Category: Men Behaving Badly

Essays, Men Behaving Badly, TV

The Middle Age of Laddism: MEN BEHAVING BADLY (Series 5, 6 + Last Orders)

A J. Black

Celebrated 1990’s British sitcom Men Behaving Badly recently returned to UK Netflix, which feels like a good opportunity to explore a show which helped define its decade, series by series. Has it stood the test of time?

Men Behaving Badly, across its final two series, sees the misadventures of Gary Strang and Tony Smart slide out of the laddism culture they propagated and into the earliest vestiges of comfortable middle age. You can feel the show doing the same along with them.

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.

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Essays, Men Behaving Badly, TV

The Cult of ‘Laddism’: MEN BEHAVING BADLY (Series 3 & 4)

A J. Black

Celebrated 1990’s British sitcom Men Behaving Badly recently returned to UK Netflix, which feels like a good opportunity to explore a show which helped define its decade, series by series. Has it stood the test of time?

If the third series of Men Behaving Badly sets the show on the road to British comedy success, the fourth series is arguably the year that cements the cult following that grew up around it – the mid-1990’s cult of ‘laddism’.

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.

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Essays, Men Behaving Badly, TV

The Birth of ‘Laddism’: MEN BEHAVING BADLY (Series 1 & 2)

A J. Black

Celebrated 1990’s British sitcom Men Behaving Badly recently returned to UK Netflix, which feels like a good opportunity to explore a show which helped define its decade, series by series. Has it stood the test of time?

Men Behaving Badly, one of the most popular and well-loved British comedy series of the 1990’s, you suspect is a show that a lot of people have not rewatched in a long time.

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*.

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