When the second and final series of Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights was released into 2002’s lucrative home DVD market, it became the fastest-selling British television DVD in the format’s history, outselling Ricky Gervais’ The Office by two to one. But where The Office lingered in popular memory through streaming, regular repeats, and an American remake, the afterlife of Phoenix Nights is more complicated. It has never been repeated on British television, cannot be accessed on streaming platforms, and exists only in charity shop DVDs, grainy online rips, and Instagram meme pages.

In British television comedy, class is no laughing matter. Every few years, an ambitious BBC commissioner with an eye on Telegraph column inches will thunder that British comedy needs more working-class voices. Nothing changes; in the immediate post-war years, flagship British comedies from The Goon Show to Monty Python were dominated chiefly by the officer class.

But as the social and political clout of workers grew in the 1960s and ’70s, so too did reach in the cultural sphere. Figures like John Sullivan emerged, the sole scriptwriter of Only Fools and Horses, a manual worker who took a job at the BBC in order to pass on the scripts he wrote in evenings to producers. Victoria Wood, a bright working-class girl traumatised by the grammar school system, found expression and future collaborators in the youth wing of Rochdale’s Theatre Workshop. Even after Thatcher’s decisive routing of working-class Britain, the 1990s still held space for figures like Caroline Aherne and Steve Coogan, who were making work that was provocative, accessible, and connected to working-class culture.

Born in Bolton in 1973, Peter Kay would never quite fit into Aherne and Coogan’s model of North-West working-class cool. After leaving school at 16, Kay worked a succession of casual, low-paid jobs before studying a HND in Media Performance at the University of Salford. On only his second live stand-up performance, he beat rising star Johnny Vegas for 1997’s North West Comedian of the Year. At the show, the bottom-of-the-bill comic befriended the compere, a biomedical scientist from Bolton General Hospital called Dave Spikey. Channel 4 controllers began to court Kay after his 1998 Perrier Award victory.

Alongside Spikey and Merseyside stand-up Neil Fitzmaurice, Kay wrote That Peter Kay Thing (1999), a very early example of the soon-to-be ubiquitous comedy mockumentary format. Most episodes were directly inspired by one or another aspect of Kay’s working life — a bingo hall, the Manchester Arena, a Lancashire motorway service station. But an episode based on the fictional Phoenix Working Men’s Club would prove particularly attractive to producers at Channel 4.

Working men’s clubs originated in the middle part of the nineteenth century. As legacies of the movements dedicated to proletarian self-organisation and self-improvement, most working men’s clubs operated as democratic co-operatives by members of the local community. While some maintained clear links to trade unionism, socialism, and varying kinds of workers’ education and sports groups, by the post-war era most of these clubs existed as community spaces for subsidised alcohol, snooker, comedy, cabaret, and live music. At the time of the show’s broadcast, over 3,000 venues belonged to the Club and Institute Union (CIU); but in the subsequent two decades, that number has nearly halved.

These North West institutions would form the show’s raw material. ‘We went in and sat in on committee meetings and went to theme nights,’ explained Spikey in 2021, ‘just talking to club secretaries and club members to get ideas, to get the feel of it, and the right mix of characters.’ In his memoir Under the Microscope, Spikey described being tipped off by a Chorley Labour Club official about an Ann Summers night some of the club women ran. He was refused entrance, but his wife and daughter infiltrated it — while he himself turned up to try and take notes from outside, ‘all I could hear was constant screaming and hysterical laughter.’ His wife and daughter found in the night some of the show’s most memorable lines, including a gag about the love-egg sex toy: ‘Pop them in on the way to work and you’ll come before the bus does.’

These real-life instances provided the inspiration for many of the characters that would populate Phoenix Nights. Each episode would end with a real clubland act auditioning for the cast. Director Johnny Campbell, who had been a documentary maker at Granada, would speak of shooting the show as a drama, with surprisingly cinematic production values and no laughter track — an innovation often credited to The Office, which came six months after Phoenix Nights, but instead owed more of a debt to 1997’s The Royle Family.

The first series, which ran from January 2001, showcased a dizzying variety of characters drawn from the everyday surrealism of working-class life: a mobile DJ (‘Ray Von’) who MC’d as though commandeering a rave, an unexpectedly far-right trad folk group (Half A Shilling’s ‘Send the Buggers Back’), and Clinton Baptiste, a volatile regional clairvoyant. It would be Kay’s fire safety officer Keith Lard, however, that would afford the show its first serious controversy; depicted as a vindictive jobsworth with a penchant for bestiality (‘you try getting an Alsatian to testify’), a viewer complained that the character shared a name and job with a real-life Bolton Council employee. Though Kay emphatically called coincidence, Channel 4 was forced into an on-air apology and £10,000 compensation payment.

The show proved a sleeper hit. Reviews were mixed, but the audience grew. ‘Mind altering substances might make Phoenix Nights more amusing,’ wrote the Guardian, which criticised the show for its lack of ‘archness’. For its audience, this was entirely the point. Where other hit Channel 4 comedies of the era measured the interregnum between university education and middle-class respectability, Phoenix Nights was a deep immersion in a world familiar to millions but absent from television. Reviewers missed that Phoenix Nights was a wistful reflection on a culture in decline; the average Phoenix Nights viewer was unlikely to spend their Thursday nights down the club, but their parents would likely once have done. The show was in an intelligent dialogue with this decline, as Kay’s scheming licensee Brian Potter attempts to rebrand the Phoenix into a modern, ‘everything under one roof’ entertainment complex.

