Although I might – but probably won’t – write a longer article about it when the cheap second-hand DVD of series two arrives in the post, I thought that I’d talk about “cringe” nostalgia today. This was something I ended up thinking about on a sleep-deprived morning in early-mid May, when I also had a cold. I was aimlessly surfing the internet, in an almost dissociative state, when I rediscovered an old 1990s British sitcom that I’d almost forgotten about – “Men Behaving Badly” (1992-1998). There were a surprising number of clips of it on Youtube as well.
If you haven’t heard of this sitcom, imagine a more conservative version of Spaced” (1999-2001). It’s a sitcom which focuses on a group of people living in a shared house. Although Harry Enfield starred in the very first series, the show is most famous for featuring two utterly immature, lager-swilling twenty-somethings called Tony (Neil Morrissey) and Gary (Martin Clunes), as well as their on-off girlfriends Deborah (Leslie Ash) and Dorothy (Caroline Quentin). It was also one of the very few British sitcoms to move channels (from ITV to BBC 1) about a third of the way through its six-year run.
For context, I watched at least some of this sitcom on VHS in about 2001-3, when I was in my early-mid teens. The show was already slightly old at the time, but it was one of many classic 1980s-1990s British sitcoms that I watched back then. Because, well, I found them to be hilariously funny. Whilst “Men Behaving Badly” (1992-1998) wasn’t the funniest of these, I still remembered some notable moments from it – like when Tony gets some terrible-looking glasses – as well as the characters from it.
And watching clips from it in May 2025 was a weird experience! I felt so many mixed emotions!
At first, I was absolutely fascinated by the retro early-mid 1990s setting. It was technically within my lifetime – I was born in the late 1980s – but not something I really remember much. And it almost seemed like a different world! Originally, I was going to write it off as “drab” and “boring” and “sad” but then, a bit later, I realised something. This was a world long before social media, one where most people didn’t feel the need to try to “become famous” or follow trends from the US. And there was something weirdly honest and human and small-scale about all of this.
But, shortly after I started to feel warm emotions about this, I then actually remembered the 1990s and early-mid 2000s. How much more narrow-minded the world seemed to be back then. Case in point, whilst the 1990s wasn’t the very worst part of British history in this regard, the show definitely shows its age in this clip (Warning – homophobia, ear-licking) where Gary gets nervous about the idea that Tony might be gay. And, for better or worse, this is a show with a very clear target audience, in a way that you probably wouldn’t see on mainstream TV these days.
Still, in some ways, this old TV show actually seems a lot better than what I’ve read about more modern online media aimed at that audience. Not only does it show relationships in a much more complicated and “imperfect” sort of way, rather than an idealised one, but both Deborah and Dorothy are actually shown to be intelligent and vaguely realistic characters as well. And, thankfully, they aren’t just two-dimensional “sensible” characters either (warning – scary spider decoration, references to sleazy behaviour). Although the show is a bit stylised in some ways, the characters actually feel like vaguely realistic – imperfect – people in a way that really caught me by surprise.
When watched today, the humour is a bit of a mixed bag though. The show’s slightly anarchic slapstick comedy moments, mild “gross-out humour” moments, classic-style farce and character-based jokes are timelessly funny – if a little awkward sometimes – but it’s also one of those shows from a pre-broadband internet time, when Britain was a more repressed country. Of course, what this translates to in practice is that a fair number of the jokes are smirking innuendos of some sort or another. And the characters spend a lot of time “talking about it”, often in a euphemistic sort of way, but relatively little time actually doing anything with each other. British repression during the mid-late 20th century/very early 21st century is its own – deeply weird – thing.
Even so, the strongest emotion I felt watching clips from “Men Behaving Badly” in 2025 was this really strange mixture of “This show evokes so much nostalgia in me!” and “This is utterly cringe!“. And there is something utterly weird about this. How something can both fill you with warm, cosy nostalgia but also awkwardly repulse you at the same time. It’s a really difficult emotion to fully describe, but there’s nothing else like it.
Objectively, your older self can see all of the flaws and the “This wasn’t even made for me” with the show, and can see just how ridiculously dated it is in so many ways. Your older self cringes with pure awkwardness. But you still have the early 2000s memories of relaxing with VHS cassettes of the show, laughing at the immature jokes, getting to know the characters etc… And these memories also let you access a very rose-tinted version of the general atmosphere and mood of the time. A version of the time consisting entirely of evenings and school holidays. Of watching DVDs and old VHS cassettes, playing PS2 games, visiting the cinema, reading second-hand 1970s-80s paperback novels and listening to “These are still good to this very day” 1980s heavy metal albums.
Getting nostalgic about something which, when looked at today, is absolutely cringe is a really strange “mixed emotions” type of thing. It feels genuinely weird!
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
