The Full Monty is back as a miniseries but with no stripping it doesn’t quite live up to the original hit film

The original, written by Simon Beaufoy (who returns for the series, aided by co-writer Alice Nutter) and directed by Peter Cattaneo (who doesn’t), was a warm and funny comedy with a political edge about six unemployed Sheffield men who form a Chippendales-like striptease group to raise £1,000.

The money was never really the point. Neither was the stripping. It was a story about regaining self-respect, reclaiming your dignity — even if, counterintuitively, that meant getting full-frontal naked before a packed audience of women — and finding hope amid the seeming hopelessness.

After a brief recap of the original story, we get to find out how things are for the characters “seven prime ministers (all of them, from Blair to Sunak, shown in a montage) and eight northern regeneration projects later.”

The short answer is “not very good for some, but much, much worse for others”. The working men’s club where the men stripped to Tom Jones’s version of You Can Leave Your Hat On — and famously didn’t leave their hats on over their dangly bits — is derelict, a symbol of how the community has deteriorated further.

"There’s no stripping in the series. This is The Full Monty without an actual Full Monty.”

Not that the men will be needing it. There’s no stripping in the series. This is The Full Monty without an actual Full Monty.

In place of the stripping, Beaufoy and Nutter throw in larky comedy capers. In the first episode and part of the second, it’s the accidental dognapping of the canine winner of Britain’s Got Talent.

All the familiar old(er) faces are back. The de facto leader of the group, Gaz (Robert Carlyle), is still the loveable rogue he’s always been, forever coming up with hair brained schemes to make fast money.

When we first re-encounter him, he’s dragging a mattress onto a bus. He works as a porter in a psychiatric hospital, but his wages aren’t enough to pay for the new electric wheelchair battery his grandson, who has a disability, needs.

Gaz’s grown-up son Cal (Dominic Sharkey) is a police officer, and he also has a teenage daughter called Destiny, or Des for short (rising young star Talitha Wing), who bunks off secondary school and is a bit of a tearaway — although not so much of one as to alienate viewers.

The principal at Des’s school, which is rapidly falling apart through lack of funds, is Jean (Lesley Sharp), whose husband — another of the stripping six — Dave (Mark Addy) is the caretaker.

The couple’s marriage, which is slowly dying of boredom, has been blighted by the death of their child. Dave becomes a mentor and father figure to a bullied boy nicknamed Twiglet (Aiden Cook), whose family depends on a food bank to eat.

Lomper (Steve Hulson), who came out in the film, runs a café with his husband Dennis (Paul Clayton) and can’t understand why its name, The Big Baps, is offensive to their more politically correct customers.

The series has its moments and the actors are, naturally, wonderful. But there are pacing problems

The one having the worst time of the lot is Horse (Paul Barber). He has to use a wheelchair because of his diabetes, he can’t afford to eat properly and it looks as if his disability benefit is about to be slashed.

As for the other two of the original six, Guy quickly fades out of the picture — a result of the actor who plays him, Hugo Speer, being dismissed during production following allegations of in appropriate behaviour.

Bafflingly, Tom Wilkinson as Gerald one of the strongest characters in the film, is restricted to short cameos in the café and is given virtually nothing to do.

The series has its moments and the actors are, naturally, wonderful. But there are pacing problems, and the nimble handling of comedy and social commentary displayed in the film has been replaced by heavy-handedness.

The Full Monty often feels like it’s ticking off a checklist of issues: underfunded schools, inadequate mental health services, bullying, food poverty and so on.

The final freeze frame of the film has become iconic. I wish they’d left the characters right there, frozen in time.