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.

A Comedy On This Day: Men Behaving Badly - Cleaning Lady (29 July 1994)

 Dorothy insists that Gary gets a cleaning lady, who turns out to be an attractive young woman... with a funny foreign accent.

 The things about this programme that made it seem sharp at the time are the things that now annoy me about it, and are mostly in the writing. Simon Nye gets a lot of his laughs from one character saying something slightly fanciful and another character reacting dismissively. Once you notice how it works, it doesn't sound good.

 Making the characters' low motivations the source of the comedy was fair enough, but there's a mistaken sense that showing their disloyalty and base appetites is funny enough in itself, and that the leads' supposed charm will make these disagreeable people in some way endearing. The comedy is constructed around a lot of very short scenes, which get to the point that advances the plot as quickly as possible through the least intelligent route. I'd just like an actual scene with the space to investigate what's going on and to draw out some very one-note characterisation.

 One disappointing aspect of this episode is that Tony starts a career as a model, but we don't get to see anything at all of him being interviewed or at work, something novel that it would be interesting to see.