A Comedy On This Day: Men Behaving Badly - Marriage (5 August 1994)

 My old alma mater once had an alumni fundraising campaign fronted by Simon Nye. "If I hadn't been to Royal Holloway then I would never have been able to write Men Behaving Badly" his message told us. I wasn't impressed with this pitch.

 Gary tries to get out of a drunken proposal to Dorothy, while Tony bugs Deborah's flat. The women don't really have much agency in this story, with the performers doing their usual things of Caroline Quentin giving withering looks and Lesley Ash protesting, "How many times, Tony? I don't fancy you!" I was more interested to see that the men have a Kellogg’s Variety pack for breakfast, and that Tony chooses the Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes first.

 There's some terribly schematic writing in places here, for example when Gary tells Tony that he once knew someone who "married a great Dane", which left me wondering not about Tony's misunderstanding but the writer's expectation that anyone might ever phrase the information like that. When Simon Nye writes detail it's often funnier than when he writes jokes, such as the dull conversation between Deborah and her boyfriend about cars that Tony intercepts.

 Thankfully this episode has a couple of scenes in Gary's office with his two much older colleagues, which I always thought were the best bits at the time. Their disconnected musings about marriage and surveillance act as a very tangential commentary on the main plot, and the more relaxed whimsy of these exchanges strikes me as less effortful than the main business.