Stay Lucky

Dennis Waterman is an iconic figure; a lean slab of ham topped with rusty hair, wrapped in a brown leather jacket, and secure enough in his masculinity to let loose both wolves which dwell inside every man; punching wrong'uns and grabbing the mic for a bloody good sing-song. Nostalgic trawls through his body of work place him as real throwback, not of performance but of casting. A bloke like Waterman would never get those roles now, like the way you stick on Die Hard in 2025, well aware a man with a body like that (a body, by any standards, in good shape) wouldn't even get an audition for John McClane today. Get some veins on it! Learn to love the needle! Similarly, in the world of modern television, even a prime Waterman would never land the hunk or hardman roles that were his bread and butter.

Not particularly charismatic, he's so lacking in identifiable traits, you'd be hard pushed to do an impression. Yet Waterman persisted, one of Britain's most recognisable faces, with the Sweeney to Minder pipeline cementing him as a tough nut through decades of consistent work, until the day he was brown bread. In a long career, there's many things one could focus on, such as the fantastically weird title for his first album, Downwind of Angels. “Cor, Gabriel, you let one go, son?” Instead, we shall look upon something suggested by one of my beloved Patrons, namely Yorkshire Television's Stay Lucky, which ran for 27 hour-long episodes between 1989 and 1993.

I get sent a lot of links, but the opening five minutes had me pinned to the screen. In those 300 seconds, Waterman topples out of frame clinging to a drainpipe while escaping an angry husband; the husband of a much younger Chinese woman picked up at a night club while Hot Stuff blares in the background. Hubby's a Triad, causing Waterman to flee London, slo-mo leaping onto a moving boat in the Thames, into the opening credits, where a 1989 CGI skeleton roly-polys across the titles under Waterman singing the feem toon – “I'm out on the road, and the going is tough, they're after me and I need a friend, but who can you trust?”

We're at episode one, titled A1 Rain Dancer, and immediately aware this represents a very specific genre from a very specific point in time. Old style telly, before the Golden Age, no past traumas will be unpicked here; no promo shots with characters stood in a line in jackets looking grim. There will be zero moody montages under needle drops of Spotify bangers, no long dialogue scenes or monologues; instead being raced from scene to scene like Den's got us by the scruff of the neck. Absolutely filled with stuff, none of which is of any consequence, it's the simplistic storytelling of yore, in a world where each criminal underling is bumbling and harmless, each mob boss a scenery chewing panto villain, and where Dennis Waterman is every woman's dream and every man's nightmare. More succinctly, it's the kind of stuff my mum would binge through on ITVX in a couple of sittings.

Though half the episodes were written by creator Geoff McQueen, who also created The Bill and wrote for both of Jim Davidson's sitcoms, Steven Moffat's name crops up once, and the series 3 premiere's directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, who created A Ghost Story for Christmas. There's similar pedigree in its enormous cast list, featuring every stalwart face you'd expect in 90's television, from Julie T. Wallace to Tom Wilkinson, and dozens of 'it's them off that thing' types – Belinda Lang making two appearances as Lady Winderscale; Roy Evans off EastEnders as simply 'morris dancer'. Absolutely standard TV fare of the time. And by 'standard' I mean 'weird as shit'.

On the lam, Waterman's hitching a ride to 'the north' and getting splashed by lorries, pleading to the Gods “someone give us a bleedin' lift!” Inside a posh Jaguar speeding past, Jan Francis off Just Good Friends retorts (though neither can hear each other) “sorry, dickhead, not today.” Thankfully, a very accommodating rugged Scottish trucker called Angus lets him dry his wet trousers on the heater and gives him a Mars Bar. “I'm famished,” says Angus, “d'ya fancy something hot inside yer?” With the promise of a service cafe up ahead, he nods down at Waterman's crotch. “Gis a wee look, I'll spring for the grub. Come on, gis a look, that's all I wan', just a look.” Feel bad for him actually, so starved of intimacy on the road, he's begging for a glimpse of Dennis Waterman's phallus. Must resemble a piglet's trotter in a clump of wire wool.

