Yahoo News Martin Clunes says 'Men Behaving Badly' would struggle to be made now
Martin Clunes has said that Men Behaving Badly, the 90s sitcom that made him famous, would struggle to be made today.
The 57-year-old Doc Martin star told the Radio Times that the show was very much ‘of its time’.
“These days, it’d have to be People of No Particular Gender Behaving Badly,” he said.
The show first aired on ITV in 1992, starring Clunes as Gary Strang and Neil Morrissey as his dim flatmate Tony, with Leslie Ash and Caroline Quentin as their long-suffering girlfriends Deborah and Dorothy.
It ran over 42 episodes and six series.
Clunes also added that it almost didn’t get made in the first place, because the pilot episode of the show was ‘s**t’.
That first episode was directed John Howard Davies, who also made both Fawlty Towers and The Good Life.
They kept saying: “They’ve got to be chalk and cheese, these two. Gary and Tony have got to keep arguing.’
“That pilot never got shown. We remade it – and if you look at the way the show went, it was completely the opposite.
“Gary forgave Tony for sleeping with his girlfriend, that’s how close they were – and that’s why it was funny.
“But at the time there were these very rigid ideas, and I think that’s what killed sitcoms.”
The show was briefly reprised in a skit for Channel 4’s Stand Up To Cancer benefit in 2014.
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