Men Behaving Badly

But I would say that everything he's done is overshadowed by the first thing he did, which was his biggest success.

And that was men behaving badly.

And he's never quite achieved the same again.

And that's fine.

forward to the late 80s, he's pushing 30 and he gets his first novel published.

I think it was the second one he wrote, but the first one he got published.

And that is a novel called Men Behaving Badly.

Okay.

His first credits were on Alo Alo, right? So he's trained at the best with the best of them.

But then did Men Behaving Badly relatively early and seems to have done pretty much every Simon Nye project since then, certainly the bigger, more successful ones.

So, yeah, obviously him and Simon Nye had a good thing going.

But for all the praise I'm giving him, like I say, there's a lot of things that don't work in this.

There was a...

I pro- I think I've mentioned it before, but there was a, an old film called Up and Under with, uh, Samantha Janus, and Neil Morrissey is in it from, um, Men Behaving Badly, and they're pl- It's a rugby league film basically, and they...

Neil Morrissey score, uh, breaks through.

He's the fastest player on the pitch, and he's on his own, and he's breaking, and he can score into the post, and he veers off and scores in the corner.

So can we go back and talk about the...

You were in three of the biggest shows ever, weren't you? Men Behaving Badly, Jonathan Creek and Dr Martin.

It's like they were huge, weren't they?

Yeah, I mean, in those days, we used to regularly get sort of 15 million people watching a show and 18 on a Men Behaving Badly Christmas special.

There's

something like that when you are, you know, a quarter of the nation is watching you every week.

Thank you, because I really do think...

I mean, I talk about, you know, my life in television and I talk about meeting wild animals, because we get to work...

only female executive in entertainment.

So I was in charge of programmes like Red Dwarf, Men Behaving Badly, right across the board.

And obviously I wrote formats for them as well.

I wrote things like rough guide travel shows.

television.

Yeah, but then

I moved into entertainment and I was in charge of Men Behaving Badly, which is another story.

And then I produced an opera for the BBC that won the Prix Italia and a load of classic music awards.

I mean, it wasn't quite sort of, it wasn't sort of the David Essex of sitcom or the David Cassidy of sitcom, but he certainly had a kind of, and he was sort of, you know, he wasn't, it wasn't like a lad.

I mean, in some ways, Man About the House could be seen as a sort of forerunner of something like Men Behaving Badly.

But I don't think Richard O'Sullivan had the same laddishness.

He was quite a

Interesting.

So this is written by Simon Nye, who at this point was best known for Men Behaving Badly.

In fact, was still writing Men Behaving Badly at the same time as this.

But he said specifically, I just put it in a solicitor's office because it felt like that's a sort of banal enough area.

But also, is it also that you have clients coming in who have probably quite high stakes situations going on and that can bring in drama, which is interesting because it's something they really don't do in this show.

Clearly.

And obviously had the skills to back that up and to make that happen.

But yeah, just to connect it with what we're doing here, Hartswood Films, they produced Men Behaving Badly, which was Simon Nye.