It had me at “crab measles”, to be honest. Even if that doesn’t strike you as the perfect name for a virus capable of wiping out the entire male population, you will still enjoy Henpocalypse!. And you should certainly try, as it will be good for you – but a barrier will likely forever remain between you and it. It’s a bit like how, if you aren’t a cradle Catholic, you will never quite understand why Mrs Doyle waiting all night, every night, by the light switch with a tea tray in case one of the priests gets a thirst on him at any point is so very right – and so very funny.
Anyway, onwards to the apocalypse, as written by Caroline Moran and not quite witnessed by her boozed-up party of five because they are holed up in an isolated cottage in Wales for a hen do. After a chaotic ride down from their native Birmingham, during which there is virtually no dialogue other than raucous screams and drunken laughter – accompanied by chief bridesmaid Shelly (Callie Cooke, nailing the stressed-big-sister vibe that attends the role) smashing into another car and driving away hastily without giving insurance details to its uptight owner – the party and the plot get going.
Bride(zilla) Zara (Lucie Shorthouse) is the queen bee, cosseted by her monstrous mother Bernadette (Elizabeth Berrington), who is yet to pay her share of the do. When Shelly timidly presses her on the issue that evening she replies “I never move money after dark, bab” and that, as one suspects it has been all Bernadette’s life, is very much that. Cousin Jen (Kate O’Flynn, somehow managing – especially in later episodes – to channel the spirit of Lon Chaney into a 2023 BBC sitcom) is dancing happily despite the blood streaming down her ankles from her new shoes. Beautician Veena (Lauren O’Rourke) is mostly drinking, though she thinks it is her ket habit that keeps her most detached from the world. She will come into her own later on.
On the unwatched telly in the background we see the plague unfold (“Lobsters not currently implicated” runs a caption) including government spokesmen keeling over and dying on suddenly misnomered live TV. I was startled by how cathartic it felt. I didn’t expect Henpocalypse! to be the means by which I started to process my post-lockdown animus, but we are where we are.
The girls inadvertently save one man from crab-measly doom. When we cut from the peaking party to three weeks later, stripper Drew (Ben McGregor) is chained to the radiator upstairs and the plague appears to have passed over him, though he weeps for all the great men who have gone. “Jeremy Clarkson! Jordan Peterson! Russell Brand! The loss is unimaginable!” The electricity has failed, the food has run out (Shelly is snorting the last of the coffee granules and Zara is huffing the big pen) and – provoking such delicately evocative work from all that I hope Bafta takes note – one of Jen’s shoe-wounds got infected and now the leg is rotting off, despite her “throwing oven cleaner down there twice a day”. They leave her with a hammer to kill herself in case they don’t come back from a run to the shops. She is grateful.
Henpocalypse! doesn’t become any less rude, crude or frantic as it goes on which is either a definite plus or definite minus depending on how it has already taken you. But for those of us in the former group? The addition of a backstory of betrayal for two of the hens, class warfare with the yoga teacher survivors over the next hill (“Our flexible friends”) and Bernadette’s growing ambition to become the new world’s “Jizz Bezos” is all gravy. And that’s before you get to the appearance of Danny Dyer, playing Danny Dyer with perfect comic timing. It betokens a growing surreal element to proceedings that in some convoluted way helps you lean into both the daftness and the backstory.
In the apocalyptic present, Zara remains sure that her fiance, Gary, will have survived the crab measles and is coming for her. “I can feel it in me fanny!” “It’s a long way from Congleton to your fanny, princess,” says Bernadette. “Not for Gary,” his beloved replies. Veena is weaponising the hired car to return home. “If there’s even the slightest chance my mother’s survived,” she says, “I cannot leave my sisters with her.”
Over and above the writing and performances, Henpocalypse! provides the same sort of joy that Smack the Pony or, say, any of Michelle Gomez’s scenes in Green Wing do. It’s the sight of women given loud, reckless, daft parts to play, asked to do liberated and liberating things in the name of comedy, and running with them for the horizon. I’d like it even wilder next time, please.
Henpocalypse! aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer.
