenais’ show might be objectively a sequel to their hit 1960s sitcom The Likely Lads, but in truth it is about surviving and adapting to a radically changing world.

It is fair to say that The Likely Lads was one of the breakout BBC sitcoms of the 1960s. If the jokes and catchphrases perhaps weren’t quite present to the same degree as Steptoe & Son or ‘Til Death Us Do Part, Clement and le Frenais’ series absolutely struck a chord amidst the rapidly evolving counterculture of the first half of such a revolutionary decade.

The misadventures of 21 year olds Terry Collier (James Bolam) and Bob Ferris (Rodney Bewes), on an eternal quest to pull birds, watch the football and go down the pub as an escape from the working class, post-war drudgery of their factory employee lives, tapped the same vein of breaking class distinctions that marked numerous famous sitcoms during the 1960s. The focus was shifting away from the middle class to rag and bone men, straight talking families and, here, North East lads talking in patter people up and down the country would recognise and understand happening all around them.

This transformation was everywhere at the time. The Beatles were beaming four working class Scouse lads into every home with a new television across not just Britain but the world. In cinema, rough edged British ‘New Wave’ pictures such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (which co-starred Bolam) and Billy Liar (which co-starred Bewes) were making stars of people like Albert Finney or Tom Courtenay, presenting tough communities with aspirational, sometimes arrogant, young bucks who want a better life than their parents or grandparents in the economic boom of the post-war period. Or it was depicting young girls getting in the family way out of wedlock or, even more shockingly, outside of their own skin colour.

Point being, The Likely Lads arrived just at the perfect time to slot neatly into a realism and naturalism being reflected in art across Britain, where television’s increasing grip was allowing more a sense of bravery from the BBC in broadcasting comedy that would appeal to the masses. Clement was a radio producer at the time who benefited from a £100 budget to develop a script, roping in a fellow writer friend le Frenais to punch up a sketch idea about two blokes in the pub doing a ‘post-mortem’ on a night out. From this, not just The Likely Lads but a 60+ year writing partnership, one of the best in British TV history, was born.

Le Frenais describes the zeitgeist they were tapping into when talking to the British Comedy Guide:

When we did The Likely Lads - the original series - we'd never written anything before but what we loved was British new wave cinema at the time. The country was perhaps not fully aware, but going through a major cultural transformation: cinema, television and music. Suddenly, for the first time ever, working class characters were the leading men and ladies. We were excited by that.

There was interest in what The Likely Lads was saying, even if there was scepticism from some that it could sustain more than an initial concept. Though the original 1960s series, running for three series across 1964-1966, had decidedly more in the way of traditional comic plotting than the sequel series that followed, it nonetheless revolved around the relationship between Terry and Bob. The former, an inveterate womaniser, gambler and Jack the lad. The latter nervier, was upwardly mobile aspirations, but many of the same urges and instincts of his lifelong friend, even if he had less bravery in acting on them.

Though in the great tradition of British sitcom, Terry and Bob inevitably failed in their intentions and aspirations most of the time, reinforcing what sitcom in Britain is usually designed to do in holding up a mirror to all of our thoughts, feelings, fears and allowing us to enjoy the misfortune even of characters we love when their best intentions collapse, they nonetheless worked in reflecting working class culture to millions when on screen. Terry and Bob weren’t just ‘likely lads’ (which means good looking and promising), but likeable lads. They represented the aforementioned seed change in the mindset of the baby boomer generation, young people being raised on rock’n’roll, make love not war and laissez faire attitudes to rules, regulations and respectful norms around for centuries. The age of the teenager.

Here’s the rub actually, in that Bolam and Bewes were almost ten years older than the characters they were playing, which they got away with in The Likely Lads during the 1960s. It became a little harder to believe in the follow up, which despite having the trappings of what we might now call a ‘legacyquel’, reviving beloved characters much further down the line, the boys nevertheless only returned to screens seven years after departing. Bob’s intentions to join the British Army and see the world, with Terry joining him just because, end up supplanted as Bob is cashiered for flat feet and Terry ends up going instead, despite being reluctant at the idea. That’s how the original show ends in 1966.

“Tomorrow’s almost over. Today went by so fast. Is the only thing to look forward to the past?”

If The Likely Lads looked forward, away from a life of pit-dwelling drudgery and forward to a world of greater opportunity and social mobility, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? without doubt looks back. Clement and le Frenais use an older, if not wiser Terry and Bob, to reflect that such positive change hasn’t ended up happening as the 60s gave way to the 1970s. Whatever happened to Britain could be another title for this.

Terry being away for five years, no contact indeed at all with Bob, allows him to return to the U.K. with fresh eyes and tall tales. Even before confronting just how much Bob and his life have changed, Terry is quick to rail at the very state of the nation he has returned to, such as walking with Bob around areas of the North East now being torn down or old haunts becoming unusable. “What a disgrace! People have no regard for the environment. They pollute the river and the air, and build chemical factories, and dump refuse. It's a disgrace!”

He groans at having been in the Army during the latter half of the counterculture revolution: “Swinging Britain was just hearsay. Something I read about in the overseas edition of the Daily Mail!” He immediately positions himself as an ex-squaddie who is unable to fit back into society, one where aspiration has replaced that sense of comradeship. Terry’s anger at how the inherent socialism of a Labour-driven 60s hasn’t worked out for the country is a neat cover for his own innate indolence.

You can find the DNA of The Likely Lads in many future successes, such as Men Behaving Badly, but naturally Clement and le Frenais as writers of both series repeat this trick in their popular series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, in the early 1980s. That show is very much an extension of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, with particularly Jimmy Nail’s coarse, violent brickie Oz Osborne a bigger, broader version of Terry. In the second series of that show, broadcast in 1986, Oz returns from a spell in the Falklands delivering an angry tirade about Thatcher’s Britain that could easily have come out of Terry’s mouth.

Both Terry and Bob will often be found talking about institutions locally which have been bulldozed or replaced or just left to fester, wandering streets at points that are about to be torn down (in the feature film, more on which later, one of their beloved pubs The Fat Ox even suffers this fate), and there is a strong sense of frustration at the continued decay of the post-war, tight knit community contract in the face of development and capitalism. Yet there is also contradiction and double standards, as witnessed in an exchange like this. “These streets are ugly, but they have a kind of beauty.” Bob states, as Terry replies: “Working class sentiment is the indulgence of working people created through football and rock-and-roll or people like you who moved out to the Elm Lodge housing estate at the earliest opportunity.” Bob then says “Well, I didn’t want my kids growing up in these streets.” These men might miss the past, but equally they benefit from a future where greater mobility is within their grasp.

Terry during the opener, ‘Strangers on a Train’, considers moving to London and starting again on learning of Bob’s new life (which is, ironically, what Bolam did as an aspiring actor, determined to escape his roots and not be defined by them), but he’s too lazy to do that. Throughout the series he just ends up sponging off his parents, allowing his sister Audrey (Sheila Fearn, returning from the original series) to do his washing and such while putting up with her moaning about how much of a layabout he is, and of course inserting himself socially and economically into Bob’s existence with detrimental results. This is, of course, what drives the comedy in the series for the most part.

Quick side note on the episode titles - almost all of them are named after well-known movies, from Alfred Hitchcock films to Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (in which a black man starts dating the daughter of a wealthy white couple). Clement and le Frenais are well-schooled in cinema and music of the past and this naming trend continues in future series they create.

“We're not the same people we used to be. It was simple then birds, booze and the dance hall. Now it's the wife, tennis clubs, scampi supper dances and holidays in Malta. All me mates will have settled down with mortgages and children, saving green shield stamps for glasses! I'll be a square peg in a round whatsit.” Terry’s nostalgia for a past that never truly existed as he imagined it, at the beginning, lies in stark contrast to Bob’s position at the beginning. He’s someone who, for all intents and purposes, has ‘made it’. He has a good job, nice new detached suburban home, a pretty fiancee in the boss’s daughter Thelma (Brigit Forsyth), and doubtless a decent future pension.

Terry’s return, and determination to drag Bob back to the world they lived in during the 1960s—one of the Saturday match and the Roxy ballroom of a weekend—steadily begins to upend Bob’s domesticity and leave him questioning everything both in the run up to marrying Thelma (which happens at the end of Series 1) and the aftermath, where if anything things get worse. Terry essentially has failed to grow up in a manner Bob at least aspires to, and wants to pull his friend back toward the carefree mode of adolescence he refuses to—or perhaps is simply unable to—let go of. Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? is both a show about nostalgia for a different country, but of youth itself.

We can’t separate masculinity within this equation too, because it feels really crucial to Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? Terry considers Bob neutered by Thelma, initially written a bit more of a shrew but steadily grows more sympathetic and both helpless to Bob’s steady transformation. Part of him flirts with the idea of a similar life—as we see in probably the strongest run of episodes around the wedding, where he falls for Thelma’s sister Susan (Anita Carey) who considers leaving a happy life in Canada for him—but deep down he just wants to keep on being a ‘likely lad’, and he chips away at Bob across the first series particularly about how marriage is a noose around the neck of a man who should be free to drink with his mates, sow his oats, and be his own boss.

In a character beat that isn’t focused on a great deal, less than you might think, we find that Terry married a girl while abroad in the Army, a German called Uta (who did have scenes written and performed for S1 finale ‘The End of an Era’ which were cut, so the character never ended up appearing), but it didn’t work out. Terry seems genuinely a bit heartbroken at losing her, much as he covers it with bravado, and you could argue on a deeper level his intentions to become the spectre in Bob and Thelma’s partnership is driven by a level of jealousy for what he lost. It feels a missed opportunity that we never see her, but Clement and le Frenais revisit the idea twice in Auf, Pet, firstly with Dennis and Dagmar and much later Oz and his unlikely Cuban ballerina paramour Ofelia. They are writers drawn to the idea of a doomed, almost classical sense of romance.

In this regard, while the scripts still retain a level of naturalistic wit and insightful commentary, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? has not aged well. If you apply the context of the time, which we always should when looking at classic British comedy, Terry and Bob are both lascivious chauvanists, constantly sexually objectifying women (Bob even openly talks about a rather queasy penchant for school girls which would never pass muster today), and referring to them as “a bit of naughty” or “spare” etc… Lad culture before the post-modern ‘new lad’ irony of Men Behaving Badly, where you were meant to laugh at Gary and Tony. Here, we’re meant to want to be Terry and to some extent Bob.

That isn’t to say WHTTLL? doesn't apply plenty of mockery or self-deprecation the way of Terry and Bob, but much like with the brickies a decade later in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, we’re certainly meant to wink wink nudge nudge quite like the fact they cheat on their wives or be ‘blokes’. That’s the part that rankles especially about WHTTLL? Not the innuendo or masculine toxicity in the context of the age—it is nothing the Carry On films weren’t doing on camp turbo at this point—but rather how Bob becomes an utterly insufferable, frankly pervy cauldron of lust aimed anywhere but the well-meaning Thelma. It’s hard to like Bob when he pays her such constant disrespect, often which she’s unaware of.

Clement and le Frenais lend WHTTLL? more of a serialised structure that best fits the steady move of Bob away from the content domesticity ahead with Thelma and closer back into Terry’s toxic orbit, but the show plays two things in an interesting way. Bolam’s performance, for one, never makes Terry unlikable even when he’s a terrible influence on his old friend; a pure blooded representation of regressive, at points bigoted masculinity in contrast to Bob’s ‘new man’ intentions. Moreover, the writers are at pains not to valorise Terry too much - he might be good looking and in his own way charming, but he’s opinionated, has no job prospects and in what for me was a really misjudged episode toward the end, ‘Conduct Unbecoming’, tries to position him as a common thug in trouble with the law (again a few shades of Oz Osborne to come).

The final episode of the second series, ‘The Shape of Things to Come’, draws the direct parallel indeed between Terry and his deceased Uncle Jacob, the black sheep of the family, as Terry’s mother describes: “He was a liar and a drifter … When he came out of the army he hardly did a day's work. Any money he drank or gambled away. His wife's life was a misery. And as for his friend Joe... Well, he ruined that marriage. He was a bad-tempered, bigoted old so-and-so.” Bob replies: “My God! She’s just described you!” to Terry, with the episode seeing both men reflect on what this means for their futures. Bob already (in a drawn out plot) sees Thelma leave him over perceived infidelity earlier in that series, while Terry ends up in a domesticated position himself at one point living with his friend. Inevitably, neither change their ways subsequently.

Truth be told, the second series is not as strong as the first, with Clement and le Frenais relying at points a little more on physical comedy and obvious gags for the plotting (such as ‘The Great Race’, which felt more like Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em at points - against which I have nothing, incidentally). The concept already feels a little played out, that the point has been made about a decaying, economically broken Britain that benefits men with Bob’s aspiration—albeit one where they must sacrifice their carefree masculinity to achieve—and punches down on the free, easy, brawling ‘men’ like Terry. There wasn’t too far left to go in terms of commentary by the end of series two.

Undoubtedly, had there been a third series, we might have seen Thelma fall pregnant and Bob (and Terry) have to deal with fatherhood and whether that might have changed either of them. It wasn't meant to be as Clement and le Frenais, having produced a script for the Ronnie Barker vehicle of stand-alone comedy episodes called Seven of One, were commissioned to write a series on the back of the episode best received. That show became Porridge, arguably their crowning achievement, and the rest is comedy legend. Indeed they tried a similar trick with Porridge in giving the protagonist, cheeky old lag Norman Stanley Fletcher, a sequel series in Going Straight, but that failed to catch fire as WHTTLL? did. Arguably because it had much less to say.

Tellingly, the final episode of WHTTLL? ended with a Christmas special billed just as ‘The Likely Lads’, with whatever happened chopped away. We know what happened by this point. Bob and Terry were who they were.

“Oh, remember when we thought we had forever, didn't it make you feel secure? We used to think that we had forever, now I'm not so sure. Daylight dreamers, midnight schemers, minstrels on the run. City cowboys, live for now boys, tomorrow's never gonna come."

The above lyrics might sound similar to Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, written and performed as they are again by Mike Hugg, but they rather accompanied a new song for the inevitable consequence of successful 1960s and 1970s British sitcoms: a feature film. 1976 saw the arrival of The Likely Lads, directed by Michael Tuchner (known otherwise for films such Villain, starring Richard Burton, written by guess who? Clement and le Frenais), transposing Terry and Bob onto the big screen.

It strikes me just how similar these Hugg lyrics as written at points above are to the better known ones accompanying Auf Wiedersehen, Pet a few years later, such as ‘Back With the Boys Again‘. In both of these shows, music is used as an expression of circumstance and a means of establishing context and theme before the narrative actually begins. For the movie, Hugg’s lyrics are against wisful, 70s ballad paean’s to nostalgia, fitting the movie adaptation which could be considered ‘more of the same’. Clement and le Frenais certainly used it as a means of making up for the fact no third season of WHTTLL? ever materialised.

As with many such big screen efforts attempting to transpose what made a great sitcom tick, and indeed what Porridge would also fall foul of in three years later, The Likely Lads fails to truly capture what made audiences fall in love with Bob and Terry, much as from a narrative perspective similar terrain is mined. It maintains a certain level of continuity, with Bob married to Thelma, but that’s essentially it. Tuchner’s film allows for the hoary old movie trope of taking the characters on holiday (in this case a caravan trip) and giving them more location work, but in fairness this is merely a set-piece within an episodic film narrative.

The problem is that it’s all starting to look a little tired now. One scene has Bewes practically salivating in a lingerie shop at all the young women changing, as Bob’s jealous lust after seeing Terry has a beautiful Finnish girlfriend Christina (played by the very English future Doctor Who companion Mary Tamm) threatens to boil out of control. Bob just looks desperate and childish at this stage, and he’s quite nasty in telling Thelma amidst this when she asks about the dress she’s trying on “I couldn’t give a shit.” It’s meant to elicit a big laugh but it just makes you dislike Bob even more.

“In the chocolate box of life, the top layer’s already gone. And someone’s pinched the orange crème from the bottom.” Bob voices at one point, in a particularly maudlin moment. Terry’s “bloody hell” sums up all of our feelings. Bob has always felt, since the beginning of WHTTLL?, that his lot is far worse than it is and by 1976, with Britain suffering long electricity blackouts and massive bin strikes as government apparatus fell apart, you wouldn’t blame them for finding such nostalgic reverie all a bit exhausting.

There is a nice inversion at the end for fans of the original series. Terry elects to go off on the ships to freshen his life up, but he this time doesn’t go, having a change of heart, but Bob wakes up after a night of drinking trapped on a container ship bound for Bahrain. We last see him calling out for Thelma in anguish after another scrape Terry has gotten him into, while Terry looks on with a smile of schadenfreude. In some ways, that’s quite a fitting end to The Likely Lads, with Terry unintentionally fixing for Bob to end up in a scrape while he gets away with it.

Overtures for the series to return were made once or twice, with James Bolam the constant sticking point, vociferously refusing to even discuss the show for many years. Conflicting reports suggest he fell out with Rodney Bewes for decades before Bewes’ death in 2017, but Bolam’s reticence preventing us getting ‘The Return of the Likely Lads’ (it surely would have been called this) in the 1980s or 1990s perhaps did us a favour. Terry and Bob as older men being grumpy about the past would have struggled to resonate as young men lamenting a rapidly changing world around them and struggling to find their place amidst evolving gender roles, economic struggles and societal development. We are better for leaving them rooted in the 60s and 70s.

Side note but there was, incidentally, a tribute revival of the first episode by ITV in the early 2000s with popular presenting duo Ant & Dec as Terry and Bob respectively - a pair of Geordie institutions playing a pair of Geordie institutions. Ant and Dec were praised in the roles but many felt the comedy fell flatter then than it had thirty years before, which perhaps sells the point above.

For me, The Likely Lads generally are placed more as a cultural artefact now than comedy that truly works. Much of the references and touch points are very dated, set as the show is in nostalgia for the post-war period. The naturalism of the comedy remains, and no question Bolam and Bewes work tremendously off one another, with Terry and Bob key comic creations of the period, but Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? doesn’t still resonate as powerfully on a comedic level 50+ years on as other shows from that era.

Much like the decades the show spanned, you had to be there I think.

Thanks for reading, please subscribe and remember… this is no laughing matter.

PS: for more on this show and from me, do give my British sitcom podcast You Have Been Watching a listen, as Rob Turnbull and I hack through the series and discuss in detail. Hope you give it a listen and enjoy.

Norfolk has a strange geography both in practical terms and in the psychology of Britons. As we see in ‘Basic Alan’, an episode of I’m Alan Partridge, Alan’s friend Dan Moody reminds us it’s considered “the rump of Britain” before his wife chips in with “I think it looks more like a boob”. The innuendo is intentional, they are after all as Alan calls them “sex swappers”, but the point is designed to highlight Norfolk’s difference.

Tucked away in the eastern corner of the nation, with a flatter, cod-European sense of natural surface made up of fields, farmers and livestock, with towns, villages and the odd city dotted in between, Norfolk feels distant. It feels a long way from anywhere which perhaps explains why Partridge’s origin derives, so memorably, from Norwich. Alan is, and always has been, an isolated figure both internally and externally, and the place and space he inhabits reflects that.

It is in this we can see the connections between Alan Partridge’s Norfolk and traditional British ‘folk horror’ in cinema and television. The term is surprisingly recent - attributed both to Mark Gattis & earlier Piers Haggard post-2000, but the roots of such work go back much further, particularly to what is considered, retrospectively, the ‘Unholy Trinity’ of folk horror films - Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970) and The Wicker Man (1973). Though only one is set in any kind of contemporary time period, they all subscribe to the same evocation of a primal terror lurking in what would otherwise be a pastoral, bucolic British landscape, as Andrew Michael Hurley has described:

“It’s a recurring motif in folk horror that the countryside beckons to the characters as a place of hope. That events often culminate in graphic violence is a given: this is horror, after all. What is more interesting is the way in which these stories show how we’re seduced by the idea that the natural world is where we’ll find some kind of restoration, enlightenment and, ultimately, peace.”

Though we never see graphic violence in Alan Partridge’s array of series, the threat of it without doubt exists. It nonetheless took those behind the character a while to truly understand this. When we first met Alan, as a sports correspondent for the On the Hour radio show in the very early 90s, he was not framed as distinctly by a sense of geography. Designed by Coogan, and later fleshed out with him by writers Patrick Marber, Peter Baynham & Armando Iannucci, Alan was designed as amalgam of particular sports commentator figures with distinct voices, such as John Motson & Jim Rosenthal, though Iannucci has claimed that in developing the backstory early on, the assortment of writers swiftly came to feel Alan’s genesis:

“Someone said, “He’s an Alan!” and someone else said, “He’s a Partridge!” Within minutes we knew where he lived, we’d worked out his backstory, what his aspirations were. We knew he felt the political reporters looked down on him as not a proper journalist; we knew he wanted to be in light entertainment, on television rather than radio. We knew he came from Norwich, because no one knew of a comedy character from Norwich. It was instant.’”

It was the advent of I’m Alan Partridge in 1997, arguably the series that transformed Coogan’s character from amusing, cult comic figure into a genuinely iconic British comedy creation, that cemented Alan’s connection to not just Norfolk, but a Norfolk that teetered on the edge of the disturbing and ever so slightly uncanny.

We didn’t see that direct tether in Knowing Me, Knowing You, the light entertainment chat show which catapulted Alan from sports radio into the limelight as a Michael Barrymore meets Michael Parkinson of his day, but there were flickers of the psychological darkness that would exist on the fringes of his world. Alan brings onto the show Joe Beesley (John Thomson), a broad Northern entertainer who made Alan laugh on holiday with his ventriloquist act ‘Cheeky Monkey’, but Joe dies on stage of nerves and displays what appears to be a near psychotic attachment to his appendage (indeed Joe returned after almost three decades on Alan’s newest chat show, This Time, and while age had mellowed him, the trauma of Cheeky Monkey remained). Moreover, the final episode of Knowing Me, Knowing You (or KMYWAP) sees Alan unwittingly shoot vile food critic Forbes McCallister to death live on air with an antique shotgun. Alan tries to present a fun, perky half hour of chat and laughs but at every turn is suffused with trauma, pain and even death.

This reaches a crescendo that sets him on the path toward I’m Alan Partridge in Knowing Me, Knowing Yule, his chat show Christmas special devised inside a TV studio mock up of his house. Aside from leading to him punching BBC boss Tony Hayers (David Schneider) on air, Alan also reveals that over the Christmas period his wife Carol has left him, as have his two grown up children. The mocked up house becomes a remnant of family trauma Alan, as he says goodbye to the audience, is left to bear, broken and shaken by events of the broadcast. It is, on one level, the darkest of comedy. Alan is established as an arrogant, self-obsessed and borderline racist chat show host in KMKYWAP but by the end has been abandoned and told he will “never work in television again”. He subsequently does what anyone might do - he retreats to the sanctuary of home, of Norwich, of Norfolk.

The brilliance of I’m Alan Partridge lies in how it transforms Alan from the arena of mockumentary into a traditional sitcom format, replete with laughter track, and allows us a glimpse behind the curtain. The first season presents him as a man caught between two worlds - his past and future. The reality of life working the graveyard shift in local Norwich radio against the aspirational belief that he could return to the BBC. He lives in a ‘travel tavern’; a motorway service station/hotel essentially equidistant between London and Norwich “that’s the genius of its location” Alan stresses.

It is, in truth, a depressing existence, especially as he immediately in ‘A Room with an Alan’ is rejected by Hayers at the BBC in a polite meeting which he has no idea is pure BBC courtesy. In 1997, no commissioning editor in their right mind would hire a broadcaster who killed a man on air (nowadays, all bets are off). Alan exists in a null-space; a trapped world where, across the first season, he balances eking out a career, maintaining a profile, and desperately trying to claw back some semblance of the career he believes he deserves.

This series begins, across the six episodes, to explore aspects of the weird Norfolk surrounding Alan’s mid-life crisis attempt at regaining his career and self-respect. For a start, I’m Alan Partridge introduces Michael (Simon Greenall), a Newcastle-born porter and general dogsbody at the Linton travel tavern; the only character beyond Alan’s perennially put upon PA Lynn Benfield (Felicity Montagu) to move with Alan beyond the first series. Michael is well-meaning but strange. Part of the comedy lies in class and cultural barriers; he ascribes to the ‘comedy northerner’ trope with a thick accent and odd customs the more cultured, refined South find alien.

