A Tier 4 Christmas has caused DH and I to turn to the TV for some telly comfort food.
A few nights ago we started watching Men Behaving Badly on Netflix. This was a show that I remember with a lot of affection from my early teens and DH felt the same way. Aside from the Christmas episode- which I stand by as being a great slice of Christmas comedy- we hadn’t watched any of them since the early noughties.
For reference MBB began in 1992. I was 12 and didn’t watch the early series, coming in at around the series 4 mark (although I did see the earlier series later, probably in my mid to late teens). It ran for a total of six series and there was a Christmas special in 1997 and then a trilogy which ended the whole thing off in 1998. It launched the careers of Martin Clunes and Caroline Quentin and brought Neil Morrissey and Leslie Ash to prominence after some years in minor roles. Harry Enfield was also in the first series and my understanding is that he was pretty well known comedian and added a bit of a star turn to it.
In case you’re not British or were living in a hole during the 90s it was a bawdy, un-PC half hour BBC comedy (actually, it started out on ITV for the first two series) and the premise was that Gary, a 30ish year old security sales manager, lives in a flat in London with his flatmate (and friend from uni) Dermot. They’re both immature misogynists whose passions are drinking down the local (grotty) boozer, drinking cans of Stella at home and talking about women they’d like to shag. Gary has a girlfriend, nurse Dorothy, but Dermot doesn’t have a regular girlfriend, instead chasing largely unobtainable women, including the woman who owns the flat upstairs, Deborah. Gary owns the flat and has a steady job, Dermot pays him rent (or more often doesn’t) and is in and out of work. Dermot leaves after series 1 and is replaced by Tony, but Tony occupies the exact same space as Dermot, just with a northern accent. So far, so The-Inbetweeners-15-years-on.
But it’s just awful. Really awful. By the time the show ended I was in my late teens and I don’t remember the world being this....unpleasant nor the show being so broad and offensive. The men are just... idiots and the women shrill and nagging, hen-pecking the men and seeming to not like them at all. The language is really offensive, with the women referred to as “bints”, “bitches” and “slags” and constant references to sex that also border on being unacceptable.
The central romances between Gary and Dorothy and Tony and Deborah are horrible in their own quite different ways: Dorothy seems to despise Gary, and who could blame her because he’s knob. But equally he doesn’t seem to like her at all either, doing everything he can to avoid any kind of real commitment to her. Their relationship is depressing: They constantly argue, seemingly only getting along when it comes to sex (though Dorothy spends much of her time rejecting Gary’s advances). The relationship is quite parental, with Gary as the naughty school boy and Dorothy the mother who just spends her whole time telling him off. They aren’t really ever that nice to one another, and although the message is clearly meant to be that they’ve got each other’s backs when the chips are down, that isn't as clear here in 2021 as it was obviously meant to be in 1995. They also both cheat on one another more than once. Dorothy even sleeps with Tony, which Gary hardly seems to care about.
Tony and Deborah’s romance is equally depressing in a different way: Tony is a sad, sex-obsessed and mopes around the flat all day, drinking lager that he buys with his JSA. He pines over Deborah in the flat and she spends all her time knocking him back and going out with other people. Until the last series when she’s reached her late 30s and basically goes out with him out of desperation. They’re also not very nice to one another but with Tony being more thick bloke who pines and her being slightly less acid-tongued than Dorothy.
There are also some questionable running themes: marriage is often discussed negatively by Gary and Dorothy in a way that maybe was meant to feel modern because she wants it no more than he does, but they do end up almost marrying and later having a baby and you don’t get the feeling that either of them really wanted to (they were just out of any other options). The women as killjoys theme has been discussed and is weaved into the very fabric of the show, whilst the men act like teenagers and avoid the women’s attempts to spoil their fun. There is also a really unpalatable theme about very young girls being fair game throughout the show... Gary makes reference to his desire to shag his 17yo niece several times, at one point saying that she has “buttocks like a racehorse”. Watching it, me and my husband literally shouted “Christ no!” in unison. So bad!
We were also shocked at how much the characters drink and smoke. Culturally the world seems hugely different to now, much more different to how I remember it. Drinking and smoking is done constantly and without question. We also have a good laugh and how rich these characters are. Both Gary and Deborah are 30/31/32ish at the start of the series and both own the 2 bed flats that they live in (that seem to be a conversion of an older house). They live in Ealing and such a flat there now would cost circa £500k. No conceivable way that a middle manager of a security firm and a restaurant manager (which is Deborahs job) would be able to get mortgages, alone, on these properties now.
So my question is this- for someone who was a child and then a teenager throughout the run of this show... were things really this different? It looks like a different world to the one we are in now to the extent that it’s hard to believe it was only 30 odd years ago.
Is this how people felt in the 90s when repeats of beloved 60s and 70s sitcoms were shown? Will we feel like this about the big sitcoms of the teenies like The Inbetweeners, Him and Her, Friday Night Dinner and People Just Do Nothing? Or was this show actually really horrible at the time, I just didn’t notice because I was so young?