Working-class cultural decline was everywhere in the politics of Britain’s early millennial years. The show landed in the period in which Tony Blair evangelised for those ‘who traditionally may see themselves as working-class’ to join a ‘new, larger, more meritocratic middle class’, and British television programmes such as Changing Rooms and Ground Force helped purge British homes of unhelpful working-class signifiers. What comfort — indeed, sense of transgression — might audiences have found in Phoenix Nights?

There’s one sequence from the first series, though, that feels like a manifesto. The club decides to host an alternative comedy night — the more formally unconventional, often left-leaning comedy pioneered in the 1980s. When Spikey’s Jerry St Clair is confronted by smug student hecklers, he turns the audience against the alternative comedy revolution, unleashing a machine gun fire of classic punchline jokes, and the students exit to a club singalong of Bay City Rollers’ 1975 hit ‘Bye Bye Baby’. It’s at once nostalgic, winning, and suspect. This was Kay’s comedy — a back-to-basics campaign for real jokes.

By the shooting of the show’s second series in 2002, Kay’s star was in the ascendency and approaching that of a genuine national phenomenon — aided by the success of the Live at the Top of the Tower TV special and a series of John Smiths’ beer adverts. ‘There was a lot of modesty around the other guys,’ explained director Jonny Campbell in a 2021 interview, ‘maybe not so much around Peter, to put it diplomatically. Peter was very much the driving force and the one that Channel 4 saw as the star of the show. Because he was being courted and there was a lot of smoke being blown. It was quite a delicate and tricky dynamic when you’re trying to shoot that. I had a really tough schedule to get through.’ Campbell would not be invited back for the second series, which Kay would direct.

Though frequently impressive and no less popular, the second series was undoubtedly weaker. A recurring gag involving two Chinese illegal immigrant workers at the Phoenix club was straightforwardly racist. Almost immediately after transmission, one of the cast members spoke out. The show contained its own sleeper agent from alternative comedy, Daniel Kitson. Kitson, who played gormless barman Spencer, was at the beginning of a creative journey that would culminate in him being one of the country’s most highly regarded comedy performers. Kitson distanced himself from a series that he termed ‘lazy and racist.’ Incensed, Kay would refer to him only as ‘the bastard’ on the series’ DVD commentary. When outtakes were broadcast in 2006, Kitson’s face would be blurred out.

This was not Kay’s only slight towards former colleagues. When Kay informed Dave Spikey and Neil Fitzmaurice that Phoenix Nights had been nominated for a Writer’s Guild of Great Britain award, the pair were thrilled. That was before they learned that the nomination had been entered solely for Kay. This dissolved the team into an acrimony that would last a decade, with Kay’s comedically anaemic spin-off Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere failing to reach anywhere near the highs of his previous collaborative efforts.

There would never be more than twelve episodes of Phoenix Nights, cementing it as part of a lineage of short-running but sharply influential British comedies most associated with Fawlty Towers — though, in 2015, there was a partial reunion for a Comic Relief arena tour (charity-washing and the British comedy world is a story in itself). In 2022, Spikey and Fitzmaurice continue to receive few royalties from the show as a result of Kay’s block on it being repeated or licensed to streaming services.

Though flawed, Phoenix Nights is a landmark in British comedy. At its best, it’s a tightly written and gorgeously observed series steeped in the working-class culture that it celebrates — an anomaly in modern British television. Its quality lies in the wide range of experiences and gallows humour in everyday working life, and of the working people who made it: the hospital employee Dave Spikey, social worker Janice Connelly, the travelling salesman Justin Moorhouse, the languages teacher Archie Kelly, the seamstress Enid Dunn.

If it is a success, it is a success through its richness as an ensemble piece, as a collective. There was no good reason at all for the show to be Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights — particularly when his infrequent touring work and later sitcoms have clearly failed to match the dynamism of his initial stand-up tours and the show itself. Like the populist who can campaign but not govern, Kay’s traditionalist crusade would briefly dazzle but provide diminishing returns.

Why does Phoenix Nights matter? Because what we get to laugh at in Britain is closely governed by class and privilege. Organisations like Cambridge Footlights have existed since the late 1800s to create structures of power to entrench upper-class hegemony in British comedy. There are no similar structures for working-class voices. Austerity has made it harder, not easier, for working-class voices to make inroads into comedy.

Earlier this year, Bolton-born comic Sophie Willan won two BAFTAs for Alma’s Not Normal, her debut BBC series. Like Phoenix Nights, this was popular and accessible work reflecting working-class life, but instead of a meditation on bygone traditions, it was a starkly contemporary story of intergenerational trauma, sex work, the care system, and the winners and losers of ‘regeneration’ in Manchester. To get her script considered by BBC producers, Willan took to waiting outside the BBC’s MediaCity offices in Salford to accost commissioners.

These shows are a testament to what happens when ordinary people are allowed to make things in their own image. That, and not any base nostalgia, is the legacy of Phoenix Nights. As Brian Potter rightly says, you can’t go back.