Michael living in Norfolk, a very different space to his North East roots, is an open question in itself. He claims to be ex-military, enthralling Alan with talk of battlefield experiences and wild nights in Bangkok etc…, but there is the distinct possibility he could just be a fantasist. There are strong hints that Michael is an aggrandiser. He also could be a coward, given in ‘Basic Alan’ he legs it rather than face the consequences when he & Alan get pulled over by a police officer while stealing a traffic cone.

Either way, Michael neither quite fits the travel tavern or indeed the petrol station he later goes to work in during the second series of I’m Alan Partridge, in which Alan sees who has by this point become a friend whenever he fills up his car (and you suspect often when he doesn’t need to). Alan goes to Michael’s terraced house on what looks a fairly impoverished street and a strange looking man walks out, saying nothing to Alan. Is he a flatmate? Brother? Lover? Alan doesn’t know and nor do we. Michael’s life, to some degree, is shrouded in the kind of mystery that creates an underlying sense of threat.

He talks in ‘The Colour of Alan’ about his fantasy of gunning down a man he used to know in a helicopter. “Oh he’s just a mate” he tells an unnerved Alan when pressed. Michael is at the very least disaffected, possibly delusional and at worst just a little bit psychotic, but Alan is attracted to him as a friend because he is precisely the kind of person he can impress and aggrandise to. Michael is the kind of target audience who cannot see Alan for the abject, chronically self-defeating failure he is.

What we find in I’m Alan Partridge is that however strange and idiosyncratic Alan can be, and whatever odd behaviour he might exhibit, he is frequently outdone by either the eccentrics around him or those he encounters beyond the limits of the travel tavern, in wider Norfolk. Just look at some at the people who call into his radio show. Alan is frequently unnerved by some of the strange folk who contribute to the show.

Take the guy who calls in after Alan asks about how you would like to be buried, and Alan reads “I’d like to be buried with a couple of Page Three stunners. They’re alive, he says…” and Alan refuses to read the rest, repulsed by what we are left to imagine in some kind of deeply disturbing, nihilistic combination of sexual allure and necrophilia that is almost too horrendous to contemplate. What about Frederick, the dyed in the wool nihilist who replies to Alan’s question ‘what happens after we die?’ by talking about his lovely wife and children, including a new baby boy, who claims “after death there is… nothing.” I’m so many of these examples, death casts a chilling pallor over the residents of Norfolk who respond to Alan’s oddball questions. Strange attracts strange.

Look at Mary, a caller who he talks to about what people will look like in a billion years time, who suggests humans will have no hands, eyes or sex organs. Alan wonders openly what that would look like. “Look in the back of a spoon…” Mary says. “In the bathroom…” and Alan quickly cuts the call, weirded out. She exists in that spectrum of weird Norfolk, the strange voice on the phone, who represents a different threat to Michael.

Rather than the coiled spring from an alien part of England who could snap at any moment, Mary is the folk example of the strange, unknowable force who could be anywhere - even next door. Alan will go so far with these people before shutting them down completely. He is eccentric. He is embittered. He is narcissistic. But he’s not weird in the manner of being unknowable. Alan will say strange things but they are usually a symptom of his random, unfiltered, often poorly judged thought process. He is not one of the Norfolk ‘folk’ residents who might walk past you in one breath and imagine your horrific death or some violent sacrifice on the other, or who might simply be purely insane.

The best example of when Alan is confronted with folk horror is in the episode ‘To Kill a Mocking Alan’, in which he hosts in the travel tavern a rather sad and desperate ‘live’ version of Knowing Me Knowing You, attended largely by a gaggle of middle aged female fans he has no interest in, and a pair of producers from the Irish RTE (played by Father Ted scribe Arthur Mathews & the other guy who wrote it with him) who he wants to impress. On discovering a super fan has turned up, a guy called Jed Maxwell, Alan ends up recruiting Jed to help him look good in front of the producers but in his blagging, ends up unwittingly pretending Jed’s house is his home, embarrassed by what was described as his “sordid little grief hole” in another episode.

On arrival, Alan is confronted by what he didn’t realise was his worst nightmare - not just a super fan but an obsessive stalker and crank caller who has a room filled with Alan arcanum; posters, cuttings, life size dolls, masks etc… and it immediately terrifies Alan. He wants nothing more to be venerated but entirely on his terms, with such fans at a very clear distance. Fans are a means to Alan’s end of broadcasting success, respect and ultimately financial gain. Jed is so far beyond that line that Alan goes into immediate panic mode.

It is interesting how Jed, much like Michael, is from the north. He is from Leeds, or certainly Yorkshire, and mentions a brother but he lives alone in a sparse house which has an air of unreality. Alan’s null-space is a horror of its own making—the desperate retreat of a man whose life has entirely broken down—but Jed’s teeters on the rabbit hole of pure insanity. He has one chair, suggesting nobody visits. He has a picture of Alan on top of his old TV. He has a plate outside on the wall of his garden. “What’s that for?” one of the producers asks. “Just… friends…” a confused Alan claims, himself finding the image strange. Jed’s house is otherwise innocuous. Anyone could live there. A family, an elderly person. There is that haunting feeling that this might not even by Jed’s house. What if the real owners are buried under the patio or in the garden?

The 1990s had, remember, been spooked by the horror in increasingly daring soap opera of serial killers lurking amongst traditional urban communities - take Brookside and Trevor Jordache murdering and burying his wife in the garden. True crime as a concept and sub-genre was a few years away but that existential fear was creeping into British society. Jed is the modern, folk horror approximation of that. He is the cliched obsessive fan, from an alien Northern world, representing Norfolk’s deepest terror.

The climax of that episode is the closest Alan gets, across any of his series, to facing that terror head on. Escaping a headlock from Jed when he tries to run away, Alan pretends to find simpatico with Jed, who says “I just want to be your friend” imploringly. He plans for Alan to come with him to see his brother but in escaping in his car, Alan calls him “a mentalist!” and drives off, a betrayed Jed raging “I’ll rip your bloody head off!” Alan soon runs out of road and is forced to run, almost tripping over his feet in terror as he races across fields—across the pastoral, supposedly safe Norfolk landscape—aimlessly, screaming for help. It’s both a comical and haunting final moment for an episode which finds a great deal of comedy in Jed, and the revelation about his mania, but it teeters enormously close to horror in the implications. What if Jed had caught up with Alan? Would he have locked him away in the shrine devoted to the man? Would he have turned Alan into a living exhibit? Might he even have killed him to protect, perversely, the secret of his own obsession?

The implications of comedy are often not rigorously considered, as the point is to enjoy the pain or suffering or comeuppance of characters like Alan. He is not designed to be sympathetic, hence why it is much easier to laugh at him being trapped by a maniac than it would be for, say, his assistant Lynn. We are able to appreciate the comedy in much the same manner as Mrs Warboys being trussed up in a sack and thrown down a hill in One Foot in the Grave; we can vicariously enjoy the misfortune of an annoying human being.

Yet this combination of horror and comedy is different from how the Trotter’s encounter a maniac in Only Fools and Horses, how they engage with a psychopath within slasher movie tropes. I’m Alan Partridge exists in less of a safe and ordered world. It is a comedy universe laced with threat and punctured by death. Tony Hayers falls from a roof off-screen and dies, much to Alan’s delight. His successor, Chris Feather, has a heart attack just as he’s about to renew Alan’s contract and dies right in front of him. “Here’s to the future!” Alan thoughtlessly toasts as he fakes the dead man’s signature - though his amoral ruse is clearly rumbled as he never does get that five year, million pound contract with the BBC.

As time passes, and Alan thaws as a character somewhat with age, perhaps as the world around him grows ever more aligned with the kind of extreme prejudices Alan once subscribed to, the humour of Partridge moves away from horror into eccentricity. We are provided some sympathy with Alan’s position as a dinosaur—such as when he becomes an unwitting party to a siege in big screen outing Alpha Papa, created by a colleague who has been put out to pasture and is even more embittered. As a result, the comedy strays less into the folk world of creeping Norfolk horror and by the 2020s, as Alan has finally returned to prime time BBC television with This Time, he in some ways has come full circle. Norfolk, nevertheless, remains a key part of his DNA as a character. He is inexorably tied up with that strange corner of our isle, that somewhat unknowable land filled with both strangers and familiars, either of whom could have dark secrets and terrifying truths lurking underneath the beautiful landscape.

We laugh at Alan Partridge’s Norfolk, but if were ever confronted with the horror within, perhaps we would not be a-ha’ing as much as we thought.

Thanks for reading, please subscribe and remember… this is no laughing matter.

In the year 1996, Men Behaving Badly was at its cultural peak as Series 5 began to dawn, but this coincided with a significant cultural challenger to the New Lad thanks to, just two weeks after the series premiered, the arrival of the Spice Girls. Their debut single ‘Wannabe’ hit the charts in July of that year and launched the single biggest musical sensation in Britain since The Beatles over three decades earlier. Where in the swinging Sixties, Beatlemania sent legions of young people into paroxysms of excitement, the Cool Britannia of the 90’s saw the impact of ‘Girl Power’ and Geri Halliwell dressed in a Union Jack mini-skirt, the impending dawn of New Labour, the most liberal government in decades, and the Austin Powers franchise which threw everything back to a halcyon age of British ‘coolness’, injected this time with a call to female empowerment in a Britain filled with a renewed sense of optimism as it sailed toward a new century and a new millennium.

In retrospect, two men deep into their thirties swigging lager, frequently chanting “wa-hey!”, displaying disrespectful and sexist attitudes to women, indulging in infidelity and becoming almost disturbingly obsessed with sex, feels starkly retrograde in the face of the changing face of British popular culture in the late-1990’s. Men Behaving Badly was still popular, and Series 5 remains enjoyable, but it is clear that the show has passed its Series 4 peak at the true apex of lad culture, and in some respects had said everything it had to say.

Writer Simon Nye spends the last few seasons continuing to mellow both Gary and Tony, not to mention their relationships with endlessly patient women in their lives Dorothy and Deborah, beginning the process of moving the show to being about not just two mates ‘and their birds’, but two couples who grow ever closer as friends and, to a degree, a dysfunctional, surrogate family. By the end of Series 6 and Last Orders, the final three concluding specials, Dorothy and Deborah feel as integral to the storytelling as Gary and Tony. Their importance grows as these two men, in their own way, slowly and surely begin to grow up.

By the final episode, ‘Delivery’, there is an argument that you could start calling this show People Behaving Responsibly.

There is a sense that laddism or lad culture overlapped and fused with the Cool Britannia renaissance which lasted certainly up to the global societal shock of 9/11 in 2001, and the subsequent popular collapse of Tony Blair’s New Labour project with Britain’s part in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the weapons of mass destruction scandal.

Cool Britannia was pure, distilled nostalgia for an age, a country and a generation on the cusp of significant change. The 90’s was the period between Francis Fukuyama’s so-called ‘End of History’, with the cessation of the Cold War and five decades of open hostility between the United States and the defunct Soviet Union, and the post-9/11 ‘Shock and Awe’ of fundamentalist terrorism which cast a dark pallor over the first decade of the 21st century. Cool Britannia, for a while, was Britain’s hope that it could retain the level of boom, optimism and sexiness inherent in the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960’s.

All of the teenagers who went crazy over the Beatles and the Stones, who drove Mini’s in the wake of The Italian Job, or partied in Swinging London, were all now middle-aged themselves, parents, part of the systems and institutions they themselves had sought to counteract. The Establishment days were over but the youth of the 60’s felt a certain glow for an age of zest for what the future may hold, before Thatcherism, neoliberal advances, globalisation and years of strikes, unemployment and austerity scarred the British psyche.

Time magazine were quick to promote the aspirations of the Blairite government in tuning into the cultural zeitgeist of Cool Britannia:

The British economy is booming: the pound is up, and unemployment is down. Peace and prosperity. Who could ask for anything more? But just in case someone does, there’s Britain’s current boom in the arts. Whether it’s movies like the The Full Monty, bands like Oasis and the Spice Girls, or designers like Stella McCartney, the hottest thing going these days seems to come from what is cloyingly known as “Cool Britannia.” And while Blair admits that this artistic blossoming was under way before he took office, he and his coterie of young advisers have relentlessly, even shamelessly, courted and promoted the hip as a way of announcing to the world that Britain is changing.

Britain was not just changing, it was reminsicing. It was rejoicing in calling back to an age before optimism had been eroded by the clinical reality of how post-war capitalism and trickle-down economics could reinforce a social and financial divide many in the 60’s hoped had been cast into the pages of history with the death of Empire.

Lad culture overlaps with some of these Cool Britannia aspects. The Gallagher brothers of the aforementioned Oasis, one of the stalwarts at the heart of ‘Britpop’, displayed behaviour which went far beyond any pale shown on Men Behaving Badly; they may have fashioned themselves on John and Paul but their antics were often more Keith Moon-era The Who. What is lad culture beyond a rejection of sexual equality and a progressive future for women in society and the workplace?

It is nostalgic for the 60’s and 70’s where Carry On films, saucy pictures and working men’s clubs reinforced women as either sexual objects to be ogled or matriarchal old battle-axes to be feared or, ideally, avoided. Promiscuity and even infidelity in these examples are cheeky, cheerful and what make a man a true bloke. Laddism struggles to eke out a place alongside ‘Girl Power’. The Spice Girls may have been designed aesthetically to appeal to young boys but their core agenda was appealing to a female audience with a message of empowerment.

‘Girl Power’ was not something founded by the Spice Girls, rather appropriated and adapted for the time from Bikini Kill, an American punk band who in the early 90’s instigated the term through a feminist zine called Girl Power. It was a variant on the ‘Black Power’ slogan which through the 60’s and 70’s called for racial equality and the creation of black cultural institutions, in this case working to build on the work of feminists to advance ideas of female identity, inclusion and discussing issues.

It was appropriate that Girl Power started in the punk feminist arena (the Riot Grrrrl movement, leading some to mispronounce the term ‘grrrl power’) because even though the Spice Girls popularised and mainstreamed the term, there remained a level of anti-establishmentarian rhetoric to the term, specifically aimed at the patriarchy. If New Men wanted to co-exist with the exponents of Girl Power then lad culture would continue to reject it. The Spice Girls and the feminist following would promote the individual success and agency of the modern woman in liberal Britain of the late 1990’s, while laddism still uncomfortably indulged in their pure objectification and sexualisation.

This is part of the reason Men Behaving Badly begins to evolve past the original brief across its last couple of seasons, as the shadow of the Cool Britannia cultural movement begins to envelop the original idea it was meant to satirise.

In purest terms, Series 5 is the last series in which Men Behaving Badly truly engages in the laddism on which it built its comic reputation. It is more self-assured than the first three series yet never reaches the comedic heights of Series 4, at which Nye’s show firmly targeted the pillars of lad culture that propped it up – ‘The Good Pub Guide’ attempts to recreate ‘Drunk’ to some degree but lacks the punch. Series 5 begins the transition away from the show being about two single guys living together, drinking and fantasising about women to a show about two increasingly middle aged men accepting their relationships and growing old a touch disgracefully.

This is made apparent in the choice made right at the beginning of Series 5, in which Gary (Martin Clunes) and Dorothy (Caroline Quentin) respond to her infidelity with Tony by her moving into the flat and them attempting, in ‘Hair’, to consolidate their permanently flimsy relationship; the fact Tony is away for months busking in Europe helps them realise they can live together and enjoy it (and was probably a move by Tony to give his slightly damaged relationship with his best friend some breathing room, though this is never stated). ‘Your Mate vs Your Bird’ hits the choice Gary has to face head on – truly commit to living with Dorothy or retain the youthful laddish impulses he still has by just living with Tony, and the episodes proves (partly through some surprisingly graphic, horror dream sequences) that Gary is not yet ready to abandon his youth. It is a process which takes all the way up to the final episode, ‘Delivery’.

Series 5 is very much about the continued transition and acceptance, for Gary and Tony (though primarily Gary) that they are becoming a little too old to convincingly still live the beer swilling, ‘bird-pulling’ life they have tried (and often failed) to make work over the last few years. Gary is consistently reminded across the series of his impending middle age; ‘Cowardice’ sees him trying to prove his machismo in the face of shying away from an aggressive driver, ‘Cardigan’ has him dressing like his fuddy-duddy co-worker George (Ian Lindsay), singing 1960’s pop songs and such, and once pointed out to him he attempts to re-assert his youth by joining a night out with students to a rave with, predictably, poor results.

Finally ‘Home Made Sauna’, the final episode of the series, sees Gary attempt to re-assert his youthful masculinity by sleeping with visiting girl from next door, Carol (Elizabeth Carling) while Dorothy and Deborah are away on a sailing weekend. It’s a move which negates any lingering sympathy you may have felt for Gary after being cheated on by his lover and best friend, yet once again Nye doesn’t work too hard to vilify the man for it. It’s all just brushed aside by ‘Stag Night’, the first episode of Series 6, as part of a catalyst to begin the next stage of the transition.

This again works to the detriment of the characters in Men Behaving Badly when it comes to them feeling like real people. Tony (Neil Morrissey) edges further and further into absurdity and eccentricity across Series 5 as his obsession with Deborah deepens. Even if you put aside quite how the impoverished Tony could have afforded to inter-rail across Europe between Series 4 & 5 (an adventure which would have been logistically expensive, even as a busker, in 1996), Series 5 sees Tony move further and further away from being an affable if slightly sleazy flatmate toward an oddball played for farcical comic effect; ‘Your Mate vs Your Bird’ has him try and tattoo Debs’ name on his leg, ‘Rich and Fat’ has him adopt a less than convincing chubby prosthetic belly as Tony gains weight, and across the series he forms a new double act with Ken (John Thomson), the just plain weird new landlord of The Crown, when he gets a job behind the bar (this lasts longer than when he worked at The Crown under Les).

Ken’s strangeness ameliorates Tony’s, slightly, but as a character Tony is positioned by the end of Series 5 as the real loser of the pair – he’s poor, whereas Gary has tens of thousands of pounds in the bank as we learn in ‘Rich and Fat’, he doesn’t own his own property, he’s not in a relationship and in ‘Home Made Sauna’, it’s Gary off having sex while Tony is saddled with the married mate, when in previous series it would have been the inverse.

Tony strays too far into the realm of caricature, especially into Series 6 when he becomes an FOF (Figure of Fun) frequently for several of the characters—such as ‘Watching TV’, which that acronym is in reference to—or the excuse for a piece of physical comedy. You can feel Nye becoming more reliant on Tony for that in episodes such as ‘Jealousy’ or ‘Ten’ (where he adopts a Kevin Keegan-style perm to try and impress Debs’ Mum) or ‘Sofa’, which has the quite bizarre sub-plot of Tony having to dispose of a snake he bought while drunk. This becomes even more of a problem when Nye finally pulls the trigger and puts Tony and Deborah into a relationship, a development that organically had been coming for a while, and should maybe have happened a season or two earlier. The result is that Series 6 parts the core central dynamic of Gary and Tony in order to make way for Dorothy and Deborah becoming more integral to their lives. While Series 6 is an uneven collection of episodes, this evolution of the show manages to refresh the formula enough to work toward a satisfying conclusion.

What’s really interesting about Series 6 is how much it intentionally strives to pull apart the established formula. Only ‘Stag Night’ or ‘Ten’ really feel like they could have been tagged onto the end of Series 5, with the conventional scenes in the office with George and Anthea (Valerie Minifie). ‘Wedding’ tells a good proportion of the episode via the skewed camcorder perspective of Gary’s ever present but unseen mate Clive (though we do briefly see him, Hitchcock cameo style, during this episode, played indeed by Simon Nye).

‘Jealousy’ takes place largely on location, indeed it’s the most on-location episode of the series probably to date, set on a Norfolk farm. ‘Sofa’ revolves around key flashbacks to points in Gary and Tony’s lives, some of which we’ve anecdotally heard about before. Even though ‘Watching TV’ is solely set in the flat, it entirely is based around the characters all sitting and watching the telly (Star Trek’s ‘City on the Edge of Forever’, which Gary & Tony discuss) in real time – indeed it’s a forerunner of the Caroline Aherne/Craig Cash sitcom The Royle Family in this regard, plus maybe a hint of the reality series Gogglebox (which itself was no doubt inspired by The Royle Family).

Martin Clunes considers the end of ‘Sofa’, which could have served as the ending of the series theoretically, as a key moment:

The crowning moment came when Gary and Tony went to Dorset to set their sofa free. There was a closeup of us on it, then the camera pulled back and you could see we were sitting on the penis of the Cerne Abbas giant. The crew had to shoot from a helicopter. We just sat and drank beer in this beautiful valley at dusk. The scene was for the end credits, so our instructions were just: “Act stupid as the helicopter pulls away.” I rolled the whole way down the giant’s penis. I had such a good time I moved to Dorset right after. What a way to make a living.

There is a sense that Nye understands he cannot retain the same key dynamics in Series 6. Too much has changed. Though Gary and Dorothy don’t elect to get married in the end, with both realising thanks to recent infidelity (Gary again cheats on her, this time unknowingly and drunk with a hooker, while Dorothy sleeps with a random on her hen night) that they are not ready, it nevertheless seems to strengthen their relationship.

Only Gary strays again, slightly, in the final series ‘Gary In Love’, and by that point it feels much more like an awkward means to generate tension before Dorothy gives birth and provide Gary with one last confrontation with his lot in life and his obsession with proving his sexual promiscuity and masculinity; almost too much has happened by that point to make his brief conference dalliance with Wendy feel logical. Nye frequently tests the limits of their relationship—again in ‘Ten’, where they both flirt outrageously with the counsellors they go to mend their relationship—but he always seems to end up in the same space with the two characters. Despite their differences and aspirations, they do ultimately love each other.

Less convincing is the Tony and Deborah relationship. The manner of how they come together in ‘Wedding’ makes sense, and we’ve been steadily building toward that point for some time, and it does feel right that Tony would become a lovesick puppy hanging off Debs’ every word and movement in the wake of their congress, but like the consummation of any long-term relationship on TV (here’s looking at you, Agents Mulder & Scully…), getting Tony and Deborah together sucks some of the comedic tension out of the show.

If Dorothy stays with Gary because they’re both actually quite mercurial in nature and a good match, it is harder to see what Tony and Deborah really have beyond the sexual attraction. Tony becomes increasingly soppy, sentimental and childlike as Series 6 goes on and into Last Orders; in ‘Gary in Love’ this is writ large in his attempts to deal with a giant ceremonial fish sculpture he and Gary drunkenly smuggle into their Worthing hotel room. The Christmas special does at least have Deborah become exhausted by his attachment issues and consider ending it, but ultimately she seems to embrace these aspects.

Deborah (Leslie Ash) works better as a character in the final couple of seasons because, as Tony’s girlfriend, she is integrated a little more into the central dynamic, but she remains consistently the most under developed and at the whim of necessity to service Tony in these final series. In Series 5, she is again depressed and listless in ‘Hair’, almost clinically so (as she was in Series 3), and the show pokes fun in ‘The Good Pub Guide’ at her attempts to fill that void through an interest in astrology.

Later she tries to reinvent herself as a full-time student in ‘Cardigan’ and possibly flirts with a same-sex relationship (you can imagine how a lesbian tryst in 1996 is approached with this series’ laddish humour). If Dorothy has a mainstream career as a nurse and seems fairly resolute in her professional domain, Deborah throughout the series (despite coming from a clearly middle-class background) veers from career to career, man to man, interest to interest, and only seems to settle down when she is coupled with Tony.

It doesn’t entirely make sense. If you put aside how much Tony wore down her defences over the years, normalised perhaps his eccentric and boorish behaviour to the point she could appreciate the fact he showers her with attention, it’s hard to imagine how Tony and Deborah actually work as a partnership. ‘The Good Pub Guide’ does a good job of bringing to light the boorish realities of a long-term relationship between Gary and Dorothy (culminating in the latter farting loudly in The Crown), and you are able to see how these two characters might function in a realistic marriage, but Tony and Deborah never really have those kind of scenes.

Theirs is a bizarre fantasy relationship come true, which often relies comedy-wise on Tony’s quirkiness, eccentricity or gaffes, whereas Gary and Dorothy’s dynamic is entirely observational. Consider how different their journeys are in ‘Performance’ – while Gary is suffering from sexual performance anxiety as they try for a baby, Tony is wondering whether he wants to date Deborah if she loses a leg. They may be in different places but observationally they are frequently worlds apart.

