How we made Men Behaving Badly

Martin Clunes, actor

Men Behaving Badly didn't start with a script coming through the door. It got going simply because Harry Enfield signed up to star in it. His original vision was for it not to be like a usual sitcom. Then we made the pilot and it shocked him. It was bad. It didn't faze me since I was nobody from nowhere, but you could see Harry wanted out. He was under contract, though, so had to do one series. I've not watched the pilot since. Actually, no one has. It's never been aired. It was everything Harry railed against: coarse, with the director saying you've got to be chalk and cheese – abrasive like The Likely Lads. But what worked about Men Behaving Badly was that Gary and Tony were so different, yet glued to each other when ridiculous things happened.

Only after Harry bailed did the show get popular. I knew Neil Morrissey because we'd done a rubbish spaghetti western in Italy, so I put him forward as Harry's replacement. Beryl Vertue was an empowering producer: she let us have real input, let the monkeys run the zoo. And Simon Nye, the writer, was up for anything. We just showed off for each other. It was the best job – not a threatening-edgy show, but still cheeky and on the edge. I have a great memory of sitting in a birthing pool with Neil, farting. I don't care if our characters were heroes or fools. People were fond of them. They still are.

We didn't set out to do a zeitgeisty thing. Although it aired in the early 1990s, it was never meant to sum up that particular time. It was just funny to laugh at people like Gary and Tony. Loaded magazine didn't come along till later, but the show still got lumped in with lads mag culture, despite Neil and I being a good 10 years older than their readership. The series was an exhalation after a finger-pointy period about men making life terrible for women, but it was also a bit: "We're just like this sometimes, so shut up." The men always lost, too: Dorothy [Caroline Quentin] and Deborah [Leslie Ash] had the upper hand. We did The Late Late Show once and they tried to drag us into a war of the sexes. We just said: "Look at the programme – it's not about anything!"

I see it whizzing by on Dave now and then. I wouldn't watch an episode, though. It has dated: all the girls had too much makeup on; they look like they're going to a dinner party. And it's weird looking back on sitcoms shot in front of a real studio audience, although everyone did that back then.

The crowning moment came when Gary and Tony went to Dorset to set their sofa free. There was a closeup of us on it, then the camera pulled back and you could see we were sitting on the penis of the Cerne Abbas giant. The crew had to shoot from a helicopter. We just sat and drank beer in this beautiful valley at dusk. The scene was for the end credits, so our instructions were just: "Act stupid as the helicopter pulls away." I rolled the whole way down the giant's penis. I had such a good time I moved to Dorset right after. What a way to make a living.

Beryl Vertue, producer

I sent off for a book by Simon Nye, called Men Behaving Badly, thinking it might make a good film. Once I'd read it, I realised it wouldn't – but it would be a good sitcom. We changed it a lot: the book featured a landlady heavily, which we didn't want. We decided it should focus on two friends, a flat-owner and his lodger. At first, Harry Enfield played the lodger and he suggested the other lead: "I'm not sure what his name is, but I saw him in a play and thought he was funny." That was Martin. So I went to see him. He was in a Regency period play outdoors in Regents Park, wearing a curly wig, long white socks and buckled shoes. I watched in the rain thinking: "Is he the man to play Gary?" He turned out to be wonderful.

Harry always said to me he'd only do one series – though I didn't tell anyone. But when I told Thames TV, they said that's that. I replied: "No, he's a lodger. Another can come." And so Neil Morrissey moved in as Tony, who fell in love with the lodger upstairs, Deborah, which we spun out for ages. We did two series for Thames TV, then ITV took over and said if any episode got 10m viewers, the show would stay on air. We got 7m, which people would kill for today – and ITV pulled the plug. I felt so cross that I went to the BBC, who took it, and it became a huge hit and definitely got more than 10 million viewers.

Back then, people seemed to have allegiances to one channel – they were either an ITV viewer or a BBC viewer. A lot of people didn't know Men Behaving Badly existed before it moved to BBC. The format didn't change, but it was put on post-watershed. Plus they aired it after Absolutely Fabulous, so viewers stumbled across it. People called it the birth of laddism, which Simon and I hadn't envisaged or even thought of. The two leads were hugely chauvinistic and the women never got upset. Yet lots of people responded to that, saying I know people like that, or my boyfriend's like that. But the audiences were split 50/50 between men and women. I don't think I ever considered profound things like whether it turned sexism on its head.

I love working on shows with studio audiences. That live feeling is scary for the actors, but it's good for them: you've got to keep the laughs coming, very very often. My favourite moment was when Tony and Dorothy got drunk and slept together. In the morning, they're trying to work out from each other "Was I good?" Then there's a bang at the door – it's Gary. The audience gasped, and I thought: "Right, we've got you."