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Blame Brassic on Dominic West. While filming Pride, the rousing 2014 film about gay Londoners finding solidarity with a hardscrabble Welsh community during the miners’ strike, West was acting alongside lanky live wire Joseph Gilgun, who would regale him with wild tales of growing up in Chorley in Lancashire. Tickled by anecdotes like the theft of a shetland pony, West encouraged Gilgun to mine his formative years for material that could become a TV show.
Gilgun teamed up with screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst, no stranger to authentic northern humour after working on Channel 4’s Shameless. The result was Brassic, a headlong comedy about a rowdy gang of scallywags, chancers and wheeler-dealers trying to stay one step ahead of the law and local heavies in the fictional northern town of Hawley. As well as repurposing the ducking and diving of his youth, the autobiographical elements extended to Gilgun’s likable ringleader Vinnie O’Neill coping with being bipolar. That key character detail also meant a recurring role for the plummy West as Vinnie’s relentlessly inappropriate GP Dr Chris.
When Brassic debuted on Sky in August 2019, it was a raucous word-of-mouth hit that became the broadcaster’s biggest comedy launch in years. Now, after seven seasons (placing it alongside Trollied as Sky’s longest-running homegrown sitcom) co-creators Gilgun and Brocklehurst are calling time with its 50th episode, a surprisingly tidy numerical capstone for a series that has always embraced chaos.
Putting aside the exuberant, escalating farce of Brassic’s innumerable shady capers – which have included a bull semen heist, infiltrating a naked cult and multiple mix-ups involving corpses in compromising situations – the show’s greatest strength has always been its deep bench of boisterous but caring characters.
Early seasons foregrounded the intense emotional triangle between Vinnie, his upwardly mobile childhood pal Dylan (Damien Molony) and Dylan’s compassionate girlfriend Erin (Michelle Keegan). But their wider circle, seemingly permanently installed in the Crow’s Nest pub, was bursting with brash, big-hearted oddballs: dodgy entrepreneur Tommo (Ryan Sampson), gay, bare-knuckle fighter Ash (Aaron Heffernan), loyal mechanic JJ (Parth Thakerar) and unlikely sweethearts Cardi (Tom Hanson) and Carol (Bronagh Gallagher).
Even amid such a stellar cast, there was an early breakout: the gang’s splenetic frenemy Farmer Jim (Steve Evets). With his scraggly woolly hat and bedraggled beard, Farmer Jim looks like Captain Birdseye marinated in sheep dip, always a hair-trigger away from a drunken, foul-mouthed tirade. Over the course of seven seasons, the indefatigable Evets has been responsible for some of the best screen swearing since The Thick of It’s imperial phase.
Having an ensemble strong enough that anyone can hold the spotlight has kept Brassic firing on all cylinders even as cast members have cycled in and out. (Molony left in season four; perhaps his Bergerac is so gloomy because he misses the high-jinks of Hawley.) A steady stream of up-for-it guest stars has helped, including Lee Mack, Steve Pemberton, Liza Tarbuck, Imelda Staunton, Greg Davies and Mani from the Stone Roses. Season five featured the surprise casting coup of Camille Cottin from French hit Call My Agent as a therapist helping Vinnie unpack his traumatic childhood. The addition of Shameless veteran Dean Lennox Kelly as ex-acid house DJ Curtis Plum also felt like a full circle moment.
The transgressive plotlines and near-constant (but mostly affectionate) swearing has always made it easy to dismiss Brassic as crass or juvenile; a UK version of the cheerfully depraved It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, another long-running sitcom about loafers in a bar looking for kicks.
But at a craft level, Brassic has always been brilliantly conceived, written and acted. There are echoes of Spaced, Community and even Family Guy in its use of elaborate flashbacks, fantasy sequences and dance numbers. What’s just as impressive is how the everyday pub scenes are optimised to maximise humour, with almost every line garlanded by sarcastic asides, knowing looks or background slapstick. Brassic’s additive, maximalist approach to comedy chimes with the all-or-nothing, ride-or-die philosophy of the Hawley crew.
So perhaps it’s for the best that it bows out before it burns out. Appropriately for a show where the characters have spent an awful lot of time cultivating a weed farm, Brassic is going out on a high. (Last year saw a surge of renewed interest when the first four seasons became available on Netflix UK.) The climactic 50th episode has been trailed as a tonal departure, suggesting that volatile Hawley gangster Davey MacDonagh (Neil Ashton) may finally lose his patience with Vinnie and the gang. The fact that season seven has been released weekly rather than as the usual bingeable box set has certainly added to the sense of anticipation and dread. That fans are genuinely concerned about the fate of these nominally knockabout characters points to how beloved they are. In any case, they had a good run. Fare thee well, ne’er-do-wells.