The final episode, ‘Delivery’, does rectify this to an extent, but it provides a mixed message. Gary has reached a point of acceptance about becoming a father, and his life with Dorothy, and the episode focuses more on him having to let go of George and Anthea (his strange fusion of surrogate parental figures and therapists) given his office is closing down, leaving Gary to face an uncertain career future. It’s a similar journey to the one he experienced in ‘Sofa’, having to process and let go of aspects of his youth, and finally grow up – which has really been Nye’s message in parts of Series 5 and particularly Series 6 as the show has embraced the realities of middle age. Tony does try and take this to heart in ‘Delivery’, getting a steady job as a postman, up early, sensible clothes and a (admittedly awful) moustache, but Deborah no longer finds him sexually attractive. Tony has to revert partially to the ‘lad’ he was in order to make Deborah happy. It’s perhaps a comment on not losing who you are to age and change but has this not been what Dorothy and Deborah have always wanted? For these boys to become men.

Men Behaving Badly suggests maybe not. The final series came out in 1998. New Labour was firmly established. Cool Britannia was happening. Girl Power and the Spice Girls were everywhere. Laddism was part of the culture but so, equally, were ‘ladettes’. Some women took on the characteristics of these men, playing them at their own game, and to a degree this is what Dorothy and Deborah do. They join them on the sofa more often. ‘Watching TV’ sees them complicit in the practical jokes played on Tony. ‘Sofa’, inverting the central duo, even has them feet up on their new, ‘girly’ sofa, cans in hand, doing exactly what Gary and Tony do, while Tony even attempts to coach Deborah in ‘Performance’ in the ways of laddism, once he has fully moved into her flat. Simon Nye’s series ends with the boys having slightly grown up while the girls have, slightly, become a bit more like the both of them. Like many couples, at the end of the day, they meet in the middle.

Maybe the credit sequence of the final series is telling. It’s no longer just Gary and Tony on the sofa crushing a can they throw behind them. Now its Gary, Tony, Dorothy and Debs all there doing the same.

Maybe that says it all.

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Yet under the surface, there lies a deeper layer of both exploration and subversion to Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant’s series: the presence of comedy and entertainment itself within the narrative. The show, revolving around hapless, deluded ‘fun’ boss David Brent and the employees of the Slough branch of paper merchants Wernham Hogg, is ostensibly about the titular office but this is simply the framework on which to present the show’s dissection of comedy & reality, and the growing juxtaposition of television and the real world, moreover how that world is presented and presents itself.

In that sense, The Office really did break the mould on arrival in 2001. It was format breaking while adapting a well-established format itself. In the penultimate episode, as Brent is attempting to pass himself off as a celebrity in a grocery shop, a man asks “are you that fat one from Airport?”. This is a reference to the BBC’s documentary series Airport which ran from 2000 to 2005 and the breakout star of that series, Jeremy Spake; a rather camp, stout employee with similar features to Brent. The Office exists, technically, in the same space, and in the concluding two episodes actively presents itself as a ‘show within a show’ in that sense.

Before that, however, as the series arrived, it was a BBC gamble that would pay off to a greater degree than anyone anticipated.

For one thing, as ubiquitous and all-encompassing Gervais might now be as a transatlantic star, in 2001 he and Merchant were a unknown quantity from the Home Counties and West Country respectively who had previously toiled in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the edgier arena of Channel Four late night comedy, contributing to series such as The 11 O’Clock Show (on which Sacha Baron Cohen made his name as Ali G) and developing projects such as Meet Ricky Gervais, an intentionally shambolic take on the traditional chat show format.

In all of these examples, Gervais played a darker extension of his own provocative personality; a rude, obnoxious creature filled with prejudice, boasting an arrogance that was later revealed as deep insecurity, especially when Merchant would play, in contrast, a perverted and eccentric ‘manager’ figure in scripted scenes. Their comedy was, to put it mildly, both of a certain taste and in many respects intentionally tasteless; what they sought was to both shock and render the audience implicit and uncomfortable in regards to their comedy. You laughed at Gervais’ persona but you were often unsure if you actually should, which stood in contrast to a great deal of comedy presented on British screens at the time.

Neither he nor Merchant, however, were anywhere close to breaking out as national or international hits. Their Channel Four comedy was niche, often strange, but always in retrospect on brand. Everything they did was about entertainment and the presentation of entertainment, beyond comedy into the realm of so-called ‘light entertainment’, that was profoundly post-modern in construction. They pioneered the post-modern trend of British comedy at a point the genre, in the U.K., was running in place.

This is not to say the 90s or indeed the end of the 90s was bereft of good or indeed great sitcoms. The Royle Family, which arrived in 1998, reconceptualised the idea of the home-based family sitcom by using the living room and kitchen areas of the home, predominantly, as the nexus for observational rather than plot driven comedy, built on naturalistic language and character motivation, working in real time – the epitome of ‘a slice of life’ and frequently extremely funny and moving as a result.

Surrealism peaked with the narratively dense One Foot in the Grave, an erudite blend of Gothic horror and traditional sitcom tropes; Father Ted, which adapted the contained, constrained essence of Fawlty Towers into a hyper-real, comic book-style deconstruction of the traditional family structure; The League of Gentlemen transformed sketch comedy into a dark, funhouse mirror inversion of old-fashioned ideas, shot through with a twisted, horror realism while balanced with a sarcastic pragmatism and, deep down, fairly end of the pier humour.

Comedy thrived in many of these examples but none of them fundamentally changed the relationship between the show and it’s audience in the way The Office would.

In all of those examples, and the majority of situation comedy of the era, a laughter track was included, even when scenes were shot on location (as they would be in The League of Gentlemen) rather than a studio, which for years had been the traditional environment. The audience had a complicity in those recordings but it was specifically one way – audiences would watch, laugh and have their enjoyment, purely as spectators, recorded in order for audiences at home to capture the same theatrical sense studio audiences, who would always be ‘warmed up’ beforehand, felt during the recording.

The Office did not exactly break the fourth wall, to use the famed parlance, but it found a structural mechanism to peek through it by utilising the documentary format, talking heads to clarify or contextualise aspects by speaking to camera (and by extension to us) and removing the laughter track. Audiences would now have to find the comedy in a series that would not, on the face of it, contain any ‘jokes’ in the traditional sense of the term.

The Office was not the first series to abandon the laughter track, or even canned laughter which would often be used in shows of that era. The aforementioned The Royle Family abandoned it, as did other comedy series that played with audience expectations and challenged the division of comedy and drama – Marion & Geoff, a series of shorts featuring Rob Brydon as a tragic taxi driver whose wife abandoned him, delivering a series of Alan Bennett-esque monologues to camera or Brass Eye and before it The Day Today, which directly spoofed news broadcasts and factual documentary series.

Certainly also People Like Us, a forerunner to The Office’s documentarian style which saw now disgraced actor Chris Langham play Roy Mallard, a well meaning but quite naive documentary maker who would depict various professions episode by episode. People Like Us failed to get a third series thanks to The Office being commissioned but the meta-awareness of its audience certainly inspired The Office, even just on a textual basis. What The Office managed to achieve was a synthesis of traditional tropes in situation comedy and more abstract series’, blending them into a fundamental shift in the reception of comedy by audiences.

Gervais and Merchant would, of course, later directly comment on this in their follow up series Extras, which in many respects dramatises their own efforts and difficulties in breaking through the BBC’s accepted vision of how comedy is made, and how unusual at this time an auteurist vision would be to pull off.

The Office does it, but Gervais’ Extras character Andy Millman does not, watching his own series about factory workers which he perhaps envisaged in the same pseudo-realistic nature of The Office churned out into a fusion of Are You Being Served? and the still to come Mrs Brown’s Boys. They might now be considered examples of ‘lowest common denominator’ comedy, perhaps an elitist term that would be chastised in the post-Brexit, culture war landscape, but one The Office is acutely aware of in how it depicts both class and various forms of educational strata. It features ordinary, fairly working class people in a somewhat deprived, sub-London town, but there is a constant undercurrent of working or even lower class values and the aspirational, sub-metropolitan world view of the New Labour generation.

In the grand sense of British comedy, however, these people are failures. The office of Wernham Hogg is, in some sense, their purgatory. There is a strong argument that every groundbreaking British comedy character is rooted in existential ennui, tragic insecurity, cosmic bad luck and practical failure. Tony Hancock pioneered such nihilism in the post-war comic bleakness of Hancock’s Half Hour in the 60s. John Cleese presents Basil Fawlty in the 70s as a post-colonial, repressed bag of tortured neuroses in Fawlty Towers. David Jason’s Del-Boy Trotter in Only Fools and Horses is the deluded extremis of 80s Thatcherite myth, the fallacy of neoliberal self-improvement that promises success on one hand but guarantees it only for the class above Del-Boy on the other.

Steve Coogan presents Alan Partridge across the 90s as a bitter representation of these false promises; the radio DJ with delusions of grandeur, chronically undercut by his own prejudice and incompetence in life and his work. David Brent is the symbolic character for the 2000s and an extension of many of these previous examples; Brent has the repressed sexual anxiety of Basil, the false aspiration of Del-Boy, and the consistent lack of skill and temperament of Alan. Yet he remains unique in that he exists in a world where these examples live and breathe in his mind.

Brent is a comedy character born of comedy creations.

There is perhaps the greatest overlap with Partridge in that they both inhabit worlds where they have a knowledge of or understanding of BBC entertainment, or at least Brent believes he does.

Partridge will often name drop real life people in entertainment who have faded somewhat in the public eye – Bill Oddie, Sue Cook etc… – and the comedy we extract comes from the world of what The Office’s Ricky might describe as “old entertainment”, and Alan’s belief that knowing these people makes him the kind of celebrity everyone else can see he isn’t. Brent rather name drops characters like Basil Fawlty in terms of the comedy he employs to ‘entertain’ the workers in the office – indeed in ‘Merger’ he recreates the famous ‘funny walk’ scene from Fawlty Towers’ ‘The Germans’. He describes his influences as “Milligan, Cleese, Everett” adding “Sessions” to land the laugh. Brent and Gervais here, as they frequently will, unify as one in terms of the mindset Brent as a character he employs.

Every character Gervais plays in his work feels like an extension of facets of his own personality. Brent’s particularly is his obsession with comedy and entertainment. This places Brent as the natural evolution both of a deluded, failed entertainer like Alan Partridge and equally the kind of arrogant yet deeply insecure characters Gervais played before he created The Office. The difference is that Brent is not intentionally offensive or cruel. He never sets out to directly mock gay people or people of colour or disabled people, indeed his prejudice is often born out of desperately trying to prove, to camera, that he doesn’t hold these views.

The probability is that Brent does have a great deal of institutional prejudice as a white middle aged man who grew up in a world of developing, but not ingrained multiculturalism and gender evolution, but we never see Brent when he isn’t ‘performing’ for the camera. The aspects of his real personality always emerge in what he doesn’t say, or has to apologise for, or blunders into, but the only real moment of truth we see from Brent comes in two places. Firstly, in second series finale Interview, when he begs to keep his job when faced with redundancy, and finally the very last episode when he tells his ‘best mate’, Chris Finch, to “fuck off”.

Beyond that, he never directly allows the veil to slip.

The same can be said of the other key characters who form the basis of The Office and, indeed, the central narrative arc that Gervais & Merchant employ, because they regularly disguise the presence of continuing story development through what would appear the fairly static existence of Wernham Hogg.

We see it most acutely in the romance of Tim (Martin Freeman) & Dawn (Lucy Davis), he a bored sales rep who survives in a job he hates in no small part thanks to she, the office receptionist trapped in a relationship that doesn’t truly work. They epitomise the closeness yet distance of colleagues in a contained environment and as we never see them truly beyond the office a great deal, we are left to the small snippets of information Gervais & Merchant give us about their lives to ascertain how their dynamic seems to exist in an office-based vacuum. Would Tim & Dawn even work as a couple beyond an office environment where their sense of humour and easy going dynamic works completely, and where both are miserable when not around the other? The Office allows us to draw our own conclusions come the end.

Nevertheless, the series presents Tim & Dawn’s relationship as the audience’s emotional attachment to a series that, ostensibly, could appear quite alienating, filled with otherwise charmless or even deeply irritating and unlikeable characters. They rank among the great ‘ships’ in television history alongside iconic pairings such as Mulder & Scully in The X-Files, their unrequited love for each other expressed in everything they don’t say – longing looks, unfinished sentences, thoughts that say one thing and mean another. There is a rare magic to their chemistry on screen and what their dynamic actually expresses, and serves as one of the core driving truths of the show – that The Office is really about the need for companionship and validation from other human beings.

Trapped in their existential hell, a Sartre’s paradise, Tim & Dawn’s ebb and flow realisation that they care for each other as more than just work friends, even with all of the barriers that press upon them, Tim particularly, that it could never happen, is a deeply touching and emotive story to experience. Rarely in television do you root for two people more.

Their experience leans toward the combination of fantasy, comedy and tragedy that underpins the dual significant narrative arc of the series – the rise and fall of David Brent.

Gervais & Merchant might ostensibly be creating a Seinfeldian ‘show about nothing’, but The Office—much like Seinfeld—is anything but. ‘Downsize’ begins the series with an existential problem of its own – the impending reduction of the Slough branch as Wernham & Hogg downsizes, with Brent forced to prove the fiscal efficacy of his branch against their counterparts (unseen until the second season) in neighbouring Swindon. Brent fails to react to this challenge, singularly unaware of the import placed upon him – not just of what’s at stake, but in terms of the colleagues he claims to protect and nurture who are at risk of redundancy. Brent is more concerned with showboating before the camera – proving his progressiveness with women’s rights in ‘Work Experience’, chasing educated glory in ‘The Quiz’, attempting to validate his own thwarted career as a singer songwriter in ‘Training’, and on and on. Brent runs toward catastrophe—hiring new staff, undermining staff training—when he should be the vanguard against it.

As the realities of Swindon’s incorporation into Slough become apparent, Brent falls further from denial into outright fantasy. Unable to cope with the presence of Neil (Patrick Baladi), his Swindon equivalent turned direct superior, embodying everything he wants to be as a middle aged man—attractive, charming, competent and crucially funny to his staff—Brent becomes increasingly reliant on the projected image of himself not just as a fun boss who is more friend than manager, but of a budding stand up comedian and “chilled out entertainer”. He attempts a bit in ‘Merger’ that turns into a car crash; he segues into tortuous motivational speaking in ‘Motivation’, extolling meaningless cod-philosophy as if he’s fronting a gig; and in ‘Charity’ he does an impromptu dance for Comic Relief that ranks amongst the cringe-worthiest scenes in comedy history. Fantasy finally catches up to reality and the inevitable happens – he loses a safety and security in the workplace he took for granted.

Brent’s arc comes full circle from the opening scene of ‘Downsize’ as he hires a worker he is later forced to fire through to his own downfall, only one that could have been prevented had he focused on his actual job rather than the life, and career, he wishes he had.

The only character in The Office who might be truly comfortable in both their own skin and their dowdy, uninspired surroundings is Gareth (Mackenzie Crook), the epitome of office workplace geeky fastidiousness.

A lanky, humourless drone himself with delusions of grandeur, he evolves from Brent’s stooge in the first series to his logical replacement. Gervais & Merchant use Gareth, certainly at the beginning, as their vehicle for some of the less palatable jokes and comments in the series, presenting him as deeply ignorant and prejudiced, if not a complete idiot – the constant butt of Tim & Dawn’s jokes given his complete inability to laugh at himself or engage socially with his peers on an equal level. Yet the series softens toward him, the second presenting him more as a sad, somewhat perverted figure before the finale episodes establish him as the new boss perfectly in tune with his surroundings. Gareth will never have the misguided aspirations of Brent, or even the listless wish to escape of Tim. He fits perfectly the purgatorial office environment because he sees it entirely differently to everyone else. To Gareth, this is success.

From a modern gaze, the presentation of Gareth raises certain interesting questions about how The Office engages both with mental health and indeed additional needs. Gervais finds jokes in physically disabled people but the joke on Gareth, a man who is very likely boasting undiagnosed additional needs, is perhaps crueller. One could even argue Tim & Dawn are guilty of the kind of institutionalised bullying that Brent has allowed to foster and fester in how they taunt, trick, cajole and manipulate Gareth for their own sarcastic amusement.

Again, The Office plays with perceptions of intelligence; Tim & Dawn consider themselves equals with a similar sense of self-knowing, post-modern humour that Gareth will never understand as he makes literal everything he hears or is told – such as when one of the office girls asks him to put in an email his intentions to have anal sex casually. It’s a joke Gareth is unable to see. From a distance, this is both funny and not, perhaps because Gareth’s intentions are genuine, however creepy and mercenary they can sometimes be. He is as he presents and, on that basis, is perhaps the truest character in the show. Everyone else is playing their own character.

Which takes us back to the theatre of comedy and how, in the final two episodes, billed as a Christmas Special in 2003, The Office moves even deeper into meta-commentary about presentation and performance. The documentarian aspects baked into how the show looks, sounds and is written become a narrative device, as the office workers are revisited by the BBC after the original two series debuted on television. This innovates what The Office is trying to do on an even deeper level, as Brent actually does become the well-known entertainer he always dreamed of, just rather for the wrong reasons. He isn’t known to the assumed fairly limited documentary audience who watched The Office within the show’s continuity as the fun, chilled out boss he saw himself as, but rather the “boss from Hell”, which is appropriate given the purgatorial undercurrent of Wernham Hogg. Brent’s perception of himself is coloured by the perception given by the documentary, which he blames for subsequent poor treatment by the press and public, calling it a “stitch up”.

Here, The Office confirms itself entirely as a show that was all about perception and how entertainment is born from our misguided conception of how we exist to others. Everyone, in whatever workplace, plays a character, a version of themselves either more polite or more professional or even more charming or comical or working or middle class. We play a part around colleagues we don’t know like close friends or family because we seek to be perceived in a certain way, and this underscores everything we see in The Office, with the only difference being these people know they are being filmed. The unwritten contract with the unseen documentary crew is key because it changes behaviour. Brent plays up to it. Gareth tries to present himself as worldly wise. Tim becomes acutely aware of how his feelings toward Dawn are being presented to the public.

The show purports to portray a ‘slice of life’, and no doubt the producers would have told these characters to “be themselves”, but that isn’t what happens, particularly with Brent. He sees this as his opportunity for the limelight, stardom and crucially validation he has, to date, failed to achieve. The series would have been markedly different if there had been no documentary crew, if the characters had been unaware they were being filmed, and Gervais & Merchant had simply shot the series in that style.

Early on in making the show, they feared too often they were playing to traditional sitcom formats they were desperate to avoid, and included clearer practical gags as a result. In time, they learned that the nuance came from the space between interactions, and allowing the naturalism within the performance of these characters to come through. In the final two episodes, the dynamic changes as the documentary crew gain voices, gain a stake in the drama, and Brent, Tim, Dawn etc… have to deal with the aftermath of their presentation. Gervais & Merchant then build on these ideas, more directly interacting with the basis of comedy production, in Extras, but the grounding of it is here. Brent’s obsession with celebrity descends into a painful realisation of cruel truth – cheesy cash in pop songs that don’t sell, autographs for people who mistake him for someone else, and soul-sucking personal appearances in clubs filled with drunken revellers who just want him off stage.

Yet the tragedy of The Office refuses to be all pervading as in many of the other comedy examples cited here. Basil Fawlty will never escape that Torquay hotel. Del Boy will always lose whatever step up the ladder he achieves. Alan Partridge will eternally be hamstrung by his own crippling lack of awareness and fundamental talent. David Brent is one of the few tragic British comedy creations offered a way out of the office. He is given the opportunity to start again and find what he truly always wanted in the first place – to be loved by someone. Whether he takes it is left up to the audience to decide, in much the same way as whether Tim & Dawn will make it, and indeed sequel movie David Brent: Life on the Road suggests Brent will probably never quite give up on the dream of stardom, even if again Gervais offers him an olive branch.

The Office differs in that regard, perhaps reflecting a less nihilistic and punishing approach to comedy and tragedy. Cleese & Coogan revel in their characters’ misery but Gervais wants him to be ok, and we see this repeated in the sentimentality he brings to future, lesser projects such as Derek or After Life. Again, this suggests the strange intersection The Office inhabits between reality, comedy and metafiction.

Gervais is playing himself as well as David Brent in places. The show has a slight sense of autobiography, though not to the extent of Extras or later After Life in some respects. It positions itself as striking and original as a comedic piece while maintaining a level of reality and awareness that mimics the rise, around the same time, of incumbent ‘reality TV’ with Big Brother in 2000, outside of the already successful ‘fly on the wall’ documentary series that The Office takes a cue from. It hybridises these aspects into a series which takes a very specific approach to office work, and comedic presentation, rejecting many of the established tropes and forms of British comedy series, while ultimately being quite traditional in terms of story, narrative and character.

This is one major reason why The Office broke out into the mainstream, the final two episodes airing on BBC1 as opposed to BBC2 in a prime time Christmas slot, and spawning not just a hugely successful, long-running US remake but a litany of series which adapted and downright copied the show’s stylistics, often to lesser effect. The Office makes you laugh in the spaces most comedy series never even think to inhabit, and therein lies its unique genius.

To paraphrase David Brent, “you will never watch a sitcom like this again. Fact”.

Thanks for reading, please subscribe and remember… this is no laughing matter.

It was a thrill to join Rob Heath and Guy Walker to chat 1965’s The Intelligence Men, the first of three Morecambe & Wise big screen translations, all of which I’ll be doing on this terrific podcast. Britcom Goes to the Movies feels an essential show for anyone reading this blog and many of the films they have covered are going to be just up your alley. So please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and I really hope you enjoy Rob, Guy and I dissecting this film and this duo in detail.

Thanks for reading (and listening), please subscribe and remember… this is no laughing matter.

1978’s Halloween, from John Carpenter, popularised through Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode the theory of the ‘Final Girl’, as Michael Myers’ unstoppable, masked killer scythed his way through the youthful population of Haddonfield. Two years later, teenage campers at Crystal Lake in the American heartland were picked off in Friday the 13th (1980) by Mrs Voorhees and later, in the subsequent franchise, her son Jason Voorhees, victims themselves of the selfish whims of casually promiscuous teenagers. By 1981, the year Sullivan introduced the Trotter family to the British populous for the first time, both Halloween and Friday the 13th were about to debut sequels. A Nightmare on Elm St (1984) was just around the corner. The traumatised, male victim turned monster had arrived in American horror, and the 1980s saw an increased boom in American cultural transfers to British shores.

This surely accounts for an episode like ‘Friday the 14th’, which aired on BBC One on November 24th, 1983, an episode which directly references not just the Friday the 13th franchise—now four films strong following the release of The Final Chapter earlier that year—but the broader trend of the slasher movie generally. Sullivan uses the episode to place, as he often would, Del-Boy, Rodney and in this case Grandad (later Uncle Albert) in positions that would showcase them in out of their depth situations; indeed he would frequently across the run of the series play with cinematic tropes or spoof well known movies as a means of doing this. ‘Miami Twice’, set in Florida, riffs on The Godfather (1973). Numerous episodes reference popular films and play on them, such as ‘Fatal Extraction’, ‘From Prussia With Love’ or ‘May the Force Be With You’. Outside of Friday the 13th and this particular episode, however, there is one other horror film which consistently is utilised as a comical reference point in the series: The Omen (1976).

What becomes clear is that Only Fools and Horses contains a surprising underbelly of anxiety in regards to horror tropes, and what they might reflect about the key socio-political factors at the heart of one of Britain’s most beloved sitcoms.

In an era of streaming services asserting dominance over a legion of established television channels, it is easy to forget just how popular Only Fools and Horses was in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

‘Friday the 14th’ takes place in the third season, during the years in which Sullivan’s sitcom was finding its feet, before the death of co-star Lennard Pierce forces the Grandad of wheeler-dealing market trader Derek ‘Del-Boy’ Trotter and his feckless young brother Rodney to be written out in the fourth year, replaced by Buster Merryfield’s iconic Uncle Albert. The years beyond his introduction, as Only Fools dabbled increasingly—and rather unprecedentedly for a BBC sitcom—in longer-form, feature-length episodes (had it been made a decade earlier it would almost certainly have been given a lacklustre feature film adaptation), established the show as the most successful and adored British sitcom of all time, not to mention a staple for many years of Christmas Day viewing. The viewing figures for 1996’s (at the time) final episode ‘Time on Our Hands’ broke records then for a BBC broadcast at 26 million and have rarely been matched in the quarter of a century since.

