Described as 'politically incorrect' by people who don't understand comedy, words or life.
1.
The Christmas Balls out-takes video (1998) suggests that most of the studio rushes are safe. There are, however, no clips from the first two series: since these were transmitted on ITV, it is possible that Thames had ownership of the tapes...although, since the independent production company Hartswood Films made all six series, this should not have presented a problem. One clip is the scene from 'Stag Night' (12/11/97) where - in the transmitted episode - Tony (Neil Morrissey) pockets Deborah (Leslie Ash)'s knickers. She requests that he return them, and - after he does so - he sniffs his hand. This was a ad lib: the session sequence reveals that Martin Clunes then took an experimental sniff, followed by Caroline Quentin who mouthed 'They're definitely hers'. Most clips on the video come from the studio recordings, with the actors hamming up their fluffs and relishing expletives; the one exception is the scene with Morrissey and Ash in a caravan (from 'Jealousy', 24/11/97), which was not performed before the studio audience - here, Ash seems genuinely irritable and restless over her colleagues' incessant corpsing.
[NOTE The third part of BBC 1's Laughter In The House series chronicling the development of British sitcom ('Modern Times', 9/4/99) featured independently-recorded footage of the recording session for the episode 'Performance' (recorded in November 1998 for transmission on Christmas Day). The programme also featured very brief footage of the cast at a listless read-through and even more listless rehearsal.]
2.
A sequence from 'How To Dump Your Girlfriend' (22/9/92) where Tony prepares a snack for the convalescing Deborah was cut for the video release because Motorhead's 'Ace Of Spades' was playing in the background.
[NOTE: Motorhead performed 'Ace Of Spades' in The Young Ones, and this sequence was retained on the video release. It is not known why it posed a problem for Men Behaving Badly.]
3.
The second series of Men Behaving Badly (the first to feature Neil Morrissey) was originally broadcast on ITV from 8/9/92 - 13/10/92 but has been repeated on BBC1 twice since. For these repeats, the stings in and out of the ad breaks were removed, and the crude grafting together of the two parts sometimes made for odd viewing. One section (which closes part one of the first episode) ended with Morrissey removing a pig's head from a carrier bag, but the reaction shots of Ash and Quentin had been truncated so heavily (due to the sting over-lapping the visuals) that the immediacy of the scene was completely lost. For more recent repeats, these edits have been tidied up slightly, with the end-chord of the sting (hitherto subliminally audible) washed over and obscured. However, the crudely-edited versions still form the current video releases (TV8220 and TV8221).
The fifth episode, 'Going Nowhere', posed continuity problems as well as aesthetic ones. As such, it was completely re-cut...albeit not from rushes, sadly. The original Part 1 ended with Clunes and Ash getting stuck in a lift, while Part 2 started with the same scene several hours later (a few clothes removed, lots of sweat, apathy set in, etc). On the video, it simply cuts from one scene to the next and looks bloody awful, especially with the usual subliminal burst of the unremovable sting. But for the 1998 repeat, good old BBC1 inserted a brief shot of Caroline Quentin on the phone (taken from elsewhere in the episode) to bridge the two sequences. The absence of this segment from the earlier scene, however, did not hinder the logic of the plot.
[NOTE: Similarly crude edits were made to the ad breaks in Girls On Top (23/10/85 - 11/12/86), the first four episodes of which were released on video in 1988 (VC6107 and CTV 1009). The edits were so bad that even the BBC sat up and took notice: when they repeated 'Staying Alive' (Series 1, Show 2) as part of their Bridget Jones Night on 17/10/98, a tasteful black-out was inserted to disguise the jump. It seems to be the case that even when rushes exist, producers often can't be bothered to locate them for video presentation: for example, it is extremely unlikely that the rushes to Father Ted have been junked, but the videos of the series issued by Hat Trick have all been taken from the episodes as transmitted, and awkward-looking stings/exteriors have been pasted in to bridge the edits.]
4.
Men Behaving Badly Series 1 and 2 featured a jaunty, sitcom-friendly coda at the end of the signature tune. For the first BBC series (Series 3, 1/7/94 - 5/8/94) the coda was removed, presumably because it was considered too ridiculous.