Stag

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.

Stag is 'Bullingdon Club meets The Revenant'

Hitting television screens later this week is a brilliant new dark comedy from BBC Two that evokes the likes of Boris Johnson and David Cameron with Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio on a nightmare weekend in Scotland.