In other words, Only Fools was a comedic juggernaut that, for many years, was an unstoppable force. Certainly by 1988, as the show evolved into a 50-minute, drama-length format for the last two standard series, it had outgrown its own comedic sub-genre. The aforementioned two-part ‘Miami Twice’ really is a blockbuster in sitcom terms; produced in the United States, shot on film, it was the apogee of the show’s even transatlantic reach. One Foot in the Algarve would never have been produced by the BBC without it.

Del-Boy, Rodney & Uncle Albert remain, to this day, on a par only with Basil Fawlty as the most immediately culturally recognisable comedy characters in British sitcom history. So, by that logic, what was John Sullivan doing writing both a pastiche of Friday the 13th and indeed broader horror tropes of the traditional, classical ghost story? Only Fools, a story about a fast-talking, ill-educated, working class wideboy trying to make his fortune, while carrying his educationally aspirational, middle-class seeking brother, surely has little connection to horror as a sub-genre?

‘Friday the 14th’ is interesting because it works to highlight the inherent venality of the Trotter family. While Del, Rodney & even their crafty Grandad, are at heart good people (and Only Fools would not shine away from outright sentimentality at points), they are crooked, opportunistic, and will happily run away from a situation if they feel the long arm of the law bearing down on them. In this case, what appears to be the offer of a nice country cottage, rent free, in Cornwall that the trio can escape to for a break comes with a caveat - Del has made a deal with his old friend Boycie, who owns the cottage, to illegally salmon poach in order to make money from and exploit the local area.

This makes the episode, to some extent, a cautionary tale. The Trotters are threatened by a dangerous external force for their hubris, for emerging from the moral vacuum of the crime-ridden, urban London landscape in order to remove natural resources from Mother Nature. Del placing a tub of writhing maggots on the dinner table as Rodney eats a curry with rice foreshadows this juxtaposition, suggesting horror before they even leave the homestead.

Upon arriving in Cornwall, episode director Ray Butt accentuates the foreboding. Thunder, lightning and heavy rain accompany the Trotters’ classic three-wheel van (memorably sporting their company slogan New York. Paris. Peckham) travelling dark and lonely country roads to reach their destination. They could be heading for the forestry remoteness of Camp Crystal Lake, and indeed they encounter a version of Friday the 13th Crazy Ralph in the jovial police officer who nonetheless works to fill in key exposition and provide these out of their depth outsiders with a warning: a man known as the ‘Axe Murderer’ has escaped an institute for the criminally insane on the Moors, so they should be extra vigilant while on their break. Rodney and Grandad, ever frightened and cautious, immediately encourage retreat but Del represents the bullish ignorance of the City boy - he has profit to make, so they press on. Financial reward comes before any warning of local legend, myth or external, unknowable force.

In this sense, Sullivan plays very clearly with tropes audiences are by now familiar with. Don’t go into the woods, don’t approach the crazy man, don’t stay alone in the big, remote house etc... all played out in literature and cinema for many decades. Only Fools here is explicitly cashing in on the transatlantic popularity of the slasher, and particularly Friday the 13th, at this time. Butt places a figure in the bushes watching the Trotters arrive at the cottage, heavily breathing and groaning in the rain with a calloused, old hand; this could be Jason in his hockey mask or Michael Myers about to stalk innocent teens.

The fact such a figure has escaped onto the Moors evokes the Gothic horror of The Hound of the Baskervilles or the work of Daphne du Maurier; an open, enigmatic space with a gloomy remoteness that could be hiding any number of spectres. In the case of Only Fools, it feels right that the menace is from exploitation horror as opposed to the classical literary sources of One Foot in the Grave.

There is, after all, an opportunistic cheapness to Del-Boy’s world (in which those around him all orbit). He becomes, especially as the series transforms him from unlicensed trader emerging from a ‘70s of working class hardship and economic downturn, into a wannabe ‘yuppie’ and product of aspirational, neoliberal Thatcherism, a tragic example of failed British meritocracy.

Del-Boy only gains his fortune, in the end, through dumb luck - a centuries old pocket watch that lands the Trotters millions of pounds. By ‘Time On Our Hands’, the Trotters have become as much extended family to the viewer as they are to each other, so their successes reads as cathartic, but it is a cheat. Sullivan’s message across the run of Only Fools is that Del-Boy is destined to always be a victim of Thatcherism and a Britain feeding class warfare and City prosperity, and even when Rodney graduates art college and even marries into the middle-class, his working class family origins, and tether to proxy father Del, frequently threaten the aspirational life he seeks to build for himself. We might love the Trotters but in the best tradition of comic British heroes, they are losers. They are victims.

While ‘Friday the 14th’ takes place a good while before many of these developments in the characters lives, by choosing to lampoon exploitative horror such as Friday the 13th, Sullivan makes the point that while the Trotters often are victims of their own innate naïveté, stupidity or ignorance, their cheap attempts to raise their status, make a quick buck and build an empire can quite literally place them under physical threat.

The teens slaughtered by Jason in the Friday the 13th series might be examples of sexual liberation run amok, of a countercultural horniness at the end of the ‘50s that results in an abrogation of duty to protect the innocent, but ‘Friday the 14th’ instead suggests the Axe Murderer could visit upon the Trotters punishment for their own economic drive, and the temerity they have to try and move beyond their station. This being a comedy of course, ‘Friday the 14th’ doesn’t end with Del & co chased across the Moors by a knife-wielding maniac, indeed the crazed killer—who poses as a policeman to break the Trotters’ sanctuary—ends up being exploited himself by Del to make money, but the point is clear.

In this instance, the killer represents an external force crashing into the Trotters lives, one of abject terror, that they could not possibly have foreseen but who represents a challenge to their own hubris. There is even an attempt to explore the psychology of the murderer, who Grandad attempts to quantify in cinematic tropes he understands, when asked what a ‘psycho’ is. “It’s a bloke what dresses up in his mother’s clothes” which of course directly references Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and gets a big laugh from a savvy studio audience. The killer does turn out to be a victim of his parents, oddly enough, just in a different way. Del manages to exploit him after he admits many of his issues stem from wanting to be a ‘loser’, as a stern and violent father was obsessed with making him a winner.

Del, as it turns out, comes from opposite stock - his father, who abandoned he and Rodney as children (though Rodney’s biological father turns out to be a different man, and that’s a whole other story) is a parasite who didn’t care enough about his children to make them anything after the premature death at a young age of their sainted mother Joan. Don’t all psychotic killers’ rage stem from parental actions or failures? Jason, Michael, Freddy Krueger, the Axe Murderer here - the list goes on.

What is interesting about Only Fools is just how powerfully the spectre of parenthood plays on the Trotter family across the series. Though she was clearly a troubled woman with mental health and abandonment issues, Del venerates their late mother, a woman he knew and Rodney never did, and spits venom at their father. This also perhaps explains one of Only Fools’ finest long-running, latter day jokes which taps into audience recognition of The Omen, Richard Donner’s 1976 chiller: Rodney’s growing conviction that Del and his partner Raquel’s unborn child is the Antichrist, accompanied by the sonorous, recognisable ‘Ave Satani’ by Jerry Goldsmith from that movie over Rodney’s growing expression of terror.

It stems from a joke in the seventh series episode ‘Three Men, a Woman and a Baby’, in which Del and the heavily pregnant Raquel are thinking of boy’s names, and Rodney sarcastically quips “why don’t you just call him Damien?”, only for it to stick, much to his horror. Once Del later confirms they’ve had a boy, the music chimes in as Rodney’s unnatural fears come true. In the next episode, ‘The American Dream’, Rodney hears the music as Damien is being christened in church, sinking into his own terrified reverie.

As Damien grows into a toddler and a young boy, Rodney sees instances of naughty or cheeky behaviour which Del laughs off but Rodney sees as evidence that he’s pure evil. The beginning of ‘Heroes and Villains’, the first episode of Only Fools’ intended final episodes in 1996, even features a protracted, dystopian sci-fi inspired dream sequence of a future in which a devilish older Damien (played by character actor Douglas Hodge), rules the entire world with Rodney and his wife Cassandra reduced to the role of supplicants and servants. The question is why Rodney jumps to this conclusion about Del’s child. What fills him with such existential horror?

For me, the answer returns to the key issue of family trauma which ripples across Only Fools, and is grounded inside the horror inspirations the series draws from in these examples.

Rodney was essentially raised by Del after Joan died when he was very young, but Del never pretends to be, or often acts like, a father figure. He frequently bemoans Rodney’s lack of gratitude at the sacrifices he made to bring him up and look after him, Del often throwing in his face during times of conflict that if not for Rodney he’d be a high flyer in the City (a fantasy he needs to believe but would never have been true), and Rodney—equally as high-tempered and indeed cunning in his own way as his brother—frequently fires back in a way no father-son relationship would allow.

When Rodney discovers in the final episode ‘Sleepless in Peckham’, that his true father wasn’t wastrel Reg Trotter but rather legendary high society criminal Freddie ‘the Frog’, making him only Del’s half brother biologically, their bond as brothers is nevertheless reaffirmed but Rodney’s constant sense of a life without a true parental figure haunts him. Del, meanwhile, canonised Joan to such a degree that in ‘Sickness and Wealth’, amidst a seance above favourite haunt The Nags Head, a message from her from beyond in fact orchestrated by Uncle Albert through his paramour, spiritualist medium Elsie Partridge, is what it takes for him to go and see a doctor about crippling stomach pains likely caused through stress at unpaid debts.

Rodney therefore, in his own way, is a product of parental trauma, and this anxiety extends to his imagination of Del’s child being some kind of turbo-charged, post-Thatcherism representation of his brother’s tactless excess. While the musical and visual iconography of The Omen is utilised here to successful comic effect, Rodney does not fear Damien will be a literal Antichrist spelling the End of Days, but that he might represent the more repellent and self-destructive aspects of his father. Rodney’s own unresolved issues about being the product of a highly dysfunctional family.

Jason, Michael, Freddy - they all went on to become the archetypal boogeyman, the representation of American fear of children or teenage innocence being violated, and the post-war nuclear family contract being ripped apart. Rodney fears that Damien could, if unchecked, represent the product of ‘80s Britain: an unregulated, immoral sense of personal prosperity at the expense of those around him. What Del could have been had he not a conscience, a sense of underlying morality behind his cowardice and hucksterism, and a family to care for and ground him. Rodney’s fear is that the victim could become the monster.

Only Fools and Horses had a coda many considered unwise, returning for three feature-length specials over successive Christmases between 2001-2003, in which John Sullivan removed the multi-millionaire lifestyle and grounded the Trotters back, largely penniless, in their flat within Nelson Mandela House. At the time, it felt unfair. We had wanted Del & Rodney to succeed, to find personal happiness, but in retrospect Sullivan perhaps understood that money was never the point. Del always believed being rich was the aim of the game when, in fact, Raquel & Damien were what made him happiest.

The final episode of the series might not have directly been written as a finale, the door open for a return that following Sullivan’s death in 2011 is unlikely ever to happen, but it works in some sense better than ‘Time on Our Hands’ precisely because it allows Rodney the closure on the family issues that have haunted him, and to a degree Del, since his childhood. As he becomes a father himself, after losing a child previously thanks to Cassandra suffering a miscarriage, he is able to let go of the past in understanding his true parentage, and why he was so different in aspiration and personality so often to Del, and he can move forward. They might be poor again, but they are victims no longer.

For me, I’d call that ending, to quote Del-Boy himself, luvvly jubbly.

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Writer and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge had to be talked into developing a follow up to her nihilistic dark comedy from 2016, in which she played the titular, unnamed ‘Fleabag’; a grief-stricken early thirty-something in modern London using sex as coping mechanism for her guilt and attachment issues. While it sounds intense on that description, Fleabag was anything but. Fleabag was beautiful, insightful, sad, moving, melancholic and laugh out loud funny, often in the most mordant and inappropriate way.

What qualifies it as a masterpiece? That’s the question. What makes it, potentially, as important a piece of comedy and drama to deserve a place among the recognised greats.

Firstly, there is almost no direct criteria for such labelling. Particularly with comedy, given how subjective the form is and how people respond to it in a variety of different ways. Hence why the term ‘masterpiece’ is difficult to quantify in any artistic art form. In the world of art, people point to Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Michaelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, which lies at the heart of the ceiling fresco in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. In cinema, masterpieces refer to work such as Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1944) or Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1973).

The world of literature would no doubt single out the plays of William Shakespeare or the novels of Charles Dickens or Jane Austen. Masterpieces are in part a decision made by the collective consciousness; as receptors of art, in whatever form, we judge based on skill, merit, the quality of the artist, and indeed what the art says to us and how it can be read to judge whether what we’re experiencing is the pinnacle of achievement in that field. We have decided the Mona Lisa is a masterpiece and it will forever remain so.

TV comedy has its own fair share of work people would consider worth of labelling as a masterpiece, as does TV drama. Take The Sopranos or Breaking Bad or The Wire for the latter, certainly over the last two decades. These are works audiences repeatedly return to and find either to enrapture or move them creatively, in terms of narrative or characterisation, or have a layered construction from what they can take different things on subsequent rewatches.

Breaking Bad, for example, is not just a poised, darkly comic in places drama about the rise of a drug kingpin, it is also an often bleak and powerful deconstruction of American masculinity, and the role of white collar American men in a world with changing gender and societal roles. At the same time it can be read as the origin story of a comic-book super villain. There are multiple angles with which to examine the journey of Walter White from, as creator Vince Gilligan puts it, “Mr Chips to Scarface”.

This is just one example of how a masterpiece is labelled and subsequently the power of the public consciousness carries it forward with such a title. Do people really question the merit of a masterpiece years later? Even if changing trends or societal movements render that same piece of work outdated?

Leighton Jones suggests you know when you’ve encountered a work that should be defined as a masterpiece because it stays with you for the rest of your life:

A Masterpiece is the work of an artist who has been absorbed by the spirit of his/her times and can transform a personal experience into a universal one. Masterpieces make us forget the artists, and instead direct our attention to the artists works. We may wonder how a particular work was executed, but for the time being we are transposed, so deeply brought into this creation that our consciousness is actually expanded.

Many would argue that Fleabag has provided such an experience, particularly in its second and final season.

Reviews were astronomically good. People described what Waller-Bridge created as “electrifying and devastating”. There is something quite transformative and unique about Fleabag. It is why anyone should be hesitant to label it either a drama or comedy or even tragedy. It ebbs and flows between all of these states with a deft brilliance that suggests Waller-Bridge, in her quite phenomenally well written scripts, has tapped into something powerful and almost indefinable. You are left wondering quite how she managed to write something so human, so heartbreaking, so desperately sad and funny, and so riven with subtext, that a hundred writers in a hundred rooms could never put together in a hundred years.

You need time, however, to truly judge a masterpiece for what it is. We rush to judgments about the greatness of art as quickly as we rush to denigrate, especially in this day and age. Temperance is an increasingly lost mode of thinking and most of us are guilty of it. Fleabag is already being described in such hallowed terms by fans and critics alike, which inevitably will give some people pause and lead to questions about whether it was really that good. There will come, to some degree, if not a backlash but a resistance from people who prefer to buck the established trend of what is accepted and embraced by the masses. Fleabag, however, is almost impossible to discount as something truly special; a piece of work that could well define its era in the way other comedies or dramas have marked theirs.

Have they all endured as masterpieces, though?

Fawlty Towers was just voted, once again, as the greatest British sitcom of all time. It has been routinely cited as an example of a comedic masterpiece over the last forty years; twelve half hour episodes (just like Fleabag) of perfect British farce, riven with subtextual commentary about dying marriages, heightened sexual repression, class warfare and the death of Empire. It is hard to look back at Fawlty Towers and not see greatness, because so much of it remains incredibly funny and incisive, with characters that transcend stereotypes, but at the same time it has dated.

Andrew Sachs’ Manuel is undoubtedly a quasi-xenophobic caricature, the bumbling Spanish fool consistently used as psychological and literal punching bag by the faux-upper class British liege lord that is Basil Fawlty. ‘The Germans’ may sympathetically paint a rare black doctor in Torquay as the sane, rational carer, but it gives way to the most blatant anti-German, post-war stereotypes and mines them for comedy, even if they’re designed to make Basil look like the fool.

Second placed on that list was Father Ted, the Irish sitcom from the mid-90’s about a crooked priest on a tiny coastal island filled with weirdos and eccentrics, desperately trying to escape the dysfunctional and strange parochial ‘family’ he ends up stuck with. Again, Father Ted on the whole has aged well, as indeed have many of the jokes (arguably its co-creator Graham Linehan has fared much worse when it comes to ageing gracefully…), but it undoubtedly cleaves to plenty of traditional Irish stereotypes; the toothless simpleton, the aggressive drunk, the devout old Catholic spinster etc… and it encourages the audience to revel in those easy comedic targets. Father Ted’s hyper-real eccentricity and the fact Ted’s amorality is frequently the butt of the joke, much like Basil’s stuff repression makes him the real target, allows the show to get away with it.

It’s quite telling that the third comedy on that Radio Times list is I’m Alan Partridge, another series which balances eccentricity and farce with a flawed, amoral, often quite tragic central character whose lack of awareness is the core of the joke. I discussed the character of Alan Partridge recently in a broader context in terms of his durability as a comic creation, and how he has evolved beyond the fixed entity he could have been, but arguably there is a detachment to these comedies widely regarded as masterpieces.

You’re not encouraged to truly care about these characters as people. Father Ted has a warmth the other two series lack, as Ted often finds it difficult to truly leave hapless stooge Dougal or drunken ward Jack to their own devices, but this is driven as much by his own failing as a rounded human being as any desire to truly, altruistically care about another person. The same can be said for The Office (more on which soon on this blog), which crafted the now iconic comedy creation of David Brent; yet another in the established British comedy lexicon of tragic male failures. The Office gave way to deeper sentimentality thanks to Brent’s semblance of a character arc exposing his own deep sadness and insecurity at the heart of the comedy aimed at him.

Perhaps Fleabag is being hallowed in the same terms, and in some senses exceeding them, because it is one of the first comedy series that deconstructs a flawed failure of a woman in a similar manner to the established comedy shows widely voted as the best and in some cases considered as masterpieces.

There is Fleabag DNA is plenty of these antecedents, even if they exist in entirely different times, worlds and contexts. Fleabag certainly exists on the fringes of an elitist London; she may be a cafe shop owner but she hails from a distinctly middle class London family with visible wealth, with Olivia Colman’s (wicked) soon to be stepmother living a charmed, bohemian life as a painter, while her sister Claire (played with unheralded brilliance by Sian Clifford) works in big City business. There are class concerns flickering at the edges of Fleabag, even if they’re not as acute as in Fawlty Towers. Equally there are aspects of farce in places, or moments of eccentricity.

Fleabag is not by any means documentarian in its approach but The Office certainly tapped into a millennial malaise with white collar workers about their place in the rampaging capitalist system they had become drones inside, and Fleabag has a similar nihilistic sense of the lead character’s complete insignificance under the weight of a fast-paced, uncaring world, specifically the London she inhabits. If there is one comedy that Fleabagreally has its roots in, however, it is without a doubt Peep Show.

There is a strong argument that Peep Show (which also co-starred the ever ascendant Olivia Colman) lingered a few seasons too many by the time it ended with Season 8 in 2014, and while it is often talked about with great reverence, it was perhaps too edgy and on the fringe of mainstream applause to be ranked as a masterpiece in the same manner several of the aforementioned shows have been. Peep Show also broke the trend of being a great comedy with few episodes – Fawlty Towers only had 12, as did I’m Alan Partridge; The Office had 14 while Father Ted had 25. Peep Show ended after 54 episodes across an entire decade, making the careers of stars David Mitchell & Robert Webb and sticking to the same established formula.

Peep Show was the first comedy to get, literally, into the main character’s heads, with their internal monologue providing the deeper thoughts behind what they would say in public, allowing for a river of dark, honest comedy. Equally, the show was filmed entirely in character first person, meaning the only time we saw them was from the perspective of each other. It was a show entirely from the skewed viewpoint of two hapless, thirty-something flatmates struggling with love and sex, crippled by their own existential and weird neuroses.

Sound familiar? Fleabag evolves the Peep Show concept by having the main character make us the silent partner; her glances at the camera or her quick asides to address us, breaking the established ‘fourth wall’ between audience and character, makes us complicit in Fleabag’s adventures.

Yet at the same time, we never know her as well as we know Mark or Jeremy from Peep Show, given we experienced their complete thought process. They couldn’t hide anything from us. Fleabag often does, especially across the first season in how she deals with the truth about why her best friend Boo took her own life. Fleabag withholds that information from us until the last possible moment, giving us just flashes of the deeper context, primarily because she can’t look herself in the eye about it. We are, in that sense, her own eye. We’re a reflection of her, or maybe her conscience, her inner ‘id’. There are many ways to interpret quite what Fleabag’s fourth wall breaking device actually does mean, and therein lies the brilliance at the heart of Waller-Bridge’s writing. She leaves a great deal open to interpretation, right down to the series’ heart wrenching final scene.

Does this make the show a masterpiece? What makes Fawlty Towers a masterpiece? The Office is considered a masterpiece by some but many can’t even watch it, or do not in any way track with the comedy or what it’s trying to say. The same can be said of Father Ted or I’m Alan Partridge. They are all subjective experiences which audiences approach from a variety of different backgrounds and states and ways of receiving what is considered funny or affecting. Fawlty Towers has no conclusive ending, with the repeating structure of John Cleese & Connie Booth’s scripts essentially leaving Basil trapped in an eternal loop of furious repression.

Father Ted ends with the character remaining trapped, even if by choice, doomed never to escape his provincial exile; The Office ends with hope for David Brent and, in many respects, a happier ending that anyone may have credited; while I’m Alan Partridge remains simply part of a chapter in life of an enduring balance of fixed entity and ageing dinosaur. Fleabag ends. There is both ambiguity and there is not. You feel the pain of a journey which was transformative for us and for the character. She is not the same woman she was at the beginning of the series, even if she doesn’t get the ending the audience want for her. Such is life, you can almost hear Waller-Bridge whisper to the audience over her writing software to us as an aside.

It is, therefore, too early to truly claim Fleabag as a masterpiece. It needs time. We need time. It can be confidently predicted, however, that Fleabagwill never be forgotten. It will be recommended, become one of those shows you say to your friend or work colleague or cousin “oh you have to watch…”. It will be studied and analysed, poked and prodded. It will also be remembered by those fortunate enough to experience it at its apogee as a very special show that chimed with the world around it, with an insightfulness about love, about hope, about loss and about religious devotion, that most writers could only accomplish in a great novel.

“This is it” remarked Sian Clifford in an interview. The show is complete. Maybe that’s why Fleabag is a masterpiece. Maybe in some way it completes us.

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It was a film I’m pretty sure I caught around the late 1990s, largely due to my lifelong adoration of Rik Mayall as a comedian. One day I will look at Bottom (har har) in detail, because that is a fascinating and genuinely adept piece of comedy writing and performance, and I’ve covered The Young Ones with Rob Turnbull on the You Have Been Watching podcast in some detail, but beyond those Mayall was both an alternative and mainstream British comedy great. Yet he didn’t get many opportunities like Atkinson had with Bean to break out as a movie star, the only significant one of the 1990s being the patchy Drop Dead Fred from 1991, where he did some sub-Jim Carrey gurning opposite Phoebe Cates.

Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis, then, was a film I was keen to take a proper look at and study. The perfect vehicle was my podcast At the Movies in the 90s, where my co-host Mark McManus and I challenged each other to find an obscure movie pick to introduce us each to. He went for the Mark Dacascos action thriller Drive. My mind immediately leapt to this Mayall outing. Ultimately, Mark suffered more than I (Drive was a fair bit of fun). Neither of us on that episode could argue that Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis is or was a good film. It is obscure for a very good reason. What it has in spades, however, is potential.

Mayall shares top billing here principally with Jane Horrocks, herself a British comedy legend thanks to work such as Absolutely Fabulous (where she plays the delightfully batty PA Bubble) and she achieved a level of film stardom that eluded Mayall subsequently thanks to the lead role in the acclaimed Little Voice. That said, Horrocks is powerfully miscast here as Marla Dorland, a globally successful musical star (in the vein of, uh… pass - it was really hard to find an analogue for her anodyne music) managed by Mayall’s typically venal, crafty agent Marty Starr, who considers himself responsible for her rise to fame.

See, as flashbacks show, Dorland came to him in the early 1980s as a struggling working-class northern woman called Mavis Davis (hence the fun title), and he reinvented her as the cool, rather cold Dorland who, fed up of Marty’s mismanagement, plans to leave him, aware her career is steadily in free fall. Marty has plenty of other problems - alimony owed to his slightly unhinged ex-wife, a failing business where he works with his PA (played by the ever superb Mark Heap) in a largely furniture-less office building, plus he’s in hock for a loan with an actual gangster in Mr. Rathbone, played with quiet, regal menace by Danny Aiello.

