After the runaway success of The Full Monty, broad northern humour is big business at the box office.

So there are high hopes today for the movie version of John Godber's famous rugby league comedy, Up 'n' Under.

On paper, it does indeed look promising: earthy northerners chuffing, drinking and swearing, and, for the Loaded generation, Samantha Janus, star of the sitcom Game On, taking her kit off.

But, and I'm sorry to have to say so, Up 'n' Under is a disappointment.

And strangely for a piece so well tried on the stage, the weakness is not in direction or performance but in the script.

The plot concerns Arthur (Gary Olsen) staking his life savings on a bet with an old rugby buddy (Tony Slattery) that he can train the worst team in Castleford to take on the best.

The team in question includes Neil Morrissey from Men Behaving Badly, but Godber - directing as well as writing - gives him surprisingly little to do.

To help knock the lads into shape, Olsen enlists the help of a local gym owner (Janus) who wants in return to turn out with the team.

So far, so good. But there are two problems; the chief one being too few jokes and a tendency to repeat those which are there.

Also - and this is where Up 'n' Under lacks an emotive element that was present in The Full Monty and Brassed Off before it - the story is driven not by collective community despair of the sort which touches us all, but by the personal, and not very well developed, problems of the individual characters.

The funniest turn is from Griff Rhys Jones as a local radio commentator. Most of the rest of the gags are old enough to have come on the bus from Castleford:

"The lads aren't committed."

"No, but they ought to be."

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.