Good new striptease – Weekend
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A quarter of a century after the release of the film “Male Striptease” about the unemployed steelworkers from Sheffield, they return in the series of the same name, released under the guise of Disney +, the same rogue.
In 1997, six unemployed working-class heroes led by the resourceful Gaz (Robert Carlisle) out of desperation staged a strip show called Hot Metal in their hometown and found a wild success – as it turned out, momentary. “After 26 years, 7 prime ministers and 8 politicians fighting for the revival of the North,” things are still there – the life of the working class in this very North has not become better. Gaz works as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital, his bosom friend Dave (Mark Eddy) is a janitor at the school where his wife directs, and Horse (Paul Barber) sits on disability benefits. Only the red-haired Lomper (Steve Hewson) has his own business – a coffee shop with an obscene name by today’s standards, Lush Rolls, which, for the sake of political correctness, he decides to rename into the same “rolls”, but in French. It turns out Grand Pain, which in English is read as “Great Pain,” and it really covers Sheffield.
Evil critics blame the characters of the new series that they “have never learned anything in all the past years,” but we won’t. Gaz, of course, is a slacker, and the rest are losers, but blaming a person for not being able to spin in new realities is like saying “put on a short skirt”: here what you put on, what you took off, you still lose. Let’s better look at the social institutions of Sheffield, which are not just bad, but engaged in sabotage. In the service responsible for benefits for the disabled, the half-dead old man Horse turns out to be “able-bodied” after filling out a questionnaire, where “he answered all questions: always alive!”. At Gaza Hospital, patients are drugged with sedatives to make them less of a hassle. According to a weary nurse, “you don’t have to be a chef to make them a dose.” But our sly friend Gaz does not give up, and here he comes up with a great plan how to make money, having discovered in one of the patients the genius of street graffiti. “Once upon a time, ordinary working guys had three ways to break through: football, boxing and rock and roll. And now it’s street art! says Gaz to the sickly artist (thank you for not suggesting a striptease). But he “was a genius until he was put out with pills,” so Gaz is developing a method for ridding the poor fellow of addiction.
Meanwhile, Dave is single-handedly trying to fix, fix and patch up everything that breaks daily at the school. teachers from “Abbott Elementary School” can exchange experiences with him: when pipes leak in the school toilet and the ceiling in the music room collapses, the insurer says: “This is not an insured event, but wear and tear.” Hello, we have arrived. Principal Jean (Leslie Sharp) can’t afford a renovation and is forced to cut costs when she fires her best friend, her music teacher.
But if adults have long been acting by inertia, then children are still fluttering, although life in Sheffield does not bode well for them. “What awaits today’s youth? Working in a call center? Get you a pizza and a bag of weed, shut up and don’t shine.” All the efforts of the young rebel Destiny (Talitha Wing), the daughter of Gaz, somehow paint her life in pink, basically go into crime: theft, breaking and entering and other tricks from the arsenal of her heroic dad. Children inherit the land of their fathers, but in fact not all of it, but only half: a quarter of a century ago, not all factories were closed yet. Now there are half as many opportunities, only a few work, and the rest are spinning. “I never thought that life could get tougher than under Thatcher,” Kon says.
A quarter of a century ago, “Male Striptease” became a hit at home – its fees were beaten only by “Titanic” released in the same year. In a new version of the same story, the trademark British “kitchen sink realism” meets the current “good new TV” series trend, the flagship of which was “Ted Lasso”: in a hysterical and embittered world, the serial creators caught the request for kindness and instead of the antihero fashionable in the previous decade, they gave the audience a gentle Buddha in the guise of a football coach. In “Striptease” there is also such an impeccable hero – this is Dave, who wants to fix everything in this life. In the role of an anti-hero, as usual, Gaz labors, inventing scam after scam and turning the “cinema of social anxiety” into a picaresque novel. The old “kitchen realism” was more cynical, ruthless and honest – sentimentality splashed in it somewhere at the bottom. In the “good new” series, it pours out from the screen in a continuous stream, because the ground under your feet has shrunk more than under Thatcher, and the demand for kindness and pity has increased. Only one question remains: will there be a striptease? Well, for those who miss him in life, let’s put it this way: the guys will still dance.
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