Television shows that remake films tend to be exercises in pointless nostalgia. Do you remember the movies Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons and American Gigolo? Yes. Would you like to watch a weird cosplay version of them that goes on for 10 hours and confusingly reshuffles the plot? Um, not really. The Full Monty (from 14 June, Disney+) is the latest entrant in an already tired genre, but it has one up on most of the competition: all the core cast are in that sweet spot where they’re successful enough to be worth rehiring but not so famous they’ve turned the reboot down. That means there’s no need to rejig the story of redundant Sheffield steelworkers who, in 1997, found solace in hard times by forming a Chippendales-style male striptease troupe. We simply return to Sheffield 26 years later, to find the same characters, played by the same actors, living the same lives. The film had it easy, plot-wise, in that it built towards that heartwarming climactic moment when a sextet of men showed the local community their penises. Those six appendages were the pegs on which were hung serious subtexts about the misery of life in a Thatcher-ravaged, deindustrialised northern England. A quarter of a century on, however, the prospect of the old boys windmilling their hosepipes in housewives’ faces would horrify everyone. So the new Full Monty is fully clothes-on. Instead, the revival presents as a Sunday-night-on-ITV comedy-drama caper, putting the lads into a series of amusing predicaments. When we’re reacquainted with rogue-in-chief Gaz (Robert Carlyle) in episode one, he’s trying to transport a mattress across town but the bus driver won’t let him on with it! Then a series of misunderstandings leads to high jinks involving a dog that’s just won Britain’s Got Talent! Later on, people get lost in a forest overnight, misplace a valuable racing pigeon and drive a mobility scooter on a main road! Honestly, what are these incorrigible middle-aged eccentrics like? Do not be fooled. Actually, feel free to be fooled because The Full Monty’s subversion of the light-shenanigans template is an admirably bold bait-and-switch. Since we last saw the gang, New Labour’s false hope has come and gone and a second, even chillier Tory winter has had to be endured. The show sets itself in a world where austerity has replaced the straightforward misery of losing your job because the mill’s closed with a more pervasive sense of corrosion and dread. At the hospital where Gaz works as a porter, mental health provision is in the toilet. Kids at the school where humble, no-nonsense Dave (Mark Addy) is now the caretaker aren’t getting enough to eat. But it’s not a school any more, it’s an academy, where education is a cost forever to be cut by a headteacher whose guilt at having drifted into a high-salary, low-morals job is exacerbated by the fact that she’s Dave’s wife, Jean (Lesley Sharp). One thing that has improved since the 90s is meaningful female roles in British comedy-dramas – back in the day, Jean was merely a supportive spouse, encouraging Dave to rip his grundies off in public – but generally everything’s screwed, and The Full Monty makes sure you know it, even as it keeps those chuckles coming. More than one episode ends with a caption giving you a number you can call. In the film, the most famous scene, apart from the strip show itself, is the one where the men, deep in rehearsal for the big night, instinctively start thrusting their hips to Hot Stuff by Donna Summer while standing in a dole queue. Now there is no dole queue, its camaraderie replaced by the “computer-says-fuck-you” nightmare of the modern benefits office. The episode set inside one such hellhole, which sees a sub-optimal disability living allowance assessment develop into a knockabout comedy hostage situation, constitutes the most ambitious – or possibly reckless – tonal clash you’ll see on TV all year. Then as the season finale looms and you wonder what the big finish will be, a storyline that has been bubbling sadly in the background ends in a way that will leave you gasping with oh-my-god-they-went-there shock, not unlike John Prescott at the 1998 Brit awards when novelty anarchists Chumbawamba emptied a bucket of ice water over him in protest at Labour leaving striking dockers high and dry. Who’s that co-writing The Full Monty with Simon Beaufoy, author of the original film’s screenplay? Alice Nutter, once of Chumbawamba but now a fine TV writer with several Jimmy McGovern collaborations on her CV. Her characters get knocked down, but do not always get up again: The Full Monty’s take on 90s nostalgia is unexpectedly ballsy.