Play a few bars of Hot Chocolate’s song You Sexy Thing, and chances are anyone over forty in the vicinity will be instantly transported - not to the soul train of 1975 when the song was released, but to a dingy club on the outskirts of Sheffield in 1997, where a group of middle-aged men are preparing to remove their clothing.
This is a song that is synonymous with The Full Monty: that rip-roaring, scandalous, heart-breaking film about a group of men who had been laid off from the local steelworks in Sheffield – but thought they might be able to make a bit of money by putting on a male strip show.
Now, the characters are back for The Full Monty, the TV series – but this time, set in our own age, it is very much not about stripping.
“I don’t think anyone wanted to see it 25 years ago,” Wim Snape laughs. The actor is sitting next to Robert Carlyle, the original Gaz (and on-screen father to Snape’s character Nathan), who shifts a tad uncomfortably in his seat, and agrees: “No-one wants to see it.”
In the original film, Carlyle’s Gaz was the brains behind the whole endeavour, mixing humour and pathos as a man desperate to better himself and his family, but with a penchant for hare-brained schemes that often went awry.
Two-and-a-bit decades on, little has changed. Just like the original, the TV series has politics at its core, opening with a mocking montage interspersing political talk about “levelling up” with the reality of life on the ground: in fact, the show’s characters are poorer than ever, and struggling to make ends meet.
“They’re having to navigate their lives, trying to get on with the day-to-day; living with the repercussions of bigger decisions that have been made beyond their control,” says Steve Huison, who plays Lomper, the security guard who was the first to join Gaz’s troupe in the original movie. The actor was brought to tears, he says, by his colleague Paul Barber’s storyline as Horse, disabled and trying to navigate the frustrating, Kafta-esque benefits system. As he speaks Mark Addy and Lesley Sharp – returning as Dave and Jean, now married – nod their heads.
“Twenty-five years went by. Twenty-five years of conservative growth, twenty-five years of austerity has chipped away at these characters and chipped away at the infrastructure of the country. Times have changed. Have they changed?” Carlyle says.
“We were in a terrible state back then, at the tail end of the 90s. And we thought… that things can only get better. Well, things did get better for about three days. And then it went straight back into it... [it’s] been tough. It’s certainly been tough for these characters.”
Simon Beaufoy, who wrote the script for the original film, is also the brains behind the new series. Did Addy, Sharp and Huison hesitate to come back? Absolutely not.
“There’s eight hours to explore these characters. And there was only 90 minutes of the film. So it was thrilling actually to be asked,” Sharp says.
“[Simon] also said to me, his reason for doing it is that he’s absolutely pig sick of what’s going on in the country, and in politics at the moment,” says Huison. “He felt that he needed to thrash out and make some sort of statement in the only way that he knows how to: through his craft.”
So where do we find our favourite characters so many years on? Dave and Jean are both working at their local comprehensive, but their marriage is on the rocks; Lomper has settled down with café owner Dennis; Gaz is father to not just Nathan, but now also to 16 year-old Destiny (played by newcomer Talitha Wing).
Has fatherhood matured him? Not in the slightest, says Carlyle.
“It’s always going to be interesting and slightly difficult when you’ve got the head of this family unit who’s actually a child himself,” he says. “Gaz, you know, he’s almost got a bit of a Peter Pan thing.”
He cites an example from episode three, when yet another scheme blows up in his face. “He says, ‘I’m like a five-year-old. I break everything I touch…’ It’s difficult. How can someone that immature pass anything onto these guys? And I think that you see the damage that has actually wrought.”
He’s not wrong: in the first episode alone Destiny manages to steal a car and with it, a prize-winning dog (which is then put up for ransom by Gaz) – much to the despair of Nathan, who has become a police officer.
“They all have this shared sense of justice,” Snape adds. “They want things to be done justly. And they want them to be done in the right way. And they care about what’s right. But I think the way that they all go about it is evidently very different.”
But despite this broad comedy, isn’t it all a bit bleak? The cast bridles as one.
“It’s really not a dirge. They’re having lots of fun,” Sharp says.
“Everybody has been affected by the cost-of-living prices; everybody has been affected by the things that are happening in society,” adds Snape. “I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily bleak. I think it’s probably a little bit more political – it is looking at what’s going on in the country, right now in a little bit more depth.
“But it’s all about these incredible characters… and that working class society and how they try and laugh their way through because if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. And it’s been written so beautifully that I genuinely think that it’s got that balance.”
These days, the cast say that they’re rarely recognised for their role in the ground-breaking original film – but it’s clear that they still have a great fondness for it.
“When people connect me to the film, it’s always in a very warm and lovely way,” Sharp says. “You know, it’s always, ‘Oh, you were in The Full Monty! Oh, I love that film. I absolutely love that film and my family loved that film.’ It’s fantastic.”
“I’m proud of that,” Addy says. “There are worse things to be known for.”
