New sitcom Mammoth is often funny, sometimes subtle and gloriously unwoke

It is sometimes subtle, often not, always warm, consistently funny, occasionally side-splittingly hilarious and always gloriously, outrageously unwoke – PC, as far as Tony Mammoth is concerned stands for Police Constable.

Mammoth is a PE teacher who is engulfed by an avalanche on a ski slope in 1979 and presumed dead. He is revived 45 years later and has to deal with life in 2024 – he is a throwback.

After his 15 minutes of fame as the ‘Iceman cometh back’, he returns to his old job at his old school.

Bubbins jacked in his day job as a PE teacher to try his hand at comedy. The title – Mammoth – shouts that you are about to watch a dinosaur, an extinct being whose opinions and fashion sense have no place in the modern world.

Moustachioed Mammoth – in his flared cords, leather jacket, winged collared-shirts, snake-skin boots and tinted glasses – is a walking charity-shop vintage window dressing.

He is a pipe-smoking, over-sexed, Capri-driving lager lout who goes through life crushing all 21st century sensibilities and sensitivity.

He scoffs at a man carrying a baby in a sling, laughs at the woman who tells him she is head of PE and his boss, asks where ‘the thick kids’ go if there are no woodwork classes and is bemused by same-sex relationships.

In one of the funniest scenes, Mammoth knocks a chugger – someone on the street collecting for charity – to the ground when he is approached for a donation. I know it should be offensive but I, unashamedly, guffawed.

He dismisses climate change as ‘that global warming thing’. In one exchange when his grandson suggests he gets an electric car Mammoth retorts: “This is the real world, not Scalextric.”

He damns our notion of progress. It was better to be famous in the 1970s, he says, because getting drunk with Oliver Reed beats eating kangaroo testicles – a reference to I’m a Celebrity.

It is hard to work out why it is not offensive – it’s not that I agree with him – not entirely. The audience takes their cue from characters who surround Mammoth – who are occasionally offended but more often flabbergasted by the man’s ignorance.

There is also little malice in Mammoth. He is vain, self-centred, arrogant but not knowingly cruel and has his bubble burst at every turn.

The support cast are wonderful – particularly Sian Gibson as the over- protective mother of the oh-so-clean-living teenager Theo played by Joel Davison, Joseph Marcell and William Thomas as Mammoth’s best mates Roger and Barry – who have aged and changed while he has not.

There is a reference to the 1970s in every second – a chance for the rest of us ‘dinosaurs’ to reminisce. Remember McCloud, the horse-riding detective played by Dennis Weaver or Cannon – who Mammoth most resembles – a private eye played by William Conrad?

He name-checks Roger Moore, 007 back then, Bodie and Doyle, Spud U Like, the Hulk, Little Chef and wears a Starsky-style cardigan.

The soundtrack is like a 70s chart rundown and includes Burning Inferno and Your So Vain. The theme tune is by Mike Post – of Hill Street Blues, Rockford Files and Magnum PI fame and the style of the opening credits is also a throwback to the disco decade.

Mammoth is on Wednesdays on BBC2 at 10pm.