The Full Monty Sheffield: This is why it’s been brought back now – and what the stripping meant

Simon Beaufoy and Alice Nutter say in the original show, the stripping was a metaphor for the characters losing their jobs when heavy industry collapsed in the city in the 80s and 90s.

Now they say they thought that public services are being stripped back instead of jobs, so it was time to go back to the Full Monty story for another look at the characters.

Simon Beaufoy told The Guardian: “After the success of the film there was a lot of chatter about a follow-up, but I could never find a story that would better the original, my only criteria to write a sequel. For 20 years, nothing. Then, in the last few years, it became increasingly clear that we were in the same place again. This time, it was less visible than a wrecking ball, more insidious.

"The political destruction wreaked by successive governments wasn’t about destroying industry; it was the infrastructure of the country they’d come to asset-strip, slowly and incredibly successfully. Schools, hospitals, dental care, social care, mental health care, transport, the courts, water: all of the structures that allow people in need to function were now on the edge of collapse. So, the idea took shape of going back to Sheffield.

“I thought a Full Monty TV series would be a great vehicle to not only see what’s still going wrong with the country, but also how things are changing in a good way. The shift in gender and sexuality expectations has completely changed since the original film. In the movie we had to cut away just before the two gay characters kiss and now we have these two gay characters married so long they’re sick of each other. How great is that? We’re not interested in their sexuality, so much as the fact that one of them has secretly spent 50 grand out of the joint account on a racing pigeon!”

The Full Monty is showing on Disney+ from June 14