Review of Men Behaving Badly Series 5

Introduction

This long running BBC comedy series (from Hartswood Films and Pearson TV) has now made its debut on DVD, one series at a time.

The series started in 1990 over on ITV. Harry Enfield (as Dermot) initially starred as Gary’s flatmate before Neil Morrissey (as Tony) arrived at the beginning of Series 2. At the end of the second series, ITV axed it because of poor viewing figures but Pearson took it across to the BBC, utilising the same team. The BBC could see that this series needed nurturing to realise its full potential and invested in it hoping it would turn out to be another of those memorable BBC successful sitcoms.

Sure enough, the series gained huge support from the BBC viewers, and with the welcome replacement of Harry Enfield with Neil Morrissey, it was ensured a successful run. So much so in fact that six full series were made (which ended in 1996), with a final additional ‘Last Orders’ session at the end. The series made household names of its four main cast members Morrissey, Martin Clunes, Leslie Ash and Caroline Quentin.

Series 5 contains some choice episodes:

‘Cowardice’ sees Deborah is going through a "lesbian phase". Well, that`s what the lads conclude after hearing Deborah admire the breasts of a TV actress and when a friend stays round at Deborahs` place. Tony offers to help the girls out (if they find they need a man).

‘Cardigan’ sees Deborah studying hard and hanging out with her new student friends and Gary is feeling disturbingly middle-aged , especially when he is mistaken for George at the office. A night out clubbing at a rave is obviously the only answer.

‘Rich and Fat’: At breakfast, Gary tells Tony he is putting on weight and Tony sees Gary`s bank statement with a balance of £33,000 and proceeds to tell everyone. That evening, Dorothy goads Gary into giving a huge donation to the Hospital which Gary tries desperately to retrieve.

Video

Having seen most of MBB from VHS recordings (for some reason I never really got round to watching it the first time on air), it is a refreshing treat to see this series in broadcast quality video. Of course we get a 4:3 ratio here, being originally shot on video for TV, but image clarity is good.

Audio

Just Dolby Digital stereo here as you would expect, nothing special, but does the job.

Features

Much care and attention has been paid to the menus. They feature a collection of sound bites from the series with an animated ‘sofa’ scene, with lots of floating icons from the series on screen. Very nice.

As regards extras, we get four interactive quizzes on the series, each containing three multi-choice questions. If all questions are correctly answered, it allows access to the special ‘out takes’ section, and very funny a lot of them are too!

Conclusion

This fifth series was the third series to be screened by the BBC, and by now the whole Men Behaving Badly thing had matured into a classic BBC sitcom, helped by better scripts and a more familiar team. Interestingly this series contained seven episodes rather than the usual six, and features the departure of barman Les for Ken.

The DVDs will no doubt sell very well, and fans of the series will probably collect all six of them. This is the best you will ever see Men Behaving Badly, and the Out takes make the package more appealing. It is also nice to get the whole series together, rather than having to buy two separate tapes as you used to have to do with the VHS release.