Some say it comes from the famous menswear chain started by a Montague Burton, where demobbed soldiers were sent with a voucher for a fresh outfit. To be kitted out in a new three-piece suit, shirt and tie, then, was to have the Full Monty.
Other people trace it back to the legendary wartime general, who insisted on eating a full English breakfast every morning, or insisted that his troops did.
What’s certain is that, since a certain blockbusting comedy hit film in 1997, those three words have largely come to mean one thing. Twenty years on The Real Full Monty (ITV) united an unlikely bunch of celebrities in a fundraising re-enactment of the classic striptease scene.
The heroes of the film were laid-off Sheffield steelworkers, some pleasing to the eye, some less so, but all of them uneasy about taking their clothes off and dancing on a stage. It has to be said, on first sight, the nerves and wobbles of the celebrity line-up were rather less convincing.
Alright, actor, comedian and game show host Alexander Armstrong is no rhythm king and swimming champion Mark Foster seems like the sort of bloke who’d rather be training alone than working with a team.
Everyone there, however, from Wayne Sleep to Towie star Elliott Wright, was used to the limelight in a way that the gruff, hard lads of Simon Beaufoy’s bittersweet screenplay just weren’t. Ten minutes in though, none of that mattered. It was partly down to the team’s various, personal reasons for getting involved. Wayne Sleep had beaten prostate cancer.
Elliott Wright’s dad had been gravely ill when it spread from the prostate throughout his body. With his Afro-Caribbean ancestry, actor Danny John-Jules knew he was twice as likely to develop it than the others.
During rehearsal breaks, he took everyone down the road to a distinctly unusual MOT garage, whose proprietor Errol gives a 20 per cent discount to anyone who gets their prostate checked out.
Errol calculated that he’d saved 44 lives with this policy, a story ultimately more inspiring than anything that went down on stage. The high point of that particular journey was when the lads arrived for a test run at the Shiregreen Working Mens Club, the Sheffield backdrop of the original film.
They thought they’d just be rehearsing there, then suddenly they were pushed out in front of 200 lively local ladies. After that, their later performance at the Palladium felt, for want of a better word, limp.
In Britain’s Greatest Invention (BBC2) various well-known faces put the case for their favourite, world-changing, Blighty-created contraptions before they were put to a public vote. Food writer Giles Coren picked the fridge which advanced nutrition, liberated women from the household and was invented by a Glasgow journalist after he’d watched the printing presses being cleaned with ether.
An equally biased and fascinating tale was told by Sir Trevor McDonald, who chose the television. Without it, he argued, there’d be no people fighting for change and no shared iconic images of history. There would also be no Sir Trevor McDonald, well, not as a famous newsreader anyway. No TV critics either, so no prizes for guessing what I voted for.
Daily Express :: TV and Radio Feed
