This old-school sitcom about a PE teacher who wakes after being frozen since the 70s is an impeccably deadpan send-up of masculinity. But it hits hardest when this unreconstructed man turns out to be right about life today You can lay the demise of political satire at the door of stranger-than-fiction governmental turmoil. You can attribute the disappearance of pop culture pastiche to a fractured zeitgeist and the thinning out of the artistic mainstream. Yet there’s no obvious reason for the scarcity of jokes about contemporary society in comedy. Maybe it has something to do with the decline of the sketch show; perhaps it’s simply because there’s far less funny stuff on TV in general (during the 2010s, the BBC’s comedy output almost halved ). Whatever the reason, when we get a chance to laugh at modern mores, we should probably take it. Re-enter Mammoth, an old-school sitcom from the Welsh comedian Mike Bubbins. The 53-year-old stars as the eponymous Tony Mammoth, a PE teacher who was buried by an avalanche on a school skiing trip in 1979. A quarter of a century later he was unearthed – nice one, global warming! – with his middle-aged body and dated values perfectly preserved. Yes we can laugh at this swaggering alpha’s outmoded tastes and borderline offensive views. But the beauty of this series is that the comedy flows both ways: when Mammoth looks aghast at the things that pass for normal in 2020s Britain, it can be hard to deny that he has a point. Continue reading...