At which point, a eureka moment. If Marla Dorland suddenly dies, he can make a killing selling her legacy product without losing his access to her success, so Marty contrives to have her bumped off as means of solving all of his problems. Alas, in the great tradition of comedy, these best laid plans consistently go awry. It wouldn't be much of a comedy if it didn’t, though truth be told, it isn’t much of a comedy anyway. The hit rate of laughs despite overtly being a slapstick comedy crime thriller, with a sprinkling of the gangster film, is extremely low. The biggest chuckle came from Mayall’s delivery of the line to his PA, “tell him to fuck off!”,. before finding out it was Elton John on the other end.

You could argue, at a stretch, that Mavis Davis satirises celebrity culture, particularly the dehumanisation of film or pop stars into becoming brands or sheer audience commodities. One of the funnier moments is whenever someone close to her is killed in the wake of Marty’s attempts to take out Marla, they launch a new tour designed to capitalise on her press from the tragedy. That’s a good running joke and cuts to the underlying theme, the cynicism of celebrity and the power of profit over people. Subsequent pictures such as Death to Smoochy (2002) or even Birdman (2014) have explored similar ideas, perhaps particularly in the latter in an age where celebrity branding is ever more acute. Was Mavis Davis a little ahead of its time on this? Possibly.

The principal reason Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis doesn’t work, for me, lies in the fact that it never truly leans into the potential of the comic idea in play, or the genuinely talented performers involved. The title is a deliberate play on the Sam Peckinpah Neo-Western picture Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia from 1974, a brutal, bloody razor edged film, which Mavis Davis certainly is not. The similarities end at the borrowed title, which does at least suggest the comic dichotomy of a story loaded with melodramatic thrills and a name which evokes dull, provincial British small town life. The title might be the funniest thing about the film, indeed.

Its biggest crime is failing to utilise Mayall well enough. While Horrocks is miscast, Mayall is perfect for a role like Marty Starr - snivelling, self-aggrandising, with the potential to be an utter b’stard (to evoke Mayall’s successful show The New Statesman from the 1980s). John Henderson’s film never goes far enough with him in this regard, the script and story either edging toward a degree of sympathy for him or even by the end having a stab at, bizarrely, some kind of happy ending. Mayall’s ability to play an utter comic scumbag should have been dialled up to the max, especially given his plot concerns murder.

Said plot ambles rather than thrusts, flirting with set pieces that could work (such as Marty’s bungled, ballaclava-clad burglary of Marla’s apartment), but largely wastes those around Mayall. Bringing in Danny Aiello, late of numerous Hollywood blockbusters or celebrated films (he memorably pops up in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America for example), was clearly designed with one eye on the American market, but his turn as British-based American gangster Rathbone (created in the Corleone mould) goes little beyond some quietly threatening noises Mayall’s way. Again, comic potential squandered.

You’ll be hard pressed to find Mavis Davis now unless you watch a copy on YouTube. Never released on Blu-Ray in the UK, I found it in a charity shop on one of those randomised DVD releases with three other barely known films. Don’t expect a Criterion release of this one any time soon! There is very little to salvage unless you’re a Rik Mayall or 90s British comedy movie completist (both of which I’d say I am), which is a shame given the buckets of promise Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis had. Obscurity, I fear, is where it is destined to remain.

Thanks for reading, please subscribe and remember… this is no laughing matter.

PS: do check out my podcast episode of At the Movies in the 90s where Mark McManus and I cover it in detail. Thanks for listening if you do.

The first two series of Simon Nye’s show had the concept but it lacked in terms of execution. Martin Clunes stood out immediately as Gary Strang, a hapless, middle-class thirty-something determined to prove his own sexual vitality and fight against a perfectly ordinary relationship with an ordinary woman. His pairing with Harry Enfield as Dermot Povey in Series 1 never quite worked, with Dermot’s passivity in the face of ‘lad culture’ immediately exposed an underwhelming in Series 2 by the arrival of his replacement, Neil Morrissey’s Tony Smart. Though arguably Nye doesn’t fully figure out how Tony works until well into Series 3, his dynamic with Clunes was far more natural, as was it with the shows female co-stars Caroline Quentin and Leslie Ash.

Come the third and particularly the fourth series, their natural dynamic steadily becomes edgier, naughtier, more raucous and more specifically about the growing aspects of ‘laddism’ that were being popularised in mid-90’s culture; dirty lads magazines, drunk nights in the pub, looser attitudes toward fidelity and a determination to prove the masculine sense of virility in sexual conquests with women. Men Behaving Badly, on moving from a pre-watershed ITV slot to post-watershed airing space on the BBC, steadily across both of these series embraces the promise of its title. Tony grows more desperate, Gary more lascivious, and both become more boorish and prone to embrace the physically grotesque.

What happens as a result? Men Behaving Badly becomes steadily funnier, more acute in its social and moral commentary, and arguably in Series 4 reaches its creative apex.

The show, retrospectively, never feels right on ITV. It looks constrained. While it would remain a multi-camera, laughter-track sitcom at the BBC with limited sets and purposely controlled staging, Series 3 immediately benefits from an extra six or seven minutes running time (sans adverts), while series director Martin Dennis—who helmed the entire six series plus special episodes, a far more common production factor in British as opposed to American comedy—is afforded what appears to be a slightly improved budget to be a little more inventive and varied in his direction. ‘Lovers’, Nye’s first script for the now-BBC series, opens with a discussion of sexual threesomes – a topic the pre-watershed ITV incarnation would likely never have touched. The stall is immediately set out.

Nevertheless, the transition between networks certainly led to frustration for veteran series producer Beryl Vertue:

We did two series for Thames TV, then ITV took over and said if any episode got 10m viewers, the show would stay on air. We got 7m, which people would kill for today – and ITV pulled the plug. I felt so cross that I went to the BBC, who took it, and it became a huge hit and definitely got more than 10 million viewers. Back then, people seemed to have allegiances to one channel – they were either an ITV viewer or a BBC viewer. A lot of people didn’t know Men Behaving Badly existed before it moved to BBC. The format didn’t change, but it was put on post-watershed. Plus they aired it after Absolutely Fabulous, so viewers stumbled across it.

There are some interesting factors to unpack here in terms of why Men Behaving Badly, across its third series, became the cult success that has lingered in the cultural memory over the last two decades.

ITV’s demands for high viewer ratings suggest they didn’t feel Men Behaving Badly was working and were looking for reasons to cancel the series in 1992. It’s interesting how the idea of the ‘new lad’ was born in 1993, the year between the transition from ITV and the BBC, via ‘lads magazines’ such as Loaded, which began propagating the idea of a rejection against the model of the ‘New Man’ in line with growing feminist attitudes. Had Nye’s series aired a year or even two later on ITV, would they have been more inclined to believe the show would be a hit? That it was tapping into a cultural zeitgeist? Would they have made the changes, such as giving the series a later time-slot and allowing Nye to explore racier material, that arguably led to the series’ eventual higher rating figures and cult status?

This is impossible to really know. ITV had a reputation for family friendly sitcoms over the preceding couple of decades which they perhaps felt keen to continue into the 1990’s. The year before Men Behaving Badly’s debut had seen the end after a decade of Never the Twain, with Donald Sinden & Windsor Davies as bickering antique dealers; Fresh Fields and later French Fields was a cosy, provincial sitcom with Julia McKenzie and Anton Rodgers as a middle-aged suburban couple; Duty Free in the mid-80’s was a romantic comedy with Gwen Taylor and Keith Barron and a Spanish setting, or The Upper Hand with Joe McGann as the working class housekeeper who falls in love with Diana Weston’s wealthy divorcee with kids.

All of these shows were hits, and many of them were actually perfectly good at what they did—indeed a personal favourite of mine was After Henry, with Prunella Scales as a widow dealing with her viperish old mother played by the great Jean Sanderson—but they couldn’t be more tonally distant from Men Behaving Badly if they tried – the biggest hit around the time of the series was Rowan Atkinson prat-falling as the weird (possibly alien) Mr Bean. ITV just wasn’t ready for what Nye was trying to deconstruct at this point, even if it would later attempt to capitalise on Men Behaving Badly’s subsequent success in shows such as short-lived late 90’s Samantha Janus vehicle Babes in the Wood, or early 00’s Davina McCall starring Sam’s Game (which lasted only six episodes and has faded from memory) and later in the late 2000’s the still-successful Benidorm. None would have the cultural impact or cult reach, or indeed the edge, of Men Behaving Badly.

Though it sounds strange, the BBC seemed to by this point have a better handle on utilising comedy to explore the pre-supposed decaying moral and social standards which allowed Men Behaving Badly to be embraced.

As Vertue explains above, the BBC aired the show in the tail wake of Absolutely Fabulous, written by and starring Jennifer Saunders who, alongside Joanna Lumley, were already playing middle to upper class, sex-mad alcoholics whose show could easily have been named ‘Women Behaving Badly’. Saunders’ husband at the same time was co-writing and co-starring in Bottom, with Rik Mayall, which takes the laddish, boorish, sex-mad content to a level of hyper-real, comic-book proportions of desperation and ultra-violence. As members of the anarchic, alternative comedy Comic Strip scene of the early 1980’s, these comic voices among numerous on the BBC—including the panellists of sports-focused comedy game show They Think It’s All Over—very much indulged in ‘new lad’ culture before and during Men Behaving Badly’s tenure as one of British TV’s most popular comedy series.

The key to this proliferation of ‘lads’ culture on the BBC, on TV, in books and cinema through the work of writers indeed such as Nick Hornby or Irvine Welsh (Fever Pitch would arrive in 1992, with Trainspotting in 1996), plus the lexicon of ‘lads mags’ such as the aforementioned Loaded or Maxim or FHM, often featuring topics about football, booze, cars, video games, men’s clothes or fragrances, and of course a surfeit of models in a state of undress, is that it was all supposed to be ‘ironic’; an intentional inversion of the ‘New Man’ progressive model with more consideration and respect for women, feminist attitudes and women’s rights. Gary and Tony, or Richie and Eddie on Bottom (as indeed Eddie & Patsy on Ab Fab, despite being women), were all either hapless, losers in life and/or sex, or rampaging, self-destructive alcoholics.

Kira Cochrane argues that such irony ended up providing a space for the very culture it was attempting to lampoon:

The worst crime of lad culture as a whole was that it took old-fashioned sexism (chauvinism), served it up in exactly the same format – endless pictures of scantily clad women, for instance, beside captions about how “up for it” they were – and slapped the label “irony” on it. Once it had been established that this culture was ironic, if a woman dared to use the word “sexist” it simply proved that she had no sense of humour, that she was out of touch. Any young woman who felt that there might be something a bit offensive about blokes talking loudly about ogling women’s “tits”, who might have wondered why the men around her – often middle-class men – were acting out some sort of tired cartoon of male dominance, was simply derided as po-faced. Lad culture was, as one journalist put it, a “blokelash”, a reaction to the gains of feminism which, although it was based on the idea of having big cojones, didn’t even have the balls to be open and honest about what it was doing. This was the old-style sexism dressed up as the new-style irony.

Men Behaving Badly arguably was just as responsible for playing up to these stereotypes for comic effect. In one episode, Gary even starts taking life tips from a magazine simply called ‘Bloke’ – a streamlined approximation of that culture in one form.

The result is that Men Behaving Badly finally begins to sink into a rhythm with many of its characters across Series 3 and 4, and understands the gallery it is playing to. Nye’s content becomes increasingly rude and pushes the boundaries of what television comedy had previously aired. Series 3 admittedly operates in a strange space between the old and new incarnations of the show, flitting between fairly tame episodes which could have ended up more raucous – ‘Bed’, for example, set in the middle of a stormy night where the characters all end up awake for various reasons – and episodes which tap into some of the spikier rudeness Series 4 would exhibit. ‘Marriage’ ends with an ultra-scabrous Gary calling Dorothy a ‘mingebag’ as he attempts to put her off agreeing to marry him. That would never have aired during the ITV days.

Yet this becomes par for the course in Series 4, which stands as without a doubt the filthiest series of Men Behaving Badly and, at the same time, the funniest.

Across Series 3, several character aspects changed as Nye’s writing evolved and his depictions of the main ensemble shifted slightly. Gary became less obviously a rival with Tony for the affections of Deborah and concentrated more on trying to find some equilibrium in his relationship with Dorothy (‘Weekend’ has them going on what he plans as a ‘dirty weekend’ to indulge in sexual fantasies that doesn’t quite work out as he hoped) – though episodes such as ‘Cleaning Lady’ prove Gary hasn’t yet quite given up on the idea he might somehow be able to charm a sexier, younger woman into bed. At the same time, Tony becomes increasingly obsessed with Deborah and Nye allows his innate weirdness, perviness and eccentricity to steadily emerge; plus he begins to morph increasingly from small time record stall owner to full blown, jobless layabout.

The obsession with Deborah feels less organic across Series 3, mainly because Deborah continues to be more of a plot cypher than a believable character in her own right. She begins the series listless, considering a new life travelling around Asia, to which Tony’s reply is “You can’t. We haven’t slept together yet!”. It becomes more of a mechanism to give Deborah by the end of ‘Casualties ‘ a new boyfriend, slimy estate agent Ray (again, Deborah only seems to go for sleazy or smarmy men who don’t quite fit the ‘New Man’ template in the way they don’t fit the ‘New Lad’ – they exist in some kind of nether space). Ultimately, there is a constant sense of inevitability about the Tony and Deborah relationships, and this slowly begins to appear at points more in Series 4 – such as ‘Drunk’, in which Deborah admits she probably will one day “just drop everything and sleep with him”. It’s less a question of if Debs will sleep with Tony by the end of Series 4 and rather simply when.

It’s why Men Behaving Badly eventually keeps the Tony and Deborah obsession going slightly too long, because it moves past the point either logically Tony would move on and find someone else, or Deborah would admit she has always been attracted to him and while he acts like an idiot most of time, what she ultimately wants is the same thing Dorothy wants, and why she still ends up with Gary – a hybrid version of the New Man and New Lad. Dorothy too, edging into Series 4, has her head turned in Infidelity by Jamie, a hospital radiographer (prompting Gary’s response: “Well I’ve never heard of him, what radio station’s he on?”), but much like Ray he fits that milquetoast model of man who only seems to function as a counterpoint to Gary and Tony’s pointed laddism. Even though Jamie dumps her, Dorothy seems to realise she never should have abandoned Gary in the first place and both she and Deborah, despite their near constant exasperation, clearly find Gary and Tony more fun to be around than the dull men they date.

In real terms this is a problem that simplifies Men Behaving Badly, perhaps necessarily in order to facilitate the plot. Nye never really seems to bring characters into the orbit of our main foursome who truly feel real; you have recurring regulars who serve a function – Gary’s work colleague George is a depiction of the doddering specimen many become at the end of years of domesticity, while Anthea is so comically chaste she is even more of a caricature (Ian Lindsay gets far more opportunities to flesh George out a bit than Valerie Minifie does for Anthea); pub landlord Les is purely an incarnation of sloth – a man so fat and stupid it’s almost impossible to believe he could run a business even as old-fashioned and provincial as The Crown (maybe this is partly why Nye dumps the character in Series 5, we being told he was sacked because he forgot to open at lunchtimes!).

Guest characters rarely fare any better. ‘Three Girlfriends’ introduces, well… three girlfriends of Tony’s who are so bland and inoffensive its a wonder they even register (one is a squeaking good time girl, the other a serious tomboy, the third a smiley animal rights activist), while Portuguese cleaner Elena in ‘Cleaning Lady’ is so stereotypically ‘foreign’ it’s almost painful. Oddly enough, Tony gets a girlfriend in ‘Pornography’, Jill, who feels to some extent the best representation of a real woman the show introduces that isn’t one of the main duo of leads; a girl who takes moral offense at Tony refusing to throw away his lads mags due to a weird, single man connection to the content. Equally, Gary’s Dad (played by the charmingly doddery Richard Pearson) may be a plot device but he’s so delightfully affable in ‘Three Girlfriends’ that he’s hard not to enjoy. “I’m just buffing up your silverware” he says at one point while humming Swan Lake.

As a result of this, Men Behaving Badly often feels quite hermetically sealed as a comic structure, designed in order to heighten certain laddish aspects for effect. There is a naturalism to the comedy which was slightly more there in the earlier seasons which by Series 4 is completely gone. Nye, by that point, is exploring themes many comedies—particularly on the BBC—wouldn’t be touching even past the watershed. Gary’s intense fear of fatherhood in Babies (the series begins with a surrealist dream featuring all of the main and guest characters); open conversations about porn and masturbation; plenty regarding infidelity and casual sexual encounters; and an entire episode, ‘Drunk’, built around alcoholic lad culture.

‘Drunk’ is probably the funniest episode of Men Behaving Badly, precisely because it distills the concept into a singular story. Gary, now back with Dorothy, staying in the pub talking nonsense with Tony while Dorothy, having cooked him a meal, sits at home with Deborah questioning why they’re together, and why women like the two of them – cultured, intelligent and sophisticated women in many ways – end up at the mercy of a pair of drunken louts. ‘Drunk’ cycles through all of the elements we had seen across the series previously and condenses them – conversations about nothing, about beer, about girls, drunken singing and behaviour, and lustful confirmations of affection. You could show ‘Drunk’ to anyone who wants to know what Men Behaving Badly and they would never have to watch another episode again.

Vertue suggests that the show wasn’t directly attempting to square the focus on this sub-culture:

People called it the birth of laddism, which Simon and I hadn’t envisaged or even thought of. The two leads were hugely chauvinistic and the women never got upset. Yet lots of people responded to that, saying I know people like that, or my boyfriend’s like that. But the audiences were split 50/50 between men and women. I don’t think I ever considered profound things like whether it turned sexism on its head.

If as many women were watching Men Behaving Badly as men, perhaps enjoying how the two female leads would rebuke and psychologically chastise the two males (such as Deborah in ‘Drunk’ making Tony wait naked for her in the shed, with no intention of coming to him), not to mention physically neuter them (there is a surprising amount of slaps around the head and knees in the groin), then you wonder what they might have made of Dorothy across Series 4, and particularly in the finale ‘Playing Away’.

As much as Caroline Quentin rises to the challenge, Series 4 is not kind to Dorothy. Even with Gary at his most boorish, she makes him an increasing figure of sympathy when he probably should be growing more and more reprehensible. She decides she doesn’t want to have children with him, cheats on him with a work colleague, and then later cheats on him with Tony, his best friend. You wonder quite what Nye was thinking with this twist, because it makes no sense if you’re looking at the show extending beyond four series, and ‘Playing Away’ would not remotely have been devised as a series finale given the show was at its apogee.

In the real world, Gary would never have forgiven Dorothy, or Tony for that matter, for a betrayal like this, but Men Behaving Badly by the start of Series 5 has largely reset the board - though Gary does at least throw it back in his face a few times here and there, and it does factor into Gary’s choices at the end of Series 5.

By the end of Series 4, however, you begin to realise the biggest change already happening to Men Behaving Badly, which we will see steadily across Series 5 and especially Series 6, is the audiences’ innate fondness for these two ‘lads’ and their situation outweighing their behaviour, and the moral questions such behaviour poses. Simon Nye perhaps comes to like them too much, in a way Jennifer Saunders never did with Eddie Monsoon, nor Adrian Edmondson or Rik Mayall with Eddie Hitler & Richard Richard. Slowly and surely, even in the show, Gary and Tony are forgiven for their selfish, hurtful and at times reprehensible behaviour, and it doesn’t fully ring true. Audiences have now been brought into the ‘cult’ of laddism and are consistently reassured that if women like Dorothy or Deborah will forgive them, then they can’t be all that bad, right?

Men Behaving Badly never bests Series 4 and, perhaps appropriately as with the onset of age, it’s all steadily downhill over its final couple of season. The bad boys are about to become incorrigible middle-aged men…

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Certainly when it came to sitcoms, the Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy by Mark Lewisohn was a genuine Bible. A mammoth tome, doorstop size, it catalogued every released British TV comedy show since 1936 up to its 1998 publication date. I’m not sure if any subsequent revised editions came out, as my copy stops there, but it exists as an incredible resource packed with comedies I wonder if even the internet remembers exists anymore. Not just sitcoms too, but sketch shows, specials, American imports and a whole lot besides.

It’s a gem of a book and one I’m very pleased to still have. I found it several weeks ago while clearing out my late mother’s house and there it was, lurking in the corner of a spare room with a few assorted bits from my childhood she had kept. It was a bit like finding treasure and immediately it flung me back to the 16 year old comedy enthusiast who would leaf through it reading all about shows at that point I had no way to ever watch. Back then, I had reams of shows on video or taped off the telly, but so many in this book were fascinating obscurities seemingly lost to time.

Despite all the doom and gloom in the 2020s and especially around the online world, one element that has been a gift is a combination of streaming services providing a place for a wealth of comedy series to live, and equally YouTube for becoming a storehouse of old shows and an archive in many cases of series long forgotten. Though still well known, I’m currently slow binging Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? for a future podcast recording (expect some writing on it too), and they’re all on YouTube, even if the quality isn’t great. That’s the only real trade off.

Anyway, looking through the RT Guide and reading Lewisohn’s thoughts and meticulous research about these shows made me, in perhaps a moment of madness, to consider a challenge. Could I work my way through the alphabet choosing a lesser known entry from Lewisohn’s book to watch and write about? It’ll be difficult sourcing some of them, so I’m sure pivoting will be in order, but this struck me as a fun way of exploring the book and maybe introducing you, reader, to some comedy you perhaps never have heard of or might have long forgotten.

My caveats for this, therefore, are that I’ll be avoiding shows that came after 1998, so we’re talking pure 20th century here. I’ll be skipping past anything too famous still or embedded in modern popular culture in some way, though that’s not to say some of these won’t be series that were at one point popular. I’ll also be sticking just to British sitcom and avoiding sketches or anything like that.

My first choice for A is one I’ve already started watching, but I think I’ll keep the choice a surprise until I drop the piece. Hopefully you’ll enjoy these musings about far lesser known comedies. And I can only encourage you to seek out a copy of the RT Guide. A lot of it might well now be online but you can’t beat leafing through a book and finding a comedy premise that piques your interest.

See you for choice A. I must be mad.

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My relationship with my Mum was a complicated one, which I’m sure many people could say about one of their deepest familial relationships in life. She was a kind woman, generous when she could be, full of the best intentions. She was also eternally trapped in a halcyon impression of the past—my childhood especially—that set her life for decades in amber. She died before any evolution beyond this could take place. I’m sceptical it ever would have.

The reason I’m discussing this is because the dynamic between Simon (played by Joe Wilkinson) and Sue (Sue Johnston) often reminded me of the one my mother and I had. One scene, in the first initial three-part run of The Cockfields, particularly broke me as I continue the process of grief. Simon sits with Sue overlooking a sea view on their native Isle of Wight, where the show is set, and Sue says to him “you’ll always be my little boy”, or words to that effect. There was so much about that scene that could have been, at a certain point, my mother and I.

Everything about that relationship, the one that underpins The Cockfields and cuts to the heart of what the show is really about, I can recognise, as indeed no doubt will many a viewer. Sue has a doting nature, caring and kind to the point of near ridiculousness, and speaks ostensibly about being relaxed and unobtrusive on Simon and his respective partner’s plans. In truth, she’s anything but. Sue, as with her husband Ray, have lots of rituals and patterns that come with old age, and she is immediately uncertain and unsettled if Simon suggests a different way of doing things.

This was my mother to a tee. The doting wasn’t necessarily identical but I can’t tell you how many times she voiced about not wanting to be a ‘burden’, only to end up becoming one because of how recalcitrant she was either to advice or a different point of view. In working so hard to not get involved in my life, she ended up being such a dominant player in terms of conversation, discussing and just plain figuring out her mindset. Sue is exactly the same and while The Cockfields spares us of it, you just know Simon and his fiancée Esther (Susannah Fielding) go off and debrief about her ways after the days events.

It is such a deeply well observed dynamic between this mother and son that it can only be a universal, especially British familial story. Either Wilkinson or co-writer David Earl (who also plays Sue and Ray’s frustrated neighbour in the background) almost certainly had a mum like Sue. It’s the only way they could write a dynamic so pointedly and poignantly. Simon seems passive but he has to be, working as hard as he does to understand Sue’s attempts to please him and pivoting literally, emotionally and physically when Sue (and Ray) barrel on without the self-awareness the younger generation do.

