I have quite strong memories associated with The Full Monty. In 1997 or so, when the film came out, our PE teacher Mrs Jones suggested using the main song from the film, ‘You Sexy Thing‘ by Hot Chocolate, as the basis for the dance module we had to do. At the time I was in a class of nine or so profoundly disabled young men (plus one girl) all bar two using wheelchairs or powerchairs. If memory serves, we were in two minds about it at the time, but in the end we were able to put together a fairly solid, well choreographed dance routine set to the famous song, and tick the box for the class.

We thought little of it at the time, but as it turned out it was just a prelude: A couple of years later, our new PE teacher Mrs Stallberg had the idea of entering us into a national wheelchair display competition. I don’t know how much she knew about what we had done before, but she nonetheless had the confidence to enter us into the regional competition in Manchester, then the national one up in Glasgow. We performed that routine to different music though, so that’s another story.

I came to think about this this morning when I heard on breakfast TV that Disney now plan to release a sequel to The Full Monty. Needless to say this strikes me as utterly bizarre: The Full Monty was a classic of 1990s British Independent film – what is a massive American studio going anywhere near it? More to the point, why does anyone need to do anything with this nice little film, set in North England, confronting many social and political concerns of the time? Surely the wisest thing to do would be to let it stand and allow it to retain it’s status as a classic. But No! Like The Lord Of The Rings, Star Wars and so many other franchises these days, the massive American corporations now want to go back to it, presumably because it was so successful at the time, to see if they can make yet more money out of it. And of course, the risk now is that they’ll just create a mess, turning The Full Monty into commercialised pap with little resemblance to the original film. It would seem that, to Hollywood these days, very little is sacred.

Yet I still have my memory: I still remember performing with my friends to Hot Chocolate. Strangely, I still think I remember some of the moves we had to do, and how Rich had to whip Andy’s shirt off as they wheeled past one another. Yet Andy, Rich and so many of those guys aren’t here any more, so these memories have a really bittersweet feeling for me. That probably includes the memories I associate with the Full Monty, another reason why I’m not convinced by this reboot.