YMMV / Phoenix Nights

• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When Max is waiting for the hitmen to come and kill him and Paddy, he sobs, "If only I'd met the right woman. I always wanted to have children!" Paddy dryly remarks, "If only you'd have met a woman," but Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere confirms that Max did meet a woman- a dwarf called Tina- and they have a son together.
  • Also, when Brian and Den Perry are reluctantly working together on a reconstruction of the Phoenix Club Fire for Crimetime, Den asks Brian what his motivation for acting is. Brian replies, "I've got plenty of motivation, fat boy. Seeing you in jail." Four years after Phoenix Nights, Den Perry's actor Ted Robbins appears on The Slammer, where he is in jail... as a governor, not a prisoner.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Amarillo music video features a cameo from Jimmy Savile before his multitude of crimes were revealed.
• Memetic Mutation: It's Peter Kay, who is Memetic Mutation incarnate. As well as call-backs to established Peter Kay memes, Phoenix Nights notably started the association of Peter Kay with the classic Tony Christie song "(Is This The Way To) Amarillo", which culminated in the song being re-released with a new video starring Peter Kay and a parade of British pop culture icons and getting to number 1. Max and Paddy are singing along to the song whilst driving a minibus, much to the bafflement and/or disapproval of their passengers, an Asian Elders group.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Den Perry crosses it when he burns the club down at the end of the first series.
  • The mysterious woman in the series finale crosses it by hiring a bunch of hitmen to kill Max and Paddy upon learning they botched up their attempt to kill her husband. The fact that we never learn what her husband did to make her want to kill him doesn't help.
• More Popular Spin-Off: Phoenix Nights is better known than That Peter Kay Thing, a six-part anthology / mockumentary series where one of the episodes featured The Neptune Club (the predecessor of the Phoenix, also run by Brian). A few changes were made for the full series.
• Paranoia Fuel: For the first few episodes of his employment, Brian's convinced that Ray Von is a psