Stag

Stag preview

The hunters become the hunted as each one is horribly eliminated, one gobby moron at a time.

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.

TV preview: Stag, BBC2

I don't really need to tell you much about comedy chiller Stag. The cast should be enough of a selling point. Jim Howick, Reece Shearsmith, Rufus Jones and Tim Key as well as Stephen Campbell Moore, James Cosmo and Pilou Asbaek. If you don't know some of the names you'll certainly know the faces.

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.

Jim Field Smith interview

Here, he discusses the film's cinematic inspirations, the challenge of making terrible people redeemable, why British comedy directors are in such demand in America and his future plans.

This opens like every crime drama you've ever seen, with a dark dreary landscape and heavy clouds gathering on the horizon. Bleak piano music plays as a car slowly winds its way through the sinister hills. I'd probably have switched off at this point if it wasn't for the fact that this is a comedy series, and no ordinary comedy but one starring the dark genius of Reece Shearsmith.

It's a three-part comedy thriller set in the Highlands and begins like a parody of An American Werewolf in London: Ian, a small and polite little Englishman in a dinner jacket, finds himself in a wild Highland village and he ventures into the local pub to be met with silence and sneers. "You shouldn't be here," he's told but the silence is soon broken by a bunch of idiots who come dancing through the pub in a conga line.

Ian is in the Highlands for a stag weekend but he's seems a bit too genteel for the antics which are planned. The rest of the party are arrogant, wealthy bankers from London who've come to Scotland to indulge in "sleeping rough, hanging tough and stalking your prime rib deer across the Highlands."

But when they leave the pub and enter the wilderness, this bunch of bankers are reduced to frightened schoolboys, being stripped naked and threatened with drowning and perhaps rape by stags and it becomes a comic version of Deliverance set in the Highlands.

Interview: cast of Stag

TV's latest genre-busting series sees a Highlands bachelor weekend become a bloody quest for survival. We brave the mud and drizzle to meet its cast.

Stag: We wanted to skewer masculinity

Think of the worst stag do imaginable. Well, it would pale in comparison to the weekend timid teacher Ian Telford has to endure in upcoming dark comedy Stag. Taken deer-stalking with his future brother-in-law Johnners and his obnoxious pals, Ian already wants to go home. But when they start being killed off one by one, will he even make it through to Monday? Writer and creator Jim Field Smith tells us why this age old ritual was the perfect environment for a dark comedy thriller.

Stag review

Whatever your plans are for the next three Saturday evenings, cancel them, because you're going to want to stay in and watch BBC Two's unmissable new dark comic thriller Stag.