Review of Men Behaving Badly Series 4

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 4 contains some choice episodes:

‘Babies’ sees Gary and Dorothy make the decision to `make a baby` but they both are having second thoughts. George tells Gary the downside (no sex for two years after the birth) and Dorothy is having worries about Gary’s maturity after finding his `fizzy fish`.

‘In Bed With Dorothy’ sees Dorothy recovering from having her appendix removed and Gary insisting on looking after her. He does her proud with constant attention but things come to a head on the third day when he wants to show his love in a physical way and Dorothy wants Gary to take a day off work to look after her.

Also ‘Playing Away’ sees Gary going on a weekend writing course with Deborah, leaving Dorothy behind. He decides George and Anthea can spend the same weekend on a business training course. Tony has a bad tooth but can`t face the dentist, so tries a bit of DIY extraction.

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 fourth series was the second 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 most episodes focus on the main four characters, rather than the excellent support cast.

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 used to have to do with with the VHS release.