What’s lovely about The Cockfields is that it never plays this dynamic for dramatic purposes, save for one especially well-earned moment in the penultimate episode, when Simon finally calls Sue on her obsessive need to please, after she quietly pays for a family meal he was determined to treat them all to. He shouts. He is explosively honest. He makes Sue cry. And it all comes from a place of love. Simon just wants to do for his mother in the way she has always done for him, but she won’t allow him to. She doesn’t feel worthy enough. The scene resonated so much for me as someone who has had a version of that exact conversation with my own mother.

Though the show naturally exacerbates certain elements for comic effect, there is an observational naturalism within The Cockfields that makes it relatable in a low-key, never laugh out loud style, but one full of moments that could happen in almost any family. Wilkinson wisely allows himself to be the Louis Theroux in this scenario, with both series based around Simon and his fiancee coming to stay with the titular family for a weekend and later a week; he eternally raising a subtle eyebrow at less their eccentricities, rather the standard habits of people advanced in years that seems eccentric to anyone younger.

The show very nearly didn't survive Covid-19, on a metaphorical and indeed literal basis. Legendary comic Bobby Ball played Ray in the initial three episodes, before tragically passing away of the virus in 2020. Wilkinson and Earl decided to simply recast the character, bringing in Rab C. Nesbitt legend himself, Gregor Fisher, to play the same man but different (more on that later). Ball’s loss was a blow, on a personal and narrative level; his Ray was a very funny part of the initial run, bouncing off Wilkinson and Sue Johnston very well. How Ball might have evolved Ray in the full eventual season is an open question.

The second series was then delayed and another couple of characters were recast - Sue’s strange, sozzled friend Lyn portrayed by another comedy legend in Michele Dotrice (of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em fame) when Maggie Steed did not return (a real shame as she was very funny in the first series). More importantly, Philomena Cunk herself, Diane Morgan, pulled out as Simon’s fiancee Donna, and in the second season Simon now has a new fiancée and an entirely different character in Esther, with veiled references for Sue as to Donna “she was a bitch” she tells Esther conspiratorially, with an almost naughty edge of guilt. We later learn Donna dumped him, leading to Simon’s commitment anxieties in the second series.

In what could have been the most tantalising casting of all, Kim Cattrall originally signed on to play Melissa, the vacuous, two-faced younger girlfriend of Simon’s dad, Larry, played by Nigel Havers; a well-meaning but vein older man blissfully unaware of how he neglects his son. Cattrall is based in England (this is a longer story, but I used to know and occasionally socialise with her partner…), so this wouldn't have been a stretch, but she ultimately had to pull out, replaced by the terrific (and often unheralded) Sarah Parish. Truthfully, Larry and Melissa are the closest The Cockfields comes to moving away from naturalism into exaggerated sitcom creations, but Wilkinson and Earl pull back just at the point the line is crossed whenever they appear.

The Cockfields certainly owes a debt to another show Johnston was keenly involved with, The Royle Family; indeed Sue is an older extension of Barbara from that series, albeit one less walked over and slightly more affluent. Ray is less slobbish or coarse than Jim Royle, but he still has a pre-feminist approach to his marriage with Sue. Despite being retirees, he still has Sue wait on him hand and foot, she programmed to cater to his needs. The joy of the show is noticing the subtle looks and unspoken reactions of Esther (and Donna before her) at Ray’s casual, unaware sexism and extremely traditional expectations. Especially in the second series, it is as if Simon and Esther cross the channel and go back in time 40 or 50 years socially.

Wilkinson makes this point himself in talking to the British Comedy Guide:

It was a really good chance to make them feel slightly more trapped. The Cockfields is always going to be about trips to the island. You're physically trapped, as well as emotionally trapped. If someone does storm off, they have to drive to the port and wait for the boat. That premise made us laugh.

The Cockfield family are pickled in a cosy, traditional amber, and the fact the show only ever depicts that is key to the charm. Ball’s Ray was a bit harsher, tougher with a caustic Northern edge, while Fisher’s Ray is a bit softer but perhaps more mercurial and pedantic, endlessly going on about boring aspects of his car or picking needless conflicts with his neighbours. It’s the tiny details that make he and Sue so funny, be it the importance placed in using “the iPad”, seeing by them as the pinnacle of technology, or Sue putting drinks in the shed at Christmas. She has no logical answer when Simon asks why. It’s just what they do.

One element that could have been a risk was the depiction of David (Ben Rufus Green), Ray’s son from another woman who lives with he and Sue and is demonstrably neurodiverse, if not autistic. David is an odd-looking but lovely, innocent man, someone who struggles to hold down a job and prefers being at home with his headphones on behind a computer, yet is eternally seeking a partner. The closest he comes is the lonely, numerous-widowed Lyn, despite the mother-son age gap. David could have been the butt of jokes or insensitively played but rather his kindly innocence is played for laughs that bring him in rather than ‘other’ him. “The other day, Simon, Griff Rhys-Jones told me to fuck off!” he joyously says in one particularly funny example.

You get the sense that David would struggle to exist outside of the Isle of Wight, which Wilkinson & Earl cast not as a space populated by weirdos (it’s not Craggy Island) or even anywhere particularly parochial, but it is rooted in their own experience, both having family connections to a place in the direction by Simon Hynd they present as genuinely beautiful. The Cockfields will throw in a gorgeous vista or panning shot of the cliffs wherever possible, which strikes me as a means of depicting the island with fondness. They want the island to be timeless, hence why Simon and Esther visiting feels like them stepping into a time capsule with family stuffed with their own particular idiosyncrasies.

Wilkinson claims he and Earl drew these people not from specific but rather different elements of their own families:

Everyone's a combination really, there's no character directly lifted from anyone. It threw up more story. That relationship is really, really interesting because it comes with so many layers. The point that you meet that person, where you are as a child, how that informs your relationship and how tricky it is for the stepfather to come into that child's life at a certain age. Also, the relationship with the stepbrother. Just more tension really, which is what you want in a sitcom isn't it?

Yet the tension in The Cockfields is almost always background, driven by quirks. Be it Simon becoming a bit exasperated by Ray’s picky refusal to back down, or Sue’s over-zealous determination to make sure everyone is well served and happy (a prime, very funny example is her reaching into Simon and Esther’s bedroom on arrival and leaving a random plate of samosas). Or even the underlay of social and class tension whenever Larry and Melissa run into them, the latter eternally determined to escape an island she feels is populated by lesser ‘yokels’ and not the cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile, trendy wealthy people she feels they are. Larry, while happy to follow her round like a puppy, equally seems in no rush to leave.

And therein lies the core arc within The Cockfields, which plays out toward the end of the second series and Christmas special which brings the show to a close. Simon seems ever drawn away from his home, having committed to marrying Esther after his jitters in the future (pleasingly the show doesn't feel the need for a wedding episode like so many do), proving himself distant thanks to a new job where he is gaining traction to a degree even Esther notices. Sue certainly does and Johnston does an excellent job of depicting the quiet disappointment of a mother who feels a bit neglected, especially given how infrequently she sees her son.

Simon’s realisation come the end is that the Isle of Wight, and this quirky sometimes oddball family, are a group he can never truly leave. He feels a pull to the pastoral community of the island by the end which strongly suggests, without ever committing itself, to the idea Simon and Esther will move there (it also hints that Esther might be pregnant, thanks to a tasteless Ray joke). The Cockfields is therefore on the surface a show about the comic awkwardness of visiting family, and attempting to integrate a girlfriend into a very particular set up, but beyond—heavily through the Simon and Sue dynamic—it is about rejecting the ‘mainland’, the hustle and bustle of a cooler, trendier world, and returning to something quieter where you can make the most of family who won’t be around forever.

Whatever you take from The Cockfields, it’s often a beautifully rendered comedy, flicked with pathos, hugely well performed with nuance, and contains a relationship that made me feel so much in the shadow of an incalculable loss. I think I’ll always love it a bit for that.

Thanks for reading, please subscribe and remember… this is no laughing matter.

PS: keep an eye out for the You Have Been Watching podcast, where I’ll soon be joining Rob Turnbull to discuss The Cockfields. Here’s a link to an embarrassment of riches.

Tempting as it might be to pen this entire piece as Nessa, the stoic breakout character of James Corden and Ruth Jones’ sitcom, one must exercise restraint. Such is the scope and reach of particularly that character since the show first aired in 2007, it becomes hard not to slip into a South Wales accent and drop some deliberate vernacular popularised by, arguably, the most successful British sitcom in decades.

In watching Gavin & Stacey for the first time (yes, I know) over the Christmas period last year, it rapidly becomes clear why Corden and Jones’ series struck such a chord with British audiences, enough of one to permeate the pop-culture consciousness for 20 years. My litmus test was going into a workplace made up of ages between 11 and 75 years of age and discovering both a Year 7 child and a pensioner laughed when I (attempted) to do an Uncle Bryn impression, equally understanding the reference. It is a show that crosses at least three distinct generations.

Think about how rare that is in a world of enormously fragmented streaming services where storytelling ‘content’ hits us between the eyes on a daily basis from all corners. Gavin & Stacey is the kind of ‘water cooler’ show to a degree rarely seen today outside of sporting events or popular reality television (such as The Traitors, for example). Not that many people seem to have water coolers anymore, least of all congregate around them. The viewing figures for the previous two episodes, both of which came after long gaps, stand as the most watched television programmes of their respective years. In 2019 and 2024, it reached 19 million households.

19 million. That’s truly astonishing. That is seven million more than watched 2023’s most watched broadcast, the coronation of King Charles III. More than England’s quarter final match against France in World Cup 2022. More than Boris Johnson broadcasting about COVID-19. No scripted television show had more viewing figures in 17 years before the 2019 special. In sitcom circles, you have to go back to 1996’s Only Fools And Horses finale, ‘Time On Your Hands’, for numbers that beat it, still with almost 25 million viewers the reigning champion.

Before then, Only Fools And Horses would repeatedly – with special episodes – clock over 20 million viewers, as did broadcasts of popular comedies such as Just Good Friends or Bread (the latter, by Carla Lane, almost forgotten today, was huge in the 1980s), but most of these were 30 to 40 years ago. Long before even cable television, let alone streaming, social media and the ubiquity of the internet. For Gavin & Stacey to get that many people on Christmas Day to sit around the television and watch not only suggests linear broadcasting isn’t dead yet, it suggests we’re dealing with a very special entity.

What made Gavin & Stacey so popular, then? One factor could be that it feels quite old fashioned, despite the absence of a laughter track. It has popular catchphrases, which many modern comedies thumb their nose at, some of which such as “what’s occurring?” or “tidy” have cemented themselves into popular culture. It has grounded, relatable characters, even when the storytelling might sometimes verge on the melodramatic. Everyone knows a brassy ‘smother’ like Pam (the brilliant Alison Steadman). Everyone has an uncle like Bryn (Rob Brydon, peerless). There’s probably a bit of Gwen (Melanie Walters) in most mothers. These are people you could meet in your day to day.

This contrasts with Ruth Jones’ Nessa, who stands out as the signature iconic character of the series, but is without question a deliberately unusual figure. Stoic, almost ageless, fiercely self-sufficient, she also has lived a thousand lives in one and you never truly know if some of her tales are tall. One of the ironies of a show called Gavin & Stacey, is that the titular characters are in essence the ‘straight men’. You couldn’t make the show without Matthew Horne and Joanna Page, but you also couldn’t make it just with them. The comedy comes from Nessa, from James Corden’s Smithy, from Bryn etc…

It is here the show differs from the series it often reminds me of, Only Fools and Horses. The two leads were always the best characters in that show, with Del and Rodney’s conflict, craftiness and one-upmaniship being central to that series. They were surrounded by excellent supporting characters, themselves ultimately quite iconic, but you couldn’t make it without the brothers Trotter. Gavin & Stacey is a show where the leads are the mechanics behind the storytelling but they are never the driving force of comedy. Stacey is intense and borderline irritating, while the comedy often happens to Gav, he being at the mercy of other forces.

Where the show does remind me of John Sullivan’s legendary series, particularly, is Smithy. He has many of Del-Boy’s attributes – the self-assurance, the charm, the fun-loving nature, the ability to get out of scrapes, even to charm women arguably above his pay grade (though the finale makes this quite a painful punchline). Like David Jason’s immortal creation, however, Smithy is also flecked with tragedy, a bit lost in life, sensitive, vulnerable and ultimately uncertain as to his future. Gav, like Rodney for Del, is his anchor, their relationship more like that of brothers, but where Gavin is secure in life and aspiration, Smithy is always chasing something else.

This becomes apparent as Jones and Corden very quickly realise while the heart is Gavin and Stacey, the emotion and story is really the will they/won’t they classic romantic dynamic of Smithy and Nessa. One of the strengths of Gavin & Stacey is how neither of these people are conventional players in a mainstream love story, both being on the larger side. Tell me Ruth Jones is not sexy though as Nessa, throughout this show. Especially toward the end. Corden plays Smithy through points where he becomes a US talk show icon, his weight fluctuating, but he always remains on the bigger side. From a representation POV, this is a feather in the show’s cap.

It helps that Jones and Corden work so well together in a deeply unconventional romance. Smithy, as dyed in the wool Essex as you can find, thinks he should be with a glamorous blonde like Sonia (Laura Aikman) from the final two episodes, while Nessa, as south Welsh equally as you’ll imagine, at first hitches her wagon to the equally stoic, rough and ready Dave ‘Coaches’ (Steffan Rhodri). Theoretically, both characters make sense with those other pairings, but Smithy and Nessa are two of a kind. Both a little boorish, both loud, both uncouth, both utterly and completely of the same mind with simple aspects of life. It is so clear to the audience throughout. It just takes them a while to catch up.

This also feeds into the other key aspect of Gavin & Stacey. If Only Fools and Horses was always about class, about working class people attempting to advance their station but never truly succeeding, Gavin & Stacey is about culture. You can say the clash of culture between Essex and Wales – in the same kingdom but utterly alien to one another – but truly about the Welsh. Essex is never characterised here as Barry Island is. The show admirably works to have players often moving from one to the other, but while Billericay is mainly characterised by the odd pub and the Shipman’s glossy home, Barry Island is absolutely a character in itself.

Barry has that sense of faded seaside life, a smaller and more provincial world being preserved by locals (people like the sweet but anally retentive Bryn), yet Gavin & Stacey never once looks down on it. The point is not to escape Barry, but rather to embrace it. Essex in the show often feels a bit distant and facile. Barry feels real, riven with a sense of united community. Stacey tries to function in Essex but simply can’t, yet Gavin is embraced by Barry when he finally takes the plunge and moves there. Jones and Corden’s message is in the importance of small town community and family. Ultimately, despite two instances where Pam becomes vitriolic and insulting about Welsh life (born ultimately out of the fear she’ll lose her son, so the show forgives her) and triggers a huge argument across both families, everyone from Essex become sucked into Barry’s orbit.

Much like Only Fools, Gavin & Stacey is propelled by heart without straying too heavily into sentimentality. The two lead characters are cute but the show is always ready with a joke or something to ground characters if ever they begin to lose perspective. The humble, relatable aspect of the writing (for instance, so often characters say ‘alright’ or ‘hiya’, I’ll be amazed if a supercut doesn’t exist on YouTube), disguises an array of tropes Corden and Jones weave in in the best tradition of situation comedy. We never see Smithy’s original girlfriend, Lisa, described as worryingly under age (in a joke that perhaps wouldn’t scan these days). We never find out what happened with uncle Bryn and Stacey’s brother Jason on the fishing trip, but it is mined repeatedly to excellent comic effect.

Not all of these tropes work. You could argue that however fun Margaret John was in the role, the horny, very old neighbour Doris, constantly shagging men young enough to be her grandson, was a hoary old joke overplayed. Moreover, the viperish dynamic between Julia Davis and Adrian Scarborough as Gavin’s aunt and uncle, Dawn and Pete, starts brilliantly vicious but is sanded off repeatedly through the show, and by the end they both look a bit ghoulish. People like that exist but they end up a bit pantomime. Though Gavin & Stacey is, in a few respects, a bit pantomime. Perhaps they speak to the loud, in your face register of it.

Part of this is why this writer avoided the show for almost two decades, though principally it was down to James Corden. As Robert Turnbull on the You Have Been Watching podcast said, paraphrasing, most people really dislike James Corden except in Gavin & Stacey, and there feels so much truth to that. He and Jones are the comedic rocks of the show and while so many performers around them are just as good, there would be no show without Smithy as there wouldn’t be without Nessa. These writers were not daft. They wrote the best parts for themselves.

In the final analysis, it would be hard not to assign Gavin & Stacey, now it is complete, with a place among the annals of British comedy sitcom greats. On an audience reception basis alone it should be there. On a creative level, it often throughout is both warm and laugh out loud funny, as well as regularly relatable to families across the country. That is surely why it struck such a chord and never went away, over the 16 years fans awaited a proper conclusion. It ended, appropriately, as it began, with a love story destined for a happy ending, and two families united. The difference now is that you know nothing will ever break them apart. A bittersweet or open ended conclusion would have been disingenuous (though it was considered at the end of the 2019 special). The ending delivered was the best option.

Whether we will see another Gavin & Stacey remains to be seen, in terms of reach and popularity. There are excellent comedies still being made but many are spread across all kinds of streaming services. One wonders if anything with the scope, longevity and sheer iconic status of Gavin & Stacey will be produced by the BBC going forward. Let’s hope so. Shows such as this are a jewel to be treasured.

We all know that. We feels it.

Thanks for reading, please subscribe and remember… this is no laughing matter.

With the end of This Time with Alan Partridge, and Alan’s stint as an unlikely co-host parachuted into the BBC’s fictional prime time magazine drama, it feels like Alan’s journey has come full circle. He began life as a radio disc jockey turned news presenter, blossomed into a chat show host, suffered a spectacular fall from BBC grace, toiled in the doldrums of regional radio, and at the conclusion of This Time, looks set to never—never!—work in television again.

In reality, we know this won’t be the case. The Partridge will always rise (like the phoenix) when the time calls for him. Alan is both a product of his time and becomes the product of whatever time he finds himself in. Indeed, as of writing, he’s about to return later in 2025 for a brand new series.

Steve Coogan, as the actor who disappears into the skin of Partridge every time he plays him, has done a remarkable job in transforming Alan into easily the most layered, complex, psychologically deft and enduring comedy character in British entertainment history. Alan and his particular brand of self-aware, sarcastic, ironically politically incorrect humour is not for everyone—he is a character passionately adored by fans but not embraced necessarily by the masses. He has been capable, nonetheless, of multiple reincarnations in the last three decades across half a dozen media platforms. How many characters have truly made such a transition?

When Coogan was one of the emergent set of comedians who started to bloom in the early-1990’s, Partridge was a character you sensed could easily have ended up as a one-off sketch on The Fast Show (a series filled with his contemporaries) but similar to how The League of Gentlemen started off on radio before translating to television, Alan first appeared as an oddball take on radio, in shows such as On the Hour in 1991 and later his own show Knowing Me Knowing You, as a spliced variant of Tony Blackburn & Michael Parkinson; the painfully outdated, egotistic personality with one foot constantly in his mouth and almost no filter.

In truth, early Alan was a broad caricature. Whether he was presenting sports segments on The Day Today or later in full chat show host mode on Knowing Me, Knowing You, tapping the worst defensive instincts of a man completely lacking any self-awareness and utterly refusing to adapt to any form of criticism. With his naff cod-70’s hair, fashions pilfered from David Niven or Roger Moore’s back catalogue, and constant references to bands outdated even in 1994 such as REO Speedwagon, Alan was the comical epitome of the traditional British broadcaster – name dropping luminaries such as Nick Owen or Sue Cook.

Coogan reflected to Time Out how he feels that early Partridge may not have aged altogether too well:

Alan 20 years ago seems very crude and a little dated now. When I started writing it with Patrick Marber and Armando Iannucci, I would get angry. I felt they were being too cruel and mocking – like pulling the legs off an insect. I feel an affinity with Alan because there is quite a lot of me in him and I use him as a bin for anything that is bothering me. So I’m not satisfied with just curling your lip and sneering.

There was always without doubt an edge to the comedy constructed around Alan. Knowing Me Knowing You ends, after six episodes of toe-curling encounters between Alan and everything from Hollywood celebrities to ineffective politicians, with Alan quite literally killing a man; he shoots accidentally with an antique pistol Forbes McAllister, an obnoxious food critic who manages to make Alan seem quite mellow and measured as a result. Patrick Marber, one of the show’s co-writers who would often appear on the series in different guises, plays Forbes as such a loathsome creature, it ameliorates Alan’s culpability to some degree, but ending a spoof chat show with a man’s murder in 1994 took some stones, and even now it feels one of the edgiest choices in Partridge history.

It places in the coffin the career nail that Alan proceeds to hammer home a year later in Christmas special Knowing Me Knowing Yule, where he punches his smug BBC boss Tony Hayers live on air with a raw chicken carcass, and serves as the key foundation the enduring character of Alan is built on: failure. He is eternally doomed to sabotage his own success due to his completely, bewildering lack of self-awareness and non-PC, ‘little Englander’ mentality. In this aspect, Alan follows in the footsteps of a tradition of comedians and comedy characters who epitomise an entitled sense of misguided Britishness, finding themselves consistently practically and psychologically outmatched: Tony in Hancock’s Half Hour, John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty, and perhaps the heir apparent in the wake of Partridge would be Ricky Gervais’s David Brent of The Office.

British audiences seem to find real comfort and succour in failures, particularly in men, and it speaks perhaps to why so many of them do endure down the decades. Hancock encapsulates a post-war grumpiness at the death of Empire and the emergence of youthful counterculture, as did Warren Mitchell’s more overtly un-PC Alf Garnett from ‘Til Death Us Do Part (one character that simply hasn’t aged as well). Fawlty embodied a gauche, faux upper class sense of enduring Empire in his faded seaside hotel; a refusal to countenance people of differences races, sexual proclivities, and someone powerfully seeking validation from a class system he couldn’t truly match. That sense of needing validation is there in Brent; The Office strips away the class aspect for 21st century Britain and instead pervades Brent’s own insecurities with a deep seated loneliness and use of popular culture to try and bond with people. Hancock wanted to preach. Fawlty wanted to be superior. Brent just wants to be loved.

Gervais himself discussed just how different these characters are to the American approach for Time:

Americans are more “down the line.” They don’t hide their hopes and fears. They applaud ambition and openly reward success. Brits are more comfortable with life’s losers. We embrace the underdog until it’s no longer the underdog. We like to bring authority down a peg or two. Just for the hell of it. Americans say, “have a nice day” whether they mean it or not. Brits are terrified to say this. We tell ourselves it’s because we don’t want to sound insincere but I think it might be for the opposite reason. We don’t want to celebrate anything too soon. Failure and disappointment lurk around every corner. This is due to our upbringing. Americans are brought up to believe they can be the next president of the United States. Brits are told, “It won’t happen for you.”

For Partridge, this sense of indicative British failure is different, and it’s perhaps why the character has managed to straddle multiple decades and multiple mediums with greater aplomb than his forebears.

When the character returned in 1997’s I’m Alan Partridge, he was, to quote a line he says, “a rather sorry individual”. His marriage had fell apart, he had no home—living in a travel tavern equidistant between his hometown of Norwich and the London metropolis—and any attempts to revitalise his BBC career were swiftly curtailed. While Knowing Me Knowing You is fondly remembered and well regarded, I’m Alan Partridge is really the point Coogan, Marber and fellow writers Armando Iannucci & Peter Baynham—all of them part of the collective comedy intelligentsia formed around Chris Morris particularly in the early 90’s—truly take the first steps away from caricature and toward nuance with Alan. He’s not just a failure, he is a distinctly strange individual who finds it almost impossible to develop attachments, consistently fails to function in the societal circles he most craves, and finds solace in people he considers inferior. His PA Lynn, played majestically for two decades now by Felicity Montagu, is the Manuel to his Basil, particularly in this series; an eternal doormat who serves at his egocentric, paranoid and often quite vile whims.

When you look at the arc of the most beloved comedic failures in television, many are often fluid. Fawlty Towers existed in an age where comedies worked, essentially, as half-hour teleplays with a set of characters, a concept, and a comedic series of beats to play out. The show remains a masterpiece because the production is as timeless as it is hysterically funny, but every episode saw Basil faced with a similar problem; a new guest, be it a hotel inspector or a psychologist or a randy playboy, would tap into all the neuroses of Basil, leading him toward an ever-escalating series of catastrophic misjudgments and assumptions which built farce upon farce. There was no arc for Basil – no realisation he is in a loveless marriage with viperish wife Sybil, no understanding that he may need psychological help. Basil is a fixed comedic entity, caught in his own eternal loop of masculine underachievement.

