The Hen Diagram:Henpocalypse!

"Those are solid norks. Any man would be honoured to splash himself over them" - Gary

"That's the nicest things anyone's ever said to me" - Shelly

That's the funniest line in the entire series of Henpocalypse! (BBC2/iPlayer, written by Caroline Moran and directed by Jack Clough and Holly Walsh). The fact that it's not actually all that funny and the fact that it's very crude will you give you a good indication of what sort of comedy programme Henpocalypse! is.

I'm not offended by crude jokes (I love crude jokes) and I'm not offended by women making crude jokes (which other reviewers seem to have taken as the unique selling point of Henpocalypse!) but I do expect the jokes to be at least funny. Or at least funnier than most of what's been offered up here. Rampant Rabbits, putting codeine up one's bum, Kegel balls, and aerolae are all utilised for humour but two things seem to crop up more than anything else:- fannies and spunk.

Fannies, fannies, fannies, spunk, spunk, spunk. I'm not saying you can't make good humour out of vulvae and sperm. I'm just saying Henpocalypse! isn't quite as edgy as it likes to think it is. There are some mildly amusing lines and some enjoyably ludicrous plot twists but there was also some desperately unfunny slapstick and if I'm honest with myself I didn't laugh out loud more than once during the entire six episodes.

Which is a shame because Henpocalypse! had potential. It could, and should, have been so much better. The story begins with Zara (Lucie Shorthouse) and her friends heading off to a cottage in North Wales for her hen party (even though Zara had wanted to go to Lanzarote) and, to begin with, everything is much as you might expect for one of these events. Pink cowboy hats, cock shaped drinking straws, blow up men, a male stripper, personalised t-shirts, and a penis pinata.

But when a global outbreak of 'crab measles' happens everyone is ordered to stay indoors. We see government officials standing behind rostrums with 'AVOID CRABS/STAY HOME/STAY SAFE' written on them and then we see the Health Minister (disappointingly not Matt Hancock) drop dead live on TV. 

He's not the only one. We rejoin the hens nine weeks later and almost every single person on Earth has died. It's never fully explained how this hen party survived but, never mind, this is a silly comedy not a serious piece of science fiction. The cottage is now a complete mess, the inhabitants washing their hair with Toilet Duck, the stripper has been tied to the radiator, and the only food they have is the remains of a chocolate penis and an owl they've managed to catch.

Zara's sniffing felt tip pens and her teeth keep falling out, Zara's mum, Bernadette (Elizabeth Berrington), has got shingles, and Zara's Danny Dyer obsessed cousin Jen (Kate O'Flynn) is in bed with a very gammy (and smelly) leg. She's handed a hammer to kill herself if it all gets a bit too much. When you've heard her use the word 'wazzock' for the twentieth time you start wishing she'll use it.

The other two hens are Veena (Lauren O'Rourke) and maid of honour Shelly (Callie Cooke). Veena has practical skills, a detective instinct, and ends up pimping up their car up to look like something from Mad Max(ine) while Shelly has father issues, self-esteem issues, and guilt issues relating to an incident at Zara's 30th birthday party to which we regularly flash back to.

Nevertheless, Shelly is the dogsbody of the group who organised, and paid for, the hen do and is tasked with looking after both Jen and Drew (Ben McGregor) the stripper. Who, by this point, is being fed owl, pissing in a Big Yellow Teapot, and shitting in an Alvin and the Chipmunks caravan.

Don't feel too sorry for him though. His main concern about the apocalypse is that it means we'll lose great men like "Jeremy Clarkson, Jordan Peterson, and Russell Brand. All the great thinkers" before going on to admitting he also likes Joe Rogan, Nigel Farage, and Elon Musk. When he later talks about going to a Super Furry Animals gig I feel the band have been slighted. SFA are a great band. They deserve much better company than that bunch of rotters.

Despite being a bit of a dick, Drew is kept just in case the world needs repopulating. Gary (George Somner), Zara's fiance - mostly seen in flashback, is also a bit of a dick. The sort of man who gets a tattoo of his fiancee's dead dog across his chest in order to impress her. 

There's a reasonably decent, and intentionally hammy, guest appearance from Danny Dyer but the only other character of any real significance is pilates instructor Nesbit (Mariam Haque). Nesbit, or Nezzie, was enjoying a solo walking holiday when the apocalypse struck and, like the hens and their stripper, somehow survived.

Though she visits the cottage to look at Jen's leg, she and the hens do not become allies. In fact they'd fallen out even before doomsday when Zara did a piss in front of her and Veena drove the car into her. From just that last sentence you'll see that the humour is often painted in very broad brush strokes and some of these jokes, like the girls wearing their knickers as face masks, must have worked better on the page than they did on the screen.

There's a decent hen-adjacent soundtrack (Britney Spears, Icona Pop, Jamelia, Tom Jones, The Dixie Cups, Liberty X, Petula Clark, Girls Aloud, Take That, and, of course, Abba's Dancing Queen) and there's some reasonably decent observational humour made about things like Gogglebox, Wetherspoons, Fray Bentos, ayahuasca, spaghetti hoops, putting fireworks up one's bum, Marie Kondo, sporks, Bestival, Paul Hollywood, ketamine, and Carl Jung but the overall feeling I took away from Henpocalypse! was an opportunity missed. Not a complete failure, not the end of the world, but it really should have been so much better. If Henpocalypse! had been a hen night accessory it would have been a huge inflatable penis - but it would have been a half-deflated one.