Wacky plots, endlessly irritating characters and a distinct lack of stripping – this Disney+ series isn’t a patch on the film
You remember the hit film, of course. In 1997, The Full Monty won Baftas, an Oscar and people’s hearts with its uplifting tale of six men, some of them former steelworkers in Sheffield, trying to improve their lot by putting together a striptease act. The title derived from their promise to outdo the Chippendales by revealing everybody’s pie and chips at the end – to the lads’ local audience only, you understand. In 1997 we hadn’t yet fallen quite so far into the pit of depravity in which 2023 happily frolics and we viewers only saw their bums. Which always felt to me like the better deal.
A new eight-part series of the same title and written, like the original film, by Simon Beaufoy (this time with Alice Nutter) revisits the gang 25 years on – as the opening caption puts it “Seven prime ministers and eight northern regeneration policies later.” The lads are still in Sheffield, an even more post-industrial landscape, and the melancholic undertow of the film – in which it was clear but not dwelled on that the climactic show would be a brief, shining moment, not a transformative one – now tugs far more insistently on all their lives.
