Sorry, but it’s just not funny any more...

IWANTED to be pleased. Really I did. But when I heard Still Game was back for a new series I had just one thought: if only it were still funny. There was a time when Still Game was one of the best things on television. Sharp, moving and yes, laughout-loud funny, it was unlike anything we had seen on the box before – a show about two old Glasgow boys fighting off the grave and getting into a succession of scrapes and japes along the way.

It wasn’t exactly the Sopranos, but then it was never meant to be. This was comfort telly, to be watched on the sofa with the family, drink in hand, roaring at a pair of pals whose misfortunes were not just hilarious, but often poignant.

We chuckled with Jack and Victor as they hid from the attentions of Isa, grew misty-eyed when Victor’s perpetually busy son never found the time to see him, and nodded with recognition at their honest and often bald fear of old age.

For so many of its viewers, myself included (as a fully paid up fan I have the first three series on DVD), there was always something soothingly familiar about Still Game. The characters reminded me of my grandparents’ generation – the smart bunnets, the don’t-bother-the-doctor nervousness in the face of authority, the tinned soup and flock wallpaper – it spoke of an age gone by that many Scots still hold dear.

Then there was the language, peppered with sage Glaswegian wisdom such as ‘haud yer wheesht’, ‘up to high doh’ and ‘what’s fur ye’ll no go by ye’ (a sturdy philosophy if ever I heard one).

But when the show returned in 2016 after a nine-year hiatus, and imbued with such BBC confidence thanks to a series of sell-out shows at the Hydro in 2014 that for the first time it was networked across the whole UK, something had palpably changed.

The comedy had become slapstick, the dialogue seeded with ugly swear words. Jokes that weren’t that funny to begin with were repeated, minutes later. Offensive phrases such as ‘window-licker’, which really have no place in society today, were played for laughs, as was the tragic drowning of the singer Whitney Houston.

Then there was Methadone Mick, an odious new character whose resemblance to some of the less salubrious individuals to be found hanging around Glasgow’s Central station was far too close to the bone to be funny. The horrors of drug addiction rarely make for fruitful comedy fodder.

I’m clearly not alone. When the actor who plays the part tweeted that he would return for the new series many decried the move, with a viewer describing him as ‘one of the worst characters in sitcom history’.

I cannot disagree. Between the bad jokes, the playground humour and the grubby undertones, the show appeared to have lost its heart, trading in pathos and empathy for swearing and cheap laughs.

Some elements of the original show remain. We have never, for example, learned which Glasgow football team Jack and Victor support. They have never voiced an opinion on Scottish independence. While a savvy way of keeping viewers from all sides of the fence watching, it is also the sort of move that stands true to the ethos of the show: that Jack and Victor are old boys we can all relate to because they feel somehow universal.

BUT these anomalies aside – along with the look of the characters in their smart check shirts and ties, bunnets and overcoats – the last series felt like it took a similar dive in quality to the later series of Last of the Summer Wine, where gentle Sunday night humour was abandoned for crude slapstick and Nora Batty’s stockings.

Perhaps, though, it is this change of pace that accounts for Still Game’s ongoing popularity. The show’s last series became the most watched non-sporting programme in Scotland for more than a decade, and to read the comments on Twitter you’d think the entire country will be sitting down next Thursday to watch Jack and Victor’s latest adventures. Well, there’s no accounting for taste.

According to Greg Hemphill and Ford Kiernan, the new series will be darker, with at least one member of the cast set to be killed off and a new character in the form of an undertaker entering the fray.

Whether that will help recapture some of the old magic is unclear. If it doesn’t, at least I’ve still got my old DVDs to watch.