by ANDREW JAMESON

Neil Morrissey is keen to bring back Men Behaving Badly for a new series – but fears the show wouldn’t be “woke” enough.

The actor, 59, and his co-star Martin Clunes, 60, appeared as beer-drinking flatmates Tony and Gary in the 1990s sitcom – which ran for six series – opposite Leslie Ash, 62, and Caroline Quentin, 61, who played their girlfriends Debs and Dorothy.

Neil admits the cast would have “fun” trying to make a new series.

But he believes the only way it would be accepted on TV nowadays is if his character Tony became “completely woke” and had the occasional “lapse” when getting drunk with Gary.

When asked if he thinks Men Behaving Badly could return one day, Neil said: “Well, with everything we do it’s all about script.

“If Simon [Nye] writes something marvellous, which of course he would want paying for, we’d obviously have a look at it.

“I don’t know if we could make that programme again now though, it’s not woke enough is it?

“Putting ladies underpants on my head and things like that.

“I guess Leslie was objectified a bit by my character.

“But that was the point of it, that we were really rubbish, and they were really cool and smart.

“That’s what the premise for the whole programme was – that we were a couple of misogynist idiots who couldn’t keep a job, let alone a girlfriend.

“I don’t know if it would work [now], but it would be fun trying.

“The way to do it would be to have the wokeness involved in it, in that Tony has become completely woke and will not do anything wrong and is so PC it’s unbelievable.

“They would just have to have lapses after several beers on the sofa in front of the telly.

“I don’t know how it would work, because Martin and Caroline’s characters had a baby before the end of the series, so this will be a 20-odd-year-old boy, I think it was a boy.

“Someone I could send to the off-licence. It would be fun, but I can’t see it.”

Neil admits he and Martin regularly discuss the show potentially returning, but admits they would demand huge fees for a new series, joking it would be a “retirement gig” for the pair.

He said: “We always talk about it and I think we have pretty much the same answer, if it’s written we’ll have a look at it and should be able to do it.

“But they’ll probably have to pay a lot of money. I think we might be saving up for a bit of a retirement gig.”

ENDS

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