'The Full Monty' strips and exposes the horrors of forgotten England

Much like 'Dirty Dancing', 'The Full Monty' is often remembered broadly as being a fun, light-hearted movie when it actually carried some sharpened social commentary underneath its frock.

Where 'Dirty Dancing' took ballroom dancing to new heights by slipping in an erotically-charged social drama about feminine liberation including a back-alley abortion, 'The Full Monty' originally used male striptease to talk about the crumbling decline of the English working class and the wanton destruction of the industrial North by Margaret Thatcher and her kind. Simon Beaufoy's script smartly placed this in a fun, lighthearted jockstrap and subsequently became a massive hit with audiences and critics alike.

Now over a quarter-century later, the working men's hall where the fateful striptease show happened has now collapsed into ruin (it's also happened in real-life), several Prime Ministers have been and gone, "levelling up" has become the bullshit watchword, and the men of 'The Full Monty' have been left behind - like much of Northern England, as well. Over the course of eight, hour-long episodes, the show unearths and explores in excruciatingly sharp detail just how utterly degraded life and common dignity has become under successive Tory (and New Labour) premierships and failed policies of the same. The school where Mark Addy's character works is literally collapsing around them, Robert Carlyle's character is living in a caravan and trying to scheme his way out of working poverty, while Paul Barber's character Horse is suffering from diabetes and trying to simply survive by sorting out his benefits in an increasingly convoluted system designed to keep people like him out of it.

As much as 'The Full Monty' goes full kitchen-sink misery, there are flashes of humour and dry wit throughout the episodes. Robert Carlyle's fast antics are as irrepressible as he is, whether it's going to therapy in the guise of a schizophrenic artist he's trying to manage or trying to sort out a celebrity dog's fate. Steve Huison's character Lomper, previously closeted but now openly gay, manages a cafe that goes through a name change from 'Big Baps' to 'Grand Pain' in an attempt at gentrification. Equally, there's the tenderness in Mark Addy's gentle giant Dave, who builds a friendship with a student at the school where he works and contends with a failing marriage too.

At eight episodes, it's not that 'The Full Monty' is stretched too thin or overwrought with stories and ideas. It's more that it could have easily been shrunk down into a movie, blending the characters again in a more distilled, focused fashion. Pacing becomes an issue in 'The Full Monty' pretty early on for the series. While it's made up of some wonderful writing and committed, textured performances by the cast of familiar faces and newcomers, 'The Full Monty' is sometimes burdened by its own task of exposing how little things have changed since the original movie.