Cut to him hurriedly getting out – “on your bike, bleedin' shirtlifter!” – at an A1 service station where Jan Francis has broken down. Trousers in hand, he tries to charm her by tap-dancing in a puddle (hence the episode title), before uttering those eight little words which immediately put all women at ease, “I'm not a lunatic or a perv, honest.” One thing audiences of the late-80s loved was the bickering 'posh totty/bit of rough' dynamic, and that's Stay Lucky's primary selling point, two characters who clearly despise each other, needling back and forth with insults and folded arms, yet fated to end up doing sin in a bed. He fixes her car in exchange for a lift to Leeds, and they bid final angry farewell; “Right stroppy bird. Last time I saw a mouth like yours, it had a hook in it!” I'm sure that will be the last time they see each other.

But he'll discover she actually dropped him 40 miles shy of Leeds, instead to where she lives in a houseboat, which has just been ransacked. He gets a proper lift to Leeds in the Reliant Robin of an Italian juggler with a Super Mario accent and loose toupee, who he meets in a cafe, firmly establishing this as the comedy-drama genre, not funny enough to be a sitcom, and too far-fetched to slot alongside similar-timeslot fare like Cracker, Taggart, or Morse, whose horny gay trucker characters would be revealed as serial killers, glove compartments absolutely chocker with severed nobs. Speaking of baddies, our subplot sees a man called Studs rifling through Francis's underwear drawer, taking a big whiff of her knickers and rubbing them all over his face. Tight-fitting punk jeans, leather jacket, buzzed haircut, earring, and fingerless leather gloves; like the finest wines, this tough guy look has only gotten camper with each passing year.

As we'll (eventually) learn in drip-drip exposition, Studs is working for a man called Ken, who's seeking a little black book owned by Francis's dead husband, whose heart gave out mid-sex with a mistress – Ken's wife! The widow and the scarlet woman bump into each other graveside, Francis given the book, which contains the mysterious key to a painting, which only “Old Cecil at the junk shop” knows more about. Cecil's not in, but he's got a Benny from Crossroads style assistant in a woolly hat, continuing the time honoured tradition of slow-witted characters referring to people by the first letter of their surname – “Hallo, Mrs. H!” Not-Benny sends her off to a boozer in Harrowgate after Cecil, coincidentally exactly where Dennis Waterman's headed to! As she walks away, the Benny makes a lustful face, implying he too is in love with her, or at least “she make my worm go all funny, so she does; makes him stand bolt upright in me britches thy knows!”

Also clearly in love with her is a mate with a little ponytail played by Eric Catchpole off Lovejoy, but we'll get to that. Built on improbable coincidences, she's almost kidnapped by Studs outside the pub, but Waterman's there to spot her escape as she runs over his foot. Feeling bad, she gives him a lift to the hospital. Now on crutches and in a cast, he's allowed to stay on the houseboat sofa, where the “dickhead” count rises to four. Most improbably is that thing everyone does in films, laying straight under a blanket for a kip and not doing a piss before bed. Mate, always reset the bladder before sleep.

The next day, he finds out the foot's only bruised and not broken, and the nurse put a cast on cos she was “just playing safe.” No wonder the NHS is losing so much money. Cue Waterman so jittery in front of a lady at the chemists, she thinks he wants rubber johnnies for his heavily-freckled willy, but he's after bandages and a plaster of Paris to make a fake cast around a Wellington boot, so the posh bird won't turf him out. Roger the Dodger ass scheme. This weird veering between drama and 1970's sitcom continues as Waterman and Catchpole get into a fight where the weapon of choice is wet fish – “I'll batter you!” – and Waterman's fish is comically small, implying Angus would've had to switch the overhead light on to see anything. Waterman calls him a wilf, like he's hosting Runaround, and a gink, before Jane Francis walks in, with a fifth “dickhead.”

Francis gets in her car to find Studs waiting in the back like Michael Myers, and Ken wants the black book, or else he'll “let this animal do what he wants.” The way he's dressed, that means get some poppers up his hooter to be Serving in the front row at G.A.Y. where three of S Club 7 are doing a midnight appearance. He shakes the book out of her handbag, returning the knickers while cackling like the Green Goblin, but the mystery of the black book is not resolved, so we have no way of knowing what happens (besides watching episode two, but I shan't be doing that.)

Of course, Waterman and Lady Muck's last goodbye turns into the long-simmering kiss, and as she goes off to bed, he warns, quite matter-of-factly, “I think you'd better lock your door,” I guess joking that he might do a rape? When he hears it actually lock, he lets out a disappointed “oh, shit” as we cut to credits. He's not the only one let down, as the skeleton from the opening never makes an appearance, unless it's meant to be Dennis', and if so, technically it's in every scene, but a rather arbitrary choice. Why not have CG recreations of his appendix or vas deferens rolling around instead? It's gone by series two, one of which I have also sampled, selected by having the coolest title, The Devil Wept in Leeds, which with a late October airdate, suggests a spooky Halloween episode.

It's not, and this is the Moffat one. I'm not familiar with his most famous work, Sherlock and Who, I just know he's got a lovely perm, and should've been locked up in writer's jail for how blatantly Chalk was just Fawlty Towers in a school. Biggest shock is the change in feem toon, indicating a shift in Big Red's circumstances, no longer a man on his own with a price on his head, and duetting with a female singer (not Jan Francis, despite the fact they're together now). They sing boat-based puns, “I'll be the captain – no you'll be the mate,” and advise us, “the feeling's getting stronger, stay lucky and free!” with Waterman's gravelly voice painting a vivid mental picture of him stood in the recording booth in his jeans.

We open on a very calm Michael Jayston with half a dozen guns on him in a warehouse, feet literally in a concrete block, and Dennis Lill dressed like a 1920's gangster from Chicago warning “dying is easy, Valentine, it's the waiting that kills you,” then Lill's goons are distracted by boxes of novelty alarm clocks going off. Elsewhere, Waterman and Francis are bickering as he drives to pick up some... novelty alarm clocks, and walk in to have guns pointed at them. Where episode one had the captain from Red Dwarf as an American heavy, among today's henchmen, we've the landlord of the Queen Vic who got murdered by Nick Cotton. Dialogue between Lill and Jayston is the height of 1990 comedy bants.

“What would you say if I told you I don't know?”

“I'd say I don't believe you.”

“I don't know.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Yep, you were right!”

Through contrivances, the pair help Valentine escape, taking out bumbling goons who either shoot each other by mistake, or get flattened when the concrete-footed Valentine falls through a wooden staircase. Dickhead count during this sequence: one. Turns out, Valentine's the deadliest hitman in Europe, and insisting on paying them for their troubles, decides the best thank you would be to whack the “tub of lard” local councillor who keeps denying them planning permission. What follows is a farce of trying to stop him, which has Valentine, then Waterman, and finally Lill all enter the councillor's office pretending to be window cleaners. There's a horrible scene Emma Wray off Watching interrupts their boat-sex, where Waterman won't leave the bedroom to talk to her because – its implied – he's waiting for his solid penis to deflate, plus some hijinx with a remote controlled sniper rifle, before everything converges at a charity show, where the councillor will be making an appearance.

Incidentally, the houseboat which smells of sex with Dennis Waterman has an unintentional Tardis quality, about three times as wide as it appears from the outside. It's interior wears the same colour pallet as the rest of the 1990 world, horrid brown, everyone and everything looking absolutely awful; Jan Francis in jumpers and a massive Jon Motson football coat, and unruly haircuts which all look like wigs. Maybe the brownness was a deliberate choice to disguise all the dog mucks everywhere before they brought fines in.

With Valentine watching through a sniper scope in the lighting box, the big show's compared by Bobby Knutt, and we can pick out but two words from his routine over the squabbling of our leads – “Japanese whaling.” But that's preferable to Francis's line about a “clever tongue,” Waterman's response to which forces the audience to picture him engaged in cunnilingus, no doubt saying things like “I'm giving your Jack and Danny a right bleedin' nosh down here!” I figured the councillor would be handing out a big cheque, but no, he's doing a magic routine, “from the Magic East!” If he gets the linking rings out, I'll whack him myself. As Waterman rushes the stage to block Valentine's shot with bits of scenery, notable is a cut to the laughing audience, where the featured background artist's face is a young Dave Chapman from Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow/Andor.

Waterman's thrown out by security, while Francis simply calls the cops on 'The Devil' Valentine, who's arrested. And that's the end of that chapter! Simpler times, when the only thing we had to worry about was if the posh lady and earthy fella who argued all the time might not interconnect genitals. It seems the entire 'diametrically opposed man and woman get into scrapes' set-up is a dead genre nowadays, and with Waterman also in the ground, sadly we'll never get that gruff-romantic-fixer dramedy crossover with a team-up between Thomas Gynn (that's his name in this, I forgot to say), Boon, and Lovejoy.