Greg Dixon: A wet weekend with the boys

If you knew you only had one weekend left watching TV, how would you spend it?

Would you pray for episodes of ancient favourites, say Doctor Who, Star Trek or Dallas?

Would you lie on the couch begging for back-to-back series of Treasure Island, Celebrity Treasure Island and Superstars Of Treasure Island? Would you hope someone at the networks figured it was worth screening all of Brideshead Revisited without ads?

It's a bugger of a poser.

And last weekend, my last weekend as a professional television watcher, I had to consider this most existential of questions.

As Queen's Birthday Weekend began, I hadn't even begun to hope there might be something to watch that might answer the question, let alone something that was worth watching on a very long, very wet weekend.

There hasn't been anything worth watching (well mostly) for so long, I've long since lost, well, hope.

But if I'd had some inspiration and then rung someone at the networks to tell them what to screen for me - as a favour for all the nice things I've said about them over the years, you understand - I don't believe that my imagination wedded to the most generous of programmers would have delivered me the sweet, happy pleasure of hours and hours and hours of one of my all-time favourite (copyright for this phrase is held by Nick Hornby) comedies, Men Behaving Badly.

I've banged on about it before. I'm sure I have. Surely I've said that Men Behaving Badly - along with Fawlty Towers, Seinfeld and The Office - is simply one of the best comedies made.

And there it was on Sky's UKTV, two nights running, for hours and hours and hours, in between the channel's other Queen's Birthday marathon screening, Mrs Slocombe's Pussy, aka Are You Being Served?

So for my final weekend watching television - well, watching TV for money - I lay on the couch with a pillow and a blanket to keep out the cold and wallowed.

On the face of it, MBB is just plain rude.

It's about two cynical blokes, though they're pretty much overgrown boys really, who drink too much and go on and on and on about sex.

Nice people wouldn't like them at all.

And there's a theory that this comedy - which rated through the roof when it originally screened in Britain between 1992 and 1998 - was nothing more than the ultimate celebration of the so-called New Lad, the farting, beer-drinking, Loaded-reading creature that emerged last decade as a reaction the so-called New Man.

Well yes, it is that, I suppose. But it's also one of the sharpest-written and most complete comedies, in terms of narrative arc, ever made.

Across its six series it did something that is almost never done well: it charted the journey from young adulthood to adulthood - something that Friends, perhaps the ultimate comedy for the New Man, could never do - and it did it with almost as many bad puns as Are You Being Served?

It might have been about men behaving badly, but the women always won. Well almost always.

So there you go. I'm sure you're wondering what the hell is this last column actually about? Hell, I don't know. Perhaps what I'm on about is that good television is a very fine thing.

And a lot of good television on a very long, very wet weekend is even better. Especially if it's your last.