TV preview: Stag, BBC2, episode 3

It is so hard to write about this excellent comedy thriller without giving something away. Needless to say the final episode in which the loose ends have to be tied up - probably around one of the cast's necks - is the toughest to discuss. One slip and the game may be given away.

Stag: episode 3 review

As we reach the bloody conclusion of the stag party from Hell, it is probably safe to say that no-one will guess who the killer is.

TV review: Stag, BBC2, episode 2

I'm not sure how much it qualifies as a comedy now that it has got proper scary, but I'm really enjoying Stag.

Stag: episode 2 review

As with the last episode, the best thing about this episode is the characters, who are at first are mostly unlikable, but as their crisis grows you understand that each has their own problems.

I had high hopes for Stag (BBC Two, Saturdays) -- a three-part black comedy by some of the team responsible for the superb The Wrong Mans -- about a stag weekend gone hideously wrong in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands. Stag parties are so often, in my experience, the best reason for wishing you had been born a woman: all that pressure to show yourself the alpha male, among painfully mismatched, pumped-up lads you often barely know, having to drink more than you'd like, watching skanky whores that do the opposite of arouse you. Can't tell you how glad I am to have got past that stage of my life.

What Stag captured very well, I thought, was the sheer repellance that stag groups often exude. I could certainly identify with the character of Ian (Jim Howick), the outsider who turns up late, doesn't know anyone, and finds that merely to survive the weekend he's going to fall in with the alien banter and submit to the random rules of arrogant bullies led by Ledge (short for 'Legend', played with Flashmanesque swagger by JJ Feild). (Ledge is scripted as having been to Harrow. This is wrong. He would definitely have gone to Wellington -- at least as it was before Anthony Seldon came along and emasculated it with My Little Pony caringness classes.)

But I didn't quite buy the tone. Obviously, it was nice to see the tossers all being picked off, one by one, Deliverance-style by the locals. But I didn't feel they'd been shown doing quite enough to deserve it. For these things to work -- see also Southern Comfort -- you have genuinely to be persuaded that the natives are sufficiently psychopathic and inbred to enact this kind of mayhem; and also, I think, to find the victims sufficiently sympathetic for you to care rather than cheer when they get cut in half, disembowelled, etc.

BBC Two's "comedy thriller" Stag sees seven moneyed and pompous southern child-men that have hurled themselves and their greed-cards into the maw of rainy Perthshire. The best man on the stag do is called Ledge, and this isn't shorthand for thick and shelfish: it's short for "Legend", which tells you pretty much all you need to know about the banker chaps. The hunters, of course, become the hunted. It's Deliverance as written by Irvine Welsh and, somehow, Nicola Sturgeon.

"You're supposed to be taking us hunting, not standing around looking Scottish," demands Ledge of his hired gamekeeper. He is echoed - "too full of Mars bars in batter", ho ho, by the other surefire dicks and other noncom asshats. Don't they know that their gamekeeper is played by James Cosmo, in the planes of whose entire face honour and murder lurk?

It gets better, and better, and the humour finally takes a back seat to the humanity. Stick with this: wholly rewarding and surprising.

The makers of The Wrong Mans go very dark indeed with this three-part drama, a twisted tale of a stag weekend gone horribly awry in the Scottish Highlands. Ian (Peep Show's Jim Howick) tags along for the festivities of his future brother-in-law who, it soon transpires, has a ghastly line in friends. When best man Ledge, a punchable City boy, mocks a gamekeeper once too often, they're left stranded. As if that wasn't bad enough, soon they're dispatched one by one, in grisly fashion.

Stag: episode 1 review

From the producer and director of BBC Two comedy thriller The Wrong Mans comes another series that combines dark humour with a deadly chill.