BBC America is currently running the series on Thursday nights.
Tony and Gary are a couple of likely lads who definitely do not fall into the category of 90's modern man! Gary owns the downstairs flat of the house where most of the action takes place, that is when they are not in the pub. Tony is the lodger and helps pay the bills but has yet to pay a penny rent. Dorothy works as a nurse at the local hospital and Deborah owns the flat above Gary's. Deborah started out as the manageress in a local wine bar until she was made redundant. Gary is in a relationship with Dorothy. Tony would like to be in a relationship with Deborah and constantly reminds Debs of his affections for her.
As you may have guessed from this thumbnail sketch, the main theme running throughout this sitcom is the interaction between two young men and two young women and err, well male hormones and beer!! To say that Gary and Tony lack some of the finesse necessary to win the hearts and minds of the Totty upstairs would be putting it mildly. Their flat is usually a tip and their manners gross to say the least. But love wins through in the end and the girls get their men.
There have been a total of six series of this hit TV sitcom with the first two series shown on ITV network and the last four on the BBC, together with a Christmas Special in 1997. The first series of Men Behaving Badly appeared on British TV in February 1992 with Gary played by Martin Clunes with his original flat mate, Dermot, played by Harry Enfield. Dermot had disappeared by the second series, broadcast in September/October 1992, to be replaced by Tony. Series 3 followed in the summer of 1994 and was the first to shown on the BBC at the later time of 10pm, This allowed the script writers to be somewhat more liberal with the plot and the series enjoyed considerable success in this new format and slot. The last series, series 6, in which Tony finally makes it with Debs is likely to have been the last and I hope we shall be able to enjoy re-runs of this popular comedy for many years to come..
Whether making viewers chuckle or chunder, Men Behaving Badly undeniably, and unapologetically, became the British sitcom of the 1990s, rivalled only by . The antidote to all that 1980s talk of the New Man, MBB made the New Lad into a cause celebre, crystallising 'traditional' male behaviour that had never really gone away but had certainly been out of vogue for a while. To be what the media categorised as a New Man, you had to care and share with your partner, and children if you had them, be responsible and recognise your place in the home and the community. To be a New Lad meant saying 'bollocks' to all of that, being self-centred, rude, crude and boorish, getting pissed on beer, swearing, bragging, belching, farting, fantasising, spewing and publicly rearranging the position of your genitals. Not surprisingly, plenty of men loved MBB, identifying with the two male lead characters, while a good many women tended to like it because it proved what they had always known: that men can be sad berks, interested only in alcohol and sex (or, to quote MBB vernacular, boozing and shagging) - although, inevitably, the two male leads got plenty of the former and little of the latter. Martin Clunes, speaking before the first series aired, got it about right when he described MBB as 'the comedy of the locker-room, that rowdy male behaviour that we try to suppress in public'. Neil Morrissey, his subsequent co-star, has also summed it up by stating, 'Like most blokes we resolve all our problems by having a lager in front of the TV and not talking about anything'. Most of the episodes indeed ended in this non-reflective, inconsequential way, with the two guys sprawled on the couch, licking their wounds by guzzling from a can of lager, having advanced not a whit from the Neanderthal.
Men Behaving Badly was based around the antics of Gary and Dermot (series one) or Tony (subsequently), who share a shambolic London flat. Gary owns the apartment but takes in a lodger to help him pay the bills. (He's not short of money but is thrifty. One also suspects that he needs approving male company.) A pair of thirty-somethings, Gary and Tony cheerily indulge in their beer-swilling existence, talking out their fantasies - sexual and otherwise - and trying to avoid commitment or hard work by opening up another tin or by heading off to their rooms for a spot of private pleasure with a top-shelf magazine. A glamorous blonde, Deborah, owns the flat above Gary's, and is well aware that Tony fancies her, but she usually decides that being single is preferable to being Tony's. Gary has an on-off girlfriend, Dorothy, a sharp-minded hospital nurse who mostly loves Gary but would certainly like him more if his mental age advanced beyond 14. Usually embroiled in the lads' messy pranks, the 'girls' despair over these male specimens but, perhaps sensing that they'd be no better off elsewhere, stay put and try to make the best of a bad situation. Gary owns a small security firm, where his colleagues are George and Anthea; Tony doesn't work. The status quo shifted for the 1997 series when Dorothy and Gary almost made it to the altar, and Tony finally eroded Deborah's resistance and became her boyfriend (a relationship that was already foundering by the 1997 Christmas special). The three-part series over Christmas 1998 brought the show to an end, with Gary closing down his business, Tony almost losing Deborah after taking a job as a postman - and turning into a bore in the process, and, most significantly, Dorothy giving birth to Gary's baby, whose name, - possibly Kylie - was left in the melting pot.
Men Behaving Badly was written by Simon Nye, based on his 1989 novel of the same name. The author himself is anything but a New Lad - more of a New Man, really, if pigeon-holing is your thing - but he invented the Gary and Dermot/Tony characters based upon students he knew at London University. MBB producer Beryl Vertue - who started out in TV at Associated London Scripts in the 1950s, working with Galton and Simpson, Hancock, Milligan, Sykes, Speight and others - read Nye's relatively obscure novel and recognised its TV potential, tracking down the author to his job as a translator in a bank. (Born in 1958, Nye, as a linguist, had translated books about Wagner, Matisse and Braque before writing TV comedy.) Unusually, both Nye and Vertue have appeared in MBB - in the best Hitchcock tradition, Beryl Vertue usually made one fleeting non-speaking appearance in each series; Nye had a non-speaking role in the first episode of series two, when Gary was casting around for a new flatmate after Dermot had gone off on an around-the-world trip. (This was the excuse for Harry Enfield, the brilliant comic oddly miscast in MBB, to leave the show; ironically, it was Enfield who had talked a reluctant Martin Clunes into taking the part of Gary, after both had appeared in ITV's light-drama Gone To The Dogs in 1991.)
While Men Behaving Badly is remembered as a BBC sitcom, the groundwork for its stupendous success was laid on ITV, where it resided for its first two series. But although it won a prize in 1992 as the Best ITV Sitcom of the year (to be truthful, it had little competition), ITV Network Centre rejected a third series and Hartswood Films, MBB's maker, promptly found a slot for it on BBC1 instead. Screened in a post-watershed slot, permitting more colourful language and behaviour, the BBC series won MBB many further awards, as did, individually, Martin Clunes, Caroline Quentin and Simon Nye, and ITV came to bitterly regret its decision.
A US adaptation of Men Behaving Badly, made with that title by the Carsey-Werner Company for NBC, got off to a shaky start, and in content was inevitably less raunchy than the UK original - it had to be for scheduling in a primetime network slot; latter transmissions went out at eight o'clock on Sunday nights, prompting Vertue to comment that it was a time at which 'you cannot behave very badly'. Ron Eldard and Rob Schneider starred as the two lads, renamed Kevin Murphy and Jamie Coleman, while Justine Bateman (from ) was Sarah Stretten, Kevin's nurse girlfriend, and Dina Spybey played Brenda Mikowski, the object of Jamie's lusting. Eldard and Bateman dropped out after the first season, however, and were replaced by Ken Marino (as Steve) and Jenica Bergere (as Katie), but, underachieving, the show was soon cancelled, the last of just 28 episodes being screened in the US on Christmas Day 1997. In the 28 November 1996 edition of the BBC2 arts and popular culture series The Works, Beryl Vertue looked at the making of the American version and examined the differences between the two productions. (To avoid complication with the British original, the US version of Men Behaving Badly is retitled It's A Man's World for export sales.)
Notes. The 1997 short special, Men Behaving Very Badly Indeed, focused on the lads' fixation with Kylie Minogue, reminiscing about their long-lasting lust for the Australian singer/actress by linking clips from previous shows. But when the real Kylie turned up at their flat the boys strangely failed to recognise her. Three months after the final episode, the team reunited for a short piece screened in Comic Relief 1999, appearing in as Swinging Sixties versions of themselves, cast in a 'recently rediscovered' black and white pilot for a 1960s sitcom titled The Naughty Boys. It was fab.
Martin Clunes and Caroline Quentin also appeared together in the TV adaptation of the hit stage-play An Evening With Gary Lineker (first run in the theatre in December 1991), networked by ITV on 14 June 1994. Paul Merton (Quentin's then husband), Clive Owen, Lizzy McInnerny, co-authors Arthur Smith and Chris England, and former football star Lineker himself also appeared. All four stars of Men Behaving Badly squared off against each other (women versus men) in a charity edition of the game-show Bullseye presented as part of Children In Need (BBC1, 20 November 1998) and turned up again in a special edition of C4's food and chat show Late Lunch, screened as Late Lunch Behaving Badly on 23 December 1998. In danger of being perceived as a permanent double-act, Clunes and Morrissey starred in one-off musical comedy film Hunting Venus (Yorkshire for ITV, 31 March 1999) and teamed again for a three-part documentary on Australia, Men Down Under (BBC1, 31 August-14 September 2000). On 11 July 2002 BBC1 screened The Real...Men Behaving Badly, a spurious tie-in that combined clips with interviews with real-life laddish-lads, including Neil Morrissey.