Conversely, fast forward over twenty years to The Office, and David Brent does undergo a journey and a character arc, even if it takes a while to truly emerge.

For a while he too is a fixed entity as the cringe-making office manager more interested in his staff loving his bad jokes and puns rather than being an efficient leader, but over the course of two seasons Brent’s own jealousies and bitterness are manifested in how he could lose his job and lose, indeed, the only real human connections he has, even if he lacks the self-awareness to realise what people truly think of him. By the heartbreaking penultimate episode of Season 2, where Brent has a lump in his throat begging for his employers to let him keep his job, there is manifest change. When in the Christmas special finale there exists hope that he may develop a real female relationship to fill the hole left by his absent job, you are rooting for a man who has spent two seasons being utterly incompetent, selfish and often downright ignorant of everyone around him.

Alan’s development sits somewhere between this fixed entity and emotional catalyst. Over the two seasons of I’m Alan Partridge, Alan grew increasingly bitter as a character. Rejected by the BBC, he penned a book describing his resurgence called ‘Bouncing Back’, when in reality he’d done nothing of the sort; yes he no longer had the graveyard shift on Radio Norwich and enough capital to build a house by Season 2, but what he really wanted was to shout “A-ha” on national television again. It’s telling that he undergoes a complete mental and physical breakdown between both of these seasons, Coogan and co playing for laughs Alan’s depressive descent into extreme weigh gain and paranoid, reactionary behaviour “I drove to Dundee in my bare feet”.

If anything dates Partridge, it’s how they approach his battles with mental health, proffering jokes you sense would be avoided today. Alan’s Toblerone-fuelled breakdown is funny but it’s broad and obvious, and almost cheapened by the fact Alan doesn’t really suffer for this serious moment in his life, bar the odd flashback at points of stress across the season. Alan doesn’t seem any different when the last few copies of ‘Bouncing Back’ are pulped than he does at the start of the season – though he has experienced an emotional catastrophe, he remains fixed.

Tellingly, this is where Marber, Iannucci & Baynham chose to leave the character, and Coogan himself—barring live shows and the odd performance here and there—largely detached from Alan after 2002 as he pursued a nascent Hollywood career and a colourful personal life. For a long time, Alan Partridge looked set to remain trapped in an entropic state of eternal, faded fame. His day was done, as Coogan suggested to The Guardian:

“I remember it was like a little epiphany when I went through the material because I was clutching round Armando, Pete and Patrick, thinking: ‘Which of you three will help me do something with this character?’ Not any fault of theirs, but Patrick and Pete clearly wanted to get out from under the weight of this big, heavy albatross and go away and do their own thing. It’s a kind of millstone of sorts. There was no one around to help me write Alan. I was sort of left holding the baby.”

Then came 2010’s Mid-Morning Matters, one of the softest reboots for a well known comedy character probably in history. Under the stewardship of new writers, brothers Neil & Rob Gibbons, Alan returned as part of North Norfolk Digital in a series of 10-15 minute, live-cam segments on the Fosters Funny website built around his radio show, which in I’m Alan Partridge we always only saw brief snippets of. You sense that the Gibbons, clearly long time fans of the character, understood that Alan on radio was always one of the funniest aspects of those two series and that you could get much more out of his on-air descent into weird rabbit holes, difficult conversations and bizarre guests. Created as part of a promotional deal with Fosters lager, Mid-Morning Matters for its second season ended up on Sky Atlantic, with many of the segments fused together to form half-hour programmes. Though launched eventually on YouTube, Alan for the first time was not solely a BBC property.

Apart from revitalising interest in Coogan’s most beloved comedy character, Mid-Morning Matters showed that Alan, crucially, could age and develop naturally in a way many other comedy characters of his ilk always struggled to do.

Alan was adaptable, not just in terms of his circumstances but in the vehicle for how he appears. Matters was a web series first and foremost; bite sized chunks designed to appeal to audiences as much reared on YouTube as broadcast television. While the show only gave us glimpses of Alan not on mic (without any trace of Lynn this time around), under the Gibbons’ pen he was noticeably mellower, perhaps more at ease with his lot as a regional Norfolk broadcaster in a slot where he could be as downright weird as he wanted without much in the way of repercussion. This most definitely wasn’t the Alan of the ‘KMKYWAP’ years. This was an evolution of the man post-depression we saw in I’m Alan Partridge.

The Gibbons seem to have understood how malleable Alan is in terms of format. Over the course of the 2010’s, with Coogan they have written two autobiographical tomes under Alan’s name, ‘I: Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan’ and ‘Nomad’, both of which were incredibly funny, utterly fantastical, myopic takes on Alan’s life from his warped perspective (they’re even better on audiobook narrated by Alan himself). Alpha Papa saw Alan’s long-mooted transition to the big screen; there were plans during the Iannucci/Baynham years to make a Partridge movie but they never seemed to be able to find a story that wasn’t in line with the cliched, sitcom extensions to film prevalent in the 1970’s particularly. They didn’t just want to do ‘Alan goes to America’.

Alpha Papa did the inverse; it uses a bigger canvas to tell a relatively intimate, homespun story about corporate hegemony, friendship and Alan’s knack for broadcasting, entangled in a take on the siege action thriller Alan—as a fan of a good action romp—would himself have appreciated. Yes there was a shootout but not on the streets of LA, rather the old Norfolk pier of Sheringham. Alpha Papa works so well, and remains so weirdly Partridge, precisely because it grounds Alan in a provincial normality. This is also a major key to why the character endures and is so successful.

Neil Gibbons talked to The Skinny about how important it is to keep it real where Alan is concerned:

The thing about Partridge is that if you’re determined to sort of just make him a collection of greatest hits, buzz words from the past, then he stops to feel like a real person. He’s more of a sort of frame of mind than a checklist of hobbies and interests; he’s got a skewed way of looking at things and a sort of desperation to be respected. And that just broadens your scope massively because you’re not ploughing the same furrow all the time.

It’s also the inherent paradox with Alan because, in many respects, he has never really changed. He is still a little Englander, he still is driven by his own egotism and insecurities, but his embarrassing failures seem as much driven these days by his attempt to be relevant and understanding of modern social and political issues. Look at his Sky documentary series, Welcome to the Places of My Life and Scissored Isle – they see Alan travelling the length and breadth of Britain trying to get under the skin of society; whether he’s spending nights with youngsters on E, ‘freganing’ and ending up trapped in a warehouse, or working on the Tesco checkout, Alan is painfully unaware of how little he grasps the issues of the day. The difference is that in days of old he wouldn’t have even tried. Middle aged Alan wants people to believe he cares, he’s ‘down with the kids’, and that he may be quite liberal – when in reality he’s anything but.

Oddly enough, though, both of the writing eras for Partridge have avoided making the character too overtly political one way or the other. He is clearly a Conservative, driven by a baby boomer mindset with an ingrained intolerance and suspicion of anything outside of his world view, but perhaps down to Coogan’s influence, Alan has never really directly made anything that places him in one partisan area or another. This is yet another reason why the character has aged better than his antecedents; Alf Garnett is rooted in the xenophobic bigotry of the 60’s & 70’s, Basil Fawlty is trapped inside a latent British restraint before the real dawn of Thatcherite capitalism and American influences on British culture. Even David Brent feels distinctly New Labour in his creation, the kind of boss with the space to muck around in an environment you now sense would be far more target driven and restrictive than under a left-centrist government – perhaps another reason why the character didn’t quite work as well in his own continuation movie from 2016, Life on the Road.

Alan himself has evolved as a person but his politics no doubt have remained fixed, but by not dwelling on those aspects, he has avoided the perils of being defined by a particular decade, era or political movement. If ever this was going to change, it could have been with This Time; initially pitched as Alan’s return to TV in ‘Brexit Britain’, the project seemed a distinct reaction to the rise of TV personalities who are almost revered by many for their frank speaking, abhorrent views and their swaggering claim to be ‘of the people’ in a world increasingly suspicious of authority and establishment intelligentsia. For years, Alan’s closest real life compatriot was Richard Madeley.

Nowadays it’s Piers Morgan, and this was never more evident than in how This Time is deliberately a fusion of The One Show’s magazine eccentricity and Good Morning Britain’s unlikely dynamic – Susannah Fielding’s Jennie Gresham is very clearly moulded, in terms of appearance, on GMB’s long suffering Susanna Reid.

This Time, as Alan’s big BBC second chance, was designed as a response to how people are now on TV who ten or even five years ago would never have had the platform they do now. The magazine format of This Time moved it away from being a mere re-tread of Knowing Me Knowing You and rather a crystallisation of every Partridge project to date. We saw Alan on air with Jennie or his Mid-Morning Matters confederate, the even-more-out-of-his-depth-than-Alan, ‘Sidekick’ Simon Denton (played so well by Tim Key); we saw Alan briefly off air with Lynn, who herself has quietly transformed from meek assistant into a Lady MacBeth figure goading Alan’s impulses; and we saw Alan’s own pieces along the line of Scissored Isle, tackling all kinds of bizarre topics in a straight forward, informative and serious way.

If anything is a surprise, it’s that Alan didn’t become more savage during This Time; there are flashes of the old monster with fame at his fingertips (he at one point shouts “where’s my fucking glass of water?”), and he does manage to insult the people closest to him that he really needs on side, but there is no fatal denouement to This Time along the lines of his first TV series. There is just Alan consistently displaying that he is punching massively above his weight in the modern era of broadcast television. That’s the joke and the consistent tragedy of his eternal failure. Of course he’ll end up sacked. Of course the establishment will hate him. The joke is that Alan is not, and never could be, one of them. The joke is that he will never truly understand that.

The appeal of the character, however, has never been higher. Any Partridge project is greeted with feverish speculation. Social media groups have thousands of members who constantly swop ‘Alanisms’ or place real world events or images in a Partridge context, often with hilarious results.

Steve Coogan feels entirely at ease playing Alan now he is catching up to the character in age, growing and maturing and mellowing with him. The Gibbons brothers completely understand, craft and nurture the character to consistently entertaining effect. Alan is now over 30 years old but few feel the character is tired or old hat; This Time reviews did polarise to an extent but you suspect fans will warm to the show on rewatches, allowing the level of depth and detail, and many of the new Alanisms, to really soak in. People were not sure about I’m Alan PartridgeSeason 2 at the time – now it’s considered classic Alan.

Alan Partridge is a cat with nine lives, it seems, and perhaps even more. He is both fixed and capable of evolution. He represents a tired, latent British mentality yet comedy is constantly found with him trying, and failing, to break out of that shell. He is in some ways metafictional, able to exist both within his fictional constructs yet amongst real people in the real world – book signings, presenting Comic Relief, appearing on the Jonathan Ross chat show. He is also able to adapt to whatever vehicle is devised for him – sitcom, documentary, web series, radio show, chat show. He is probably the most malleable character, free of a particular place or time, in British comedy history. Alan may go away for a while, but he isn’t going anywhere.

In a fractured, uncertain world, the certainty of Alan Partridge is almost comforting. He is without doubt the comedic hero we may not deserve, but we absolutely need.

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Debuting thirty years ago in 1990, the spectre of misanthropic pensioner Victor Meldrew (as played with spectacular bite yet vulnerability by Richard Wilson) looms large over the British sitcom. He stands among the comic characters who transcend their series – Basil Fawlty, Del-Boy Trotter, David Brent – and achieve household recognition. Victor has done down in history as television’s most infamous moaner, grumbling in every episode of David Renwick’s series about the state of the world to his long-suffering wife Margaret (the magisterial Annette Crosbie). From crisp packets and lager cans on the lawn to boisterous, rude teenagers and cowboy businessmen, Victor would rage in frustration at the eternal bad luck that engulfs his life, often spouting his immortal catchphrase “I don’t believe it!”.

It is easy to forget, however, that Victor’s misanthropy is driven by a maelstrom of not just misfortune or selfishness, greed and ignorance from his fellow man, but an almost cosmic sense of weirdness and injustice that lurks at the edge of One Foot in the Grave, particularly as the series wears on. Whenever a comedy character who breaks out from their series bears a memorable recurring refrain, they are almost always tethered to their personality. Del-Boy’s “this time next year we will be millionaires!” is his own personal, reaffirming mantra of prosperity against the odds. “I have a cunning plan” Baldrick regularly promises in Blackadder, affirming the exact opposite. Victor’s turn of phrase organically developed as a note of disbelief at the frequently bizarre, unexpected and just downright weird events that would intrude on his prosaic, middle-class, Home Counties retirement.

It is, in some sense, meta-textual on the part of series writer and veritable auteur David Renwick. Victor Meldrew’s waking nightmares are infused with a recognition of horror and weird fiction tropes and references that go far beyond One Foot in the Grave.

Renwick, as a writer, grew up eternally fascinated and enthralled by the macabre. He has cited films such as Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) or The Masque of the Red Death (1964) as key childhood touchstones, plus a fascination with the work of Edgar Allan Poe. One Foot in the Grave stands out amongst its contemporaries, and indeed has aged well from a narrative perspective while naturally looking visibly dated, because it dares to project a world which differs from many other British sitcoms. Renwick says that “There is something a bit bleak and uncomfortable about Victor’s world. It’s more David Lynch than Laurel and Hardy, which means you never really feel safe”.

Evidence of the macabre and bizarre is evident early on, despite the first season of the show only just finding its feet; ‘The Valley of Fear’ sees the Meldrew’s find a dead cat somehow frozen in their freezer, a tasteless joke, perhaps, but far from the coziness you might see from sitcoms from any era – next season Renwick repeats the trick with a barbecued turtle in “We Have Put Her Living in the Tomb”.

“The Return of the Speckled Band”, in a much more effective gag, sees Margaret’s annoying but well-meaning friend Mrs Warboys (the wonderful, frequently scene-stealing Doreen Mantle) accidentally given Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) to watch while in recovery from illness and, later, through one of Renwick’s brilliantly bizarre twists of plotting, she ends up being given by Victor what they both think is a normal egg, only for Mrs Warboys (or Jean, as Margaret calls her) to find inside the spawn of an alligator. She screams in terror as Susan Belbin’s character zooms in on her reaction, and at that moment we could be inside a Hammer movie. It’s funny but the broader confluence of Alien adds to the genuine horror of the moment.

From that point on, Renwick seems to grow more comfortable with the fusion of the terrifying and comical within One Foot in the Grave, realising that Mrs Warboys being the butt of such jokes frequently is comic gold. The 1996 Christmas special, ‘Starbound’, sees Jean trussed up in a sack by an escaped villain and thrown down into a ditch, before she is humped by a randy Alsatian. It sounds horrific on the page but the comic construction of it is glorious.

Earlier, in the 1993 Christmas special ‘One Foot in the Algarve’, Renwick plays with audience preconceptions about murderous husbands, invoking a Gothic sensibility as Jean engages in a holiday romance in Portugal with Alfonso, a charming aged man whose wife passed away but Renwick, backed by terrifically persuasive direction by Belbin (and even a creeping, unerrring score by John du Prez), suggests killed her and covered up the crime. Jean’s plot throughout that feature-length episode is built on a Hitchcockian-level of suspense, filled with iconography, that Alfonso might be planning to murder her. While the eventual revelations are always fairly prosaic from Renwick, at points in ‘One Foot in the Algarve’ we are in a dark, enigmatic thriller as opposed to a situation comedy.

Few sitcoms are able to get away with these stylistic touches and inspirations and make them work, but One Foot in the Grave does so with remarkable deftness, successfully managing to combine the featureless banality of middle-age in the early ‘90s with a river of weird happenstance and horrific inflection.

One might consider Victor’s entire retirement to be some kind of curse and in “Beware the Trickster on the Roof”, this is made manifest in the a glazed scorpion in amber that the Meldrew’s eccentric neighbour Nick Swainey brings into their possession, one which allows Renwick to play out scenarios that apply themselves to the traditional horror concept of a cursed item wreaking havoc on suburbia. Swainey himself is redolent of One Foot’s creeping sense of Lynchian unease; an outwardly friendly man, who often helps out the aged and the community, he lives with an unseen mother he cares for and frequently ambushes Victor or Margaret with a monologue in unusual situations – through a door he’s inserted into his fence, or practicing archery by using his house as a field.

Renwick plays distinctly on our broader horror knowledge of Norman Bates with Swainey; the outwardly normal loner who could be inventing his mother, or could be up to even more sinister goings on. Unlike in Psycho (1960), One Footnever commits to anything with Swainey beyond a sense of existential depression and loneliness, but actor Owen Brenman plays him just off-kilter enough to leave the audience wondering if Swainey has dark, horrific secrets lurking behind his suburban homestead.

Renwick takes the biggest delight, however, in how he paints the perception of Victor. Audiences knew him as a misanthrope broadly, but those paying attention would see what Margaret saw, as she describes in “Warm Champagne”: “he’s the most sensitive man I’ve ever met. And that’s why I love him and why I constantly want to ram his head into a television screen”. Victor is actually kind and generous in many of his actions, his temper only triggered by the selfishness and unkindness of his fellow man, but through the cleverness of his storytelling, Renwick paints Victor to his neighbours as a combination of psychopath, serial killer and deranged old man.

The central source of comedy mined from his other neighbours Patrick & Pippa Trench (Angus Deayton & Janine Duvitski) lies in the confluence of events that build, over seasons, to both of them (Patrick particularly) considering Victor to be completely insanely. The joy for the audience is understanding the reasons, be they bad luck or mistakes or conflicts, that lead to the misunderstanding, and revelling in Patrick & Pippa’s escalating terror.

Take “The Pit and the Pendulum” (one of many episode names Renwick would steal or adapt from gothic horror sources), in which they find Victor buried up to his neck in soil by a disgruntled gardener he quarrelled with, his head under a plant pot. What about “The Man Who Blew Away”, in which Patrick sees a naked old man swinging by his office window as he introduces his setup to new corporate bosses, a man who is in fact Mr Foskett, someone the Meldrew’s met years ago who randomly turns up, stays all day, and then later kills himself after his wife and children leave him.

Or “Secret of the Seven Sorcerors”, in which attempts to build bridges between Victor & Patrick result in an escalating series of misunderstandings revolving around a magic act and an old, amateur magician accidentally trapped in a box, who Patrick believes has been intentionally locked up by Victor. There are plenty more examples but each of them work as part of a consistent, running gag in which titanic bad luck and misunderstanding combine to project the image of Victor as a malevolent, crazy human being. The results are often hilarious.

Yet it would be unfair to describe One Foot as simply throwaway, as Renwick is unafraid to use horror-based narratives to either create pathos or develop character.

Perhaps the most infamous and celebrated episode of One Foot in the Grave is “Hearts of Darkness”, which starts as a not so veiled play on Joseph Conrad’s 19th century novel (by way of cinematic homage Apocalypse Now (1979)) and segues midway from a comical Victor & co lost on a day out episode into an incredibly dark expose of elder abuse at a remote care home, where Victor transforms into a one man vigilante to save the abused victims, confront the matronly woman in charge, drug the abusive care workers and truss them up as scarecrows in a nearby field.

The episode forced BBC edits on broadcast to remove scenes that challenged censors over depicting the abuse on screen, but while Victor’s punishment of the abusers is macabre in the extreme, Renwick ensures a deeper level of justice infuses the story. Victor gets the chance to right a wrong that fate, in his own life, rarely affords him; he stumbles upon the abuse, deals with it, and then disappears into the night. “Victor Meldrew, the Crimson Avenger!” as he jokes in another episode, indeed.

In a different context is ‘Endgame’, an episode toward the tail end of the series that could have operated as a finale in other circumstances. Victor buys a cheap, old, battered caravan which he later comes to believe is inhabited by the spirit of Mrs Velda Bassett, a Satan worshipper, and upon rowing with Margaret and taking himself off in the caravan on a solo holiday to Dorset, he has a vision of a ‘fetch’ of Margaret—in folklore a vision of someone about to die before they do—before hearing she has had a near-fatal stroke. ‘Endgame’, at times, is the closest One Foot comes to genuinely engaging with the supernatural, as director Christine Gernon works to enhance the level of creeping dread and fear around the supposed haunted caravan.

“Endgame” is the second episode in a row to expressly lean into the ‘90s penchant for genre television—The X-Files being the big TV horror phenomenon at the time—after “Starbound” toys with the possibility Victor might have been abducted by aliens. The horror behind these events, the supernatural possibilities, are always played down by Renwick, who merely uses them to heighten One Foot’s often bleak or bizarre mood, but in other places Renwick actively encourages more of a plain strange or sadistic streak.

“Hole in the Sky” features Christopher Ryan (of The Young Ones fame) playing twin brothers, both workmen, who pull repeated practical jokes on Margaret that frequently involve serious and bloody injuries, much to her annoyance and Victor’s amusement. But in a classic example of ‘cry wolf’, when one brother is genuinely injured, Margaret doesn’t believe him and he ends up embroiled in a serious argument with a group of invading, profane pensioners, one played by Hilary Mason, chilling in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) decades earlier.

“Tales of Terror” contains a ghoulish postscript to the characters of Ronnie & Mildred, a pair of nerdy, joined at the hip friends, endlessly cheery, who the Meldrew’s go to great lengths to avoid. Mildred, in the middle of a game of Happy Families, hangs herself from the upstairs window, the camera showing the bottom half of her corpse dangling by the window as a storm rages, and a baffled Ronnie looks heartbroken. It’s so unexpected, to us and to Victor and Margaret, that it provides a real punch, almost making you feel bad for enjoying the Meldrew’s avoidance of two well-meaning friends, one of whom was suffering from such intense depression she takes her own life. These kind of episodes display just how unafraid One Foot in the Grave was to confront the horrors within our own psychology, as well as play, from a comedic standpoint, on horrific tropes and concepts from film, television and literature.

The episode that, for me, sums up just how well David Renwick’s series balances the prosaic and horrific, the ghoulish and the banal, and indeed the strange and the normal, is “The Futility of the Fly”. Aside from the haunting and emotional series finale, it stands as the strongest episode in a rather weak final season, built around the a massive sculpture of a fly that is delivered to the Meldrew’s house. They never know where it comes from, who sends it or why, and it’s a fact that fascinates their housekeeper and aspiring playwright Katy, who stages a ribald, end of the pier take on Victor & Margaret’s life, with all its bizarre happenings, that is savaged by a London critic.

He refuses to buy into the idea that the fly would just appear, with no context, claiming—in one of the best inversions of Victor’s catchphrase—that “I don’t believe it”. The fly is the one story thread in seasons worth of plotting that Renwick—a writer who would lie face down on his carpet for hours agonising over how to make storylines connect—intentionally doesn’t explain. That’s the point. The mystery, and the potential horror behind who would send such a macabre object to the Meldrew’s and why, underscores the intersection between reality and terror that One Foot resides in.

The brilliance of One Foot in the Grave is how it manages to combine the utterly mundane with the extreme and make them believably in their unbelievability. Victor & Margaret live in a fairly anodyne part of ‘90s Britain, not wealthy but not poor either, with fairly liberal but undefined politics, and a sense that they are secure in house and home. Everything that happens to Victor, and by consequence Margaret, happens to them, thanks to largely farcical misunderstandings, mistakes and cosmic bad luck, but Renwick’s series is entirely about one man’s stand against the growing self-destructive nature of society.

The horror that surrounds the series, which Renwick and his directors work to enhance, aware of our awareness of many of the classic horror tropes they are indulging, is a consequence of Victor watching a societal decay in everything from youth to business to government and beyond. The horror of One Footis, truly, change. It is of a developing world that Victor is no longer part of, and doesn’t understand. How else to explain the callous, offhand and brutal nature of his sudden death in “Things Aren’t Simple Anymore”? Of all the ways Victor could have been killed or badly injured over the seasons, he dies in a hit and run accident on a rainy side street.

Here is the beauty of that final episode, and the gut punch we are left with. Margaret learns, months after Victor’s death, that Glynis—a fellow widow she met subsequently through a community group and befriended—was the one who hit Victor. The steel with which Annette Crosbie silently looks at Glynis as the woman rambles with guilt, trying to explain what happened, is for me the scariest moment in the entire series. There is coldness and murder in her eyes, and we earlier saw Margaret swear she would kill the person who struck Victor down if she ever found them.

In a wonderfully ambiguous moment, we see Margaret hold painkillers near Glynis’ drink. We never see if she put them in. We only see her hand Glynis the drink, walk away, get in her car and drive off. We never know what Margaret did. We are left to decide for ourselves if she murdered or forgave. The horror of One Foot in the end is that, like the fly, and like all of the cosmic weirdness visited upon Victor, we will never know why.

Now that… I do believe…

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Running for six series, a Christmas special, and three special concluding episodes between 1992 and 1998, Simon Nye’s ITV and later BBC series (based on a book of the same name by the writer), Men Behaving Badly was a show that struck a clear chord in the 90’s as a response to the phenomenon of the ‘New Man’, a pro-feminist, almost new age male figure who eschewed boorish masculinity at the tail end of the 1980’s and into the 1990’s, but we must be careful to mark out Nye’s series as a rejection of such a movement. Men Behaving Badly is sometimes mischaracterised as a major influence on the birth of ‘laddism’, or a ‘new lad’ subculture which rejected the progressive, gender equal feminist movement in favour of a return to masculine, and often misogynistic ideals.

In truth, Nye’s series is a clear and approximate satire on the rejection of the ‘New Man’, revolving around two (or as it ends up being, three) men who both epitomise aspects of ‘laddism’ while proving, uncategorically, how pathetic such positions are. While Men Behaving Badly gets off to a slow and in places rocky start with its first series, the template by the end of the first six episodes is clearly defined. Martin Clunes’ Gary and Harry Enfield’s Dermot are flatmates and a fairly useless pair of men at the tail end of their youth, still trying to define themselves by fake masculinity, sexual promiscuity, and personal success. In the time honoured tradition of British comedy, they are endlessly doomed to failure in all of these aspects, held back by their own selfishness, lack of self-awareness and frequent childish behaviour.

Even more acutely, especially with the benefit of hindsight, neither Gary or Dermot in the first series are men who don’t actually behave particularly *badly*.

Men Behaving Badly premiered on ITV in February 1992, a studio-based sitcom which aired before what is known as the ‘watershed’, based on the rather dry allegory of drainage basins designed to separate water into different areas; in TV terminology, the ‘watershed’ applies to programmes with content designated at adult audiences, which broadcasters have strict Ofcom rules to abide by in terms of what is shown before 9pm, specifically for the protection of children. With broadcast television now on the wane, the watershed concept is transforming via cable pay per view and streaming services into parental locking systems and the like, but the watershed was particularly applicable to a show like Men Behaving Badly – except at first.

Airing in a pre-9pm slot on ITV, the first and indeed second series of Men Behaving Badly are decidedly much more milquetoast than later series, once the show moved to airing on the BBC for the rest of its run in a post-watershed slot. The first series is frequently naughty, filled with double entendre and frank discussion about sexual intercourse—indeed sex is the main topic on Gary and Dermot’s brains—but aside from some angry outbursts, they don’t indulge too heavily in the kind of overtly ‘laddish’ behaviour that would become associated with the show at its peak around the fourth and fifth series. Series 1 is often described as the show at its weakest, and while they may be true given the comedic heights it scales, the scripts are much funnier than you might remember.

Famously of course, Enfield—who at the time was undeniably the star of the show thanks to his BBC sketch series Harry Enfield’s Television Programme, later known as Harry Enfield & Chums (one of the best sketch series of the 90’s)—did not enjoy his experience on the show and Dermot was only a fixture for these first six episodes.

According to co-star Clunes, Enfield was out after being disappointed at the pilot episode, Intruders:

Men Behaving Badly didn’t start with a script coming through the door. It got going simply because Harry Enfield signed up to star in it. His original vision was for it not to be like a usual sitcom. Then we made the pilot and it shocked him. It was bad. It didn’t faze me since I was nobody from nowhere, but you could see Harry wanted out. He was under contract, though, so had to do one series. I’ve not watched the pilot since. Actually, no one has. It’s never been aired. It was everything Harry railed against: coarse, with the director saying you’ve got to be chalk and cheese – abrasive like The Likely Lads.

Clunes is referring to the fact that Series 1, due to Enfield’s presence and thanks to a contractual issue with ITV, has never been repeated on broadcast television (Series 2 has been, perhaps due to the fact Enfield was not a feature), and his words make Series 1 sound a little more remote and inaccessible than it always has been – widely available of course on VHS (I wore out my copies in the 90’s and 00’s), and later on DVD – but it speaks to the fact most of the cast believe Series 1 is best forgotten; an inferior take on, as Clunes suggests, hit 1960’s sitcom The Likely Lads.

This isn’t quite fair to Series 1. You can see the DNA of Men Behaving Badlyin something like The Likely Lads (which featured James Bolam & Rodney Bewes as two working class friends in 60’s Newcastle – later revived as 70’s sequel series Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?), but if that show reflects a cynical, northern viewpoint on modern life during a period of significant social and political change, then Simon Nye’s show is happening, certainly in terms of British society, at the birth of gender identity. If women’s roles in the 50’s and 60’s were changing to move out of the home and into the workplace, women of the 90’s were becoming ever more empowered in terms of their sexual agency and dominant femininity. Series 1 may not find all of the comedy in that but the seeds are there.

Of the two leads, Gary is immediately the stronger character, with Clunes instantly getting a handle on his middle-class, little Englander, laddish yet ultimately quite emotionally pathetic character. Gary owns his own flat, holds down a decent job as head of a small, provincial security firm, has a perfectly nice, equally middle-class girlfriend in nurse Dorothy (played with redoubtable wit and comic timing by Caroline Quentin) and absolutely believes life has handed him a duff card. Clunes, the son of respected Shakespearian character actor Alec Clunes, understands Gary comes as much from the Basil Fawlty school of perennial underachievers as he does Bewes’ aspiration Bob Ferris. You get the feeling Fawlty Towers is a major influence on Nye’s work here, and Clunes brings out all of Gary’s repressed fury when he gets the opportunity.

Gary is one of those great British comedy archetypes – the trapped Englander forced to live with his lot. If Fawlty has his quaint hotel stuck eternally in some kind of colonial British loop, Gary has the security firm job in a tiny office where he rarely seems to do any actual work. If Basil is surrounded by doddering old guests who feel trapped in a time warp, Gary has ageing workers George (Ian Lindsay) and Anthea (Valerie Minifie); both dithery and strange, both at the whim of Gary’s neuroses and questions (he often treats them like therapists to work through issues with those he lives with). And if Fawlty has his shrewish wife Sybil and their loveless marriage, Gary has Dorothy – a woman who knows full well she can do better, knows Gary is a boorish sexist with little respect for women, but loves him for it anyway (though they are among the most viperish and on/off in the first series than they’ll ever be).

“You really are a yob, aren’t you Gary?” Dorothy asks in ‘The Bet’ as he mocks her slideshow of classical Italian architecture, but there’s a sense that Gary only rejects her middle-class aspirations and strong feminist attitudes because he believes a real man should be that way.

When Dorothy starts dallying with Graham, a very middle-class (but also intentionally quite boring man), Gary is incensed. He consistently believes he can do better than Dorothy, and wants to sleep with more women than Dorothy, but after two years has come to rely on her more than he would like to admit. Gary is a great comic creation from the off not just because he ticks many of these archetypal sitcom boxes as a bitter, raging Englishman, but because he’s essentially at war with himself – between the middle-class, relatively affluent boyfriend he could be, and the lager-swilling, womanising working class boor he thinks he should be. “It’s not easy being a guy in the 1990’s you know?” he rails at one point. It’s an existential line that could define the series.

It’s why the concept begins to click a little more from Series 2 when Neil Morrissey arrives as new flatmate Tony, because it allows Nye to tug a little more on the often-unspoken class divide between the two central male characters, and accentuate Gary’s entitled southern middle-class snobbery and arrogance even more. Nye can’t quite pull that off with Gary and Dermot because, to a degree, they’re from similar worlds. They’re old friends from university who come from similar backgrounds you sense, though it’s much less clear with Dermot as he’s far less defined as a character. Enfield plays him so still and deadpan he almost neuters Clunes’ repressed fury. Their dynamic feels like Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show with the edges filed off.

Enfield, in truth, is not nearly as bad in the role as people might remember – he just doesn’t fit. Dermot feels like an aberration and you suspect had Enfield continued in the role, Men Behaving Badly would not have lasted as long, or become the success it was. This isn’t to say Morrissey was the key to the formula, as Clunes is probably the primary reason the show works so well (he’s probably the only character you could really remove from the series and the show wouldn’t work anymore), but the show only really comes into its own once the Gary/Tony dynamic is figured out—in tandem with the aforementioned post-watershed slot. Dermot just isn’t that much of a lad; he’s arrogant, vain, a liar and he enjoys all of the aspects you would expect a ‘lad’ to enjoy, but he’s so passive about the experience of living with Gary and life in general, he never comes alive as a character.

That’s not to say Dermot isn’t a funny character, it just feels as if he’s been airlifted out of a different kind of comedy script and ported into Men Behaving Badly, which is a little unfair to Enfield, despite his visibly disinterested performance.

It’s just hard to really buy across Series 1 what Nye wants to accomplish with Dermot – his obsession with the literal ‘girl next door’ in Deborah (played by Leslie Ash, best known by the early 90’s for her co-starring role in cult late 70’s music film Quadrophenia and 80’s detective series C.A.T.S. Eyes), the beautiful new neighbour who moves in upstairs in Intruders and serves as a catalyst for much of Dermot’s character arc; be it turning down the now glamorous sister of an old flame in Animals because he can’t get Deborah out of his head, or working for Deborah in My Brilliant Career as a waiter in order to be close to her and impress her all in one step.

It’s a character arc that works much better with Tony Smart, Dermot’s replacement in Series 2 when Enfield walked away from the series, played by Neil Morrissey.

It would be unfair to suggest that Men Behaving Badly starts truly working when Tony enters the picture because, in truth, parts of Series 2 simply don’t work as well as Series 1. It takes Nye a while to figure out the dynamic between Gary and Tony, and indeed figure out quite what he wants Tony to be as character. Morrissey brings much more of a relaxed naturalism to Tony than Enfield allowed himself with Dermot, but at first Tony is presented as a shaggy-haired, bohemian musician perhaps to provide a counterpoint to Gary’s dull, middle-class repression. Tony is from the north and could have time warped out of The Likely Lads era in Series 2; in ‘People Behaving Irritatingly’, we see Tony’s annoying brother who is much broader in his accent and much more directly reflects Tony’s working class origins, very much unlike Gary’s relatively privileged upbringing.

‘Rent Boy’, an episode which very much shows how Men Behaving Badly has in some ways not dated very well, plays with Gary’s homophobia in a way that you suspect Nye though was an ironic take on the kind of ‘gay panic’ visible in 1970’s sitcom world (Dorothy and Deborah are both on hand to tell Gary he’s an idiot for worrying Tony might be gay), but ends up playing into many of the same narrative stereotypes (the fact Tony immediately fancies Deborah on his introduction in ‘Gary & Tony’ proves he’s probably not gay anyway, invalidating the entire episode). It’s only by the end of Series 2 does Nye begin creeping in the elements that will define Tony going forward; scaling back the musician aspect and ramping up his growing obsession with Deborah and his layabout weirdness.

Crucially alongside this, Morrissey and Ash have demonstrable on-screen chemistry together; you can believe Deborah would fancy Tony, whereas you never really bought into that with Dermot – he was too dorky, in his own way. Tony is a bit cooler, a bit sexier, and Deborah—though probably the weakest overall character in the ensemble—always looks for two things in her prospective boyfriends: charisma and success (even though Mike, the boyfriend she has in Series 1, is pure 1980’s cheesy, slick soap-opera sleazebag). Tony has one of the two, and Nye nicely puts in place the building blocks for Tony and Deborah’s eventual relationship toward the end of the series (not that he ever should have pulled the trigger on that, but we’ll talk about that down the line…). Once this key foursome are established, Men Behaving Badly edges closer toward the point it *really* begins to work by Series 3.

It also, with Gary and Tony, has two actors and characters nicely placed to explore the lad culture phenomenon on the verge of burgeoning by the end of 1992. The term ‘new lad’ would be popularised in 1993 by Sean O’Hagen in Loaded, during the year Men Behaving Badly was off air before it would return, newly on the BBC and in time slot where it could fully capitalise on the show’s name and potential. Clunes doesn’t agree, however, that Men Behaving Badly was responsible for the birth of so-called ‘laddism’ as the series began moving toward becoming a cult hit:

We didn’t set out to do a zeitgeisty thing. Although it aired in the early 1990s, it was never meant to sum up that particular time. It was just funny to laugh at people like Gary and Tony. Loaded magazine didn’t come along till later, but the show still got lumped in with lads mag culture, despite Neil and I being a good 10 years older than their readership. The series was an exhalation after a finger-pointy period about men making life terrible for women, but it was also a bit: “We’re just like this sometimes, so shut up.” The men always lost, too: Dorothy and Deborah had the upper hand. We did The Late Late Show once and they tried to drag us into a war of the sexes. We just said: “Look at the programme – it’s not about anything!”

True or not on reflection, the time would soon come that these men could start behaving very badly on television indeed.

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What, though, is Fawlty Towers really about? What are all our comedies about, whether in the UK with a long-standing tradition of legendary comedic creations or the US with their penchant for long-running, familiar series? Every drama is about something and comedy is no different. The jokes are born from an idea or theme or societal construct the writer is looking to explore. One Foot in the Grave sees David Renwick unpicking the listlessness of the working man at the tail end of Thatcherite neoliberalism after Victor Meldrew is displaced by a heartless corporate system. Only Fools and Horses was a fantasy of working class meritocracy, of Derek, and in a different way Rodney, Trotter overcoming their background of poverty and struggle to try and prove their worth within an elitist class system where the deck is stacked against them.

Following the surge of protests across the world after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there was been a swift trickle-down effect in terms of racial politics which has proven to be on some level ‘knee-jerk’. Britbox and BBC iPlayer started by removing the 2000’s Matt Lucas & David Walliams’ series Little Britain, which was always festooned with sketches that were politically incorrect even back then, citing that “times have changed”, while Netflix subsequently pulled The League of Gentlemen and The Mighty Boosh as both display characters who engage in what would be termed ‘blackface’. Catch up service UKTV subsequently removed the well-known Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Germans’, featuring Basil’s infamous line “Don’t mention the war!”, due to the overt racism displayed by the character, and the use of racial slurs by an ageing colonial character. This was been questioned by some who felt the reactionary cultural politics of the moment has gone too far.

‘The Germans’, however, is an example in which context is missing, and with comedy, context is king.

Fawlty Towers is, chiefly, about good old fashioned British repression, and indeed a neo-colonial repression during a 1970’s clinging onto the last vestiges of already-dead Empire. Basil encompasses the ‘little Englander’ to a tee; a stiff-backed, elitist coward from, likely, a middle-class background who has the whiff of retired military man about his bearing, even though he almost certainly never served (there is a consistent joke where he uses a Korean War wound to get out of things he doesn’t want to do, allowing for the brilliant quip from his wife Sybil “he was in the catering corps, he used to poison them”). He instantly despises anyone working-class, including his wife who likely married him in the early 60’s believing he would make her ‘upwardly mobile’, and lionises anyone upper class, such as the doddering old Major who lives eternally at his quaint Torquay hotel.

If Only Fools and Horses is about the working man proving himself to the elitists in the midst of Thatcherism, Fawlty Towers is about a false, deluded elitist who wants to live in a bygone age in the wake of us entering the European community.

Basil doesn’t just hate people from different countries (such as his Spanish stooge Manuel, who he routinely physically and mentally abuses), but he hates anyone who represents social and sexual counterculture that runs against his repressive, British colonial views. ‘The Wedding Party’ is the chief example, with Basil running around trying to prove his Canadian waitress Polly is sleeping with the father of a family she is friends with; his farcical misunderstanding serves only to expose his own sexual repression, as Sybil keeps catching him accidentally molesting at one point a beautiful Australian tourist. “Do you *really* think a girl like that could possibly be interested in an ageing, bryliantine stick insect like you?” she asks him in a put down which shows her equal antipathy. Theirs is the coldest marriage probably ever conveyed in comedy.

‘The Psychiatrist’ is the same, in which Basil attempts to both fete a pair of educated, middle-class psychiatrists while trying to prove Nicky Henson’s swaggering, openly masculine (and from modern eyes, quite ridiculous-looking) hunk Mr Johnson is sneaking women into his room. This only serves to prove to the psychiatrists how mad he is. “There’s enough material there for an entire conference” one quips. Consistently, Fawlty Towers places the humour on Basil. You are always, in every episode, laughing at his complete inability to read social situations, to react in any way appropriately to any guest or member of his staff, and the extreme methods he goes to in order to prove he’s right about any number of sexual or psychological or indeed racial problems he has with his guests. Basil’s ignorance and prejudice fuels the entire series. Manuel is sympathetic, Polly (herself an immigrant) put upon, and while Sybil may be viperish, she would undoubtedly be happier away from her awful husband.

Granted, the show does at times reflect the 70’s quite laissez-faire approach to racial stereotypes. ‘The Builders’ certainly buys into the negative idea of the ‘lazy Mick’ with Mr O’Reilly, the befuddled Irish cowboy builder who Basil gets in to essentially wreck the hotel, while the African doctor in ‘The Germans’ does have a whiff of the ‘perfect black man’ about him, a touch of the Sidney Poitier-style ‘intelligent black saviour’ which was as patronising and, in its own way, homogenised and racist as a negative stereotype at the time. Did it also need to have the Major use racial slurs such as the ‘n’ or ‘w’ word in relation to ‘West Indians’? Probably not. It’s the most outdated, unnecessary scene in the show, even if it’s designed to display an even deeper prejudice from the Major–a genuine colonial throwback–than Basil himself. Beyond that, however, ‘The Germans’—the episode now banned, at least temporarily—is the chief example of Basil’s neo-colonial prejudice, of his inability to detach from a racist class system.

While Cleese perhaps lets him off slightly by having Basil suffering from a medical delirium for the final act, Basil obsesses about not mentioning World War Two to their German guests, then constantly does, before goose-stepping around the hotel in probably the most famous clip from the entire series.

This episode is many things—funny, chiefly, being one of them—but it is not racist.

‘The Germans’ encapsulates why Fawlty Towers is actually very self-aware in terms of the social and psychological politics of the post-war period, particularly in relation to many of the other comedies on British TV at the time. We are not laughing at Basil making his German guests cry and when claiming they started it, his retort after they refuse this: “Yes you did, you invaded Poland!”, we are laughing at the horror of how politically incorrect Basil is. Our laughter is reactionary in sympathy with his guests, who are portrayed as perfectly nice, normal people who are being not just abused by Basil’s horrendous, English colonial racist attitudes, but traumatised by invoking memories of war and loss they would have experienced as younger people. ‘The Germans’ paints Basil as the abuser, and this is the key context banning this episode has missed.

Fawlty Towers was a show constructed on defeating the kind of stereotypes many ‘comedies’ at the time would reinforce. While Johnny Speight might have intended Alf Garnett in Til’ Death Us Do Part (and later in the 80’s in In Sickness and in Health) to be a bigot we should reject, his openly racist vitriol was lionised by less progressive parts of society who rejected multiculturalism which arrived in the UK during the 1950’s, and bought into the myth of the ‘foreigner coming over and taking our jobs & women’ etc… Love Thy Neighbour mines too much humour out of Jack Smethurst’s horror at living next to Rudolph Walker’s Caribbean family, again reinforcing the stereotype of not wanting to live next door to a black family. Are You Being Served?, while not dealing as much in racial politics, is from modern eyes terrifyingly homophobic and even transphobic in how it portrays John Inman’s Mr Humphries. Most heinous is perhaps Curry & Chips, a short-lived show (again written by Speight), that outraged viewers even in 1969, in which Spike Milligan, in full blackface, plays a character who is literally nicknamed ‘Paki Paddy’.

Yep.

All of these examples should be, largely, consigned to the comedic dustbin of history. Only halcyon members from a largely deceased generation keep shows like Til’ Death or Are You Being Served? alive now, shows which have long been venerated. I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s with them being widely shown on UK Gold in repeats, as was Fawlty Towers or Only Fools, both shows which have at various points displayed racism, sexism and homophobia (Only Fools is particularly one for the latter).

But where do we draw the line? At what point does problematic become ‘cancelled’, as the term goes? HBO Max, the new American streaming service, removed Gone With the Wind until it could be placed within a new historical context where the overt racism is clarified for viewers, and this does make some sense. The film, a recognised American classic which even saw its black co-star Hattie McDaniel be the first African-American to win an Academy Award, has a key place in film history and should not be forgotten.

The same needs to be said for Fawlty Towers.

It is, unquestionably, one of the greatest sitcoms ever made, not just in Britain but the entire world. Some of the humour may have dated, but what it speaks to, frankly, has not. The ‘little Englander’ sub-culture and a veneration of Empire has only grown thanks to right-wing caricatures such as Nigel Farage and the subsequent Brexit fiasco. We even had a Prime Minister who wants to be Churchill, a previously inviolate historical figure now being talked about amongst those who are seeing their statues be torn down for representing racist or colonial historical attitudes that we look past in order to venerate their place in building modern Britain. Modern Britain, however, is not perfect. It is riven with societal issues, class warfare, cultural divides and rampant inequality, and these symbols simply underscore how the Western world is now amidst a Cultural Cold War: largely youthful, liberal metropolitan attitudes on one side and post-colonial, conservative beliefs on the other.

You can understand why Little Britain might be removed, or at least perhaps re-edited to remove the instances of ‘blackface’ or characters such as ‘Ting-Tong’ (which wasn’t funny back then). As much as I admit, I did used to laugh at Little Britain, there is no doubt the comedy is punching down at minorities, reinforcing stereotypes and cruelly utilising others’ misfortunes for comedy purposes. Even co-star David Walliams has disavowed some aspects of it these days. You can understand why the litany of 60’s or 70’s series which have become culturally unpalatable to a more progressive, empathetic and multicultural society have been now filed away as historical artefacts best left untouched. But we must be careful at how we approach shows such as The Mighty Boosh or The League of Gentlemen, in which the instances that could be classed as racist have to be placed in context and if done so, do not fall into any kind of prejudice bracket. Audiences have the ability to discern genuine racism from contextual use, and should be trusted to do so.

We veer too close to outright censorship if we push this too far. It would be in line with intended Conservative party pornography restrictions at one point, which were downright Draconian. Comedy is entirely subjective and contextual but we cannot reach a point where we become so afraid of offence that we shut down anything where nuance is key. If ‘The Germans’ might have, to some, racially offensive content, add a warning before the episode starts and allow the public to make up their own minds as to whether they engage or not. I suspect most people have the intelligence to understand the racism or bigotry espoused by characters such as Basil, or Alan Partridge, or The Office’s David Brent, is designed to reflect their ‘little Englander’ prejudice and is written so the joke is very much on them, and they as characters are designed to look stupid for reinforcing such outdated racial views.

This is probably a long winded way of me saying, let’s not cancel comedy from decades past just yet for the purposes of firing a shot in our culture war. Fawlty Towers is too good, and too important to our cultural history, to live next to Curry & Chips.

Thanks for reading, please subscribe and remember… this is no laughing matter.

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I’ve been writing now, professionally, for a solid ten years (unprofessionally ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper). I’ve written reams about film and TV. I’ve written books about subjects including Star Trek and Sean Connery. I’ve never properly sat down and written regularly about comedy.

That’s the purpose of this blog. Analysis of comedy which tries to unpick what is being said underneath the laughs. The focus will be on British comedy, of which there is an embarrassment of riches across 70+ years now, and will look at comedy of yesteryear and contemporary work. I will also look at British movies at points, plus where comedy and drama overlap (so called ‘dramedy’) if it feels relevant.

Hopefully you’ll find something in the writing to enjoy, something that might enhance your love of a particular comedy series or movie or point of discussion. It would be nice to monetise this down the road and add bonus or curated work, but the focus for a while at least will be to establish an audience of people who might be up for shelling out a few coppers for a bit more. We’ll see.

What would genuinely be much more gratifying for me would be a comment on what you think, whether you agree or not, or ask questions etc… there’s nothing better for a writer (especially in an age where the written word is being supplanted by video ‘content’) than to have some communication and know people are reading. Means way more than a few quid.

If you want more on what I’m up to, as I’m a busy boy with podcasts, books, writing (mainly for www.filmstories.co.uk these days) etc… do check out linktr.ee/ajblackwriter for a deep dive.

Thanks for reading and remember, this is no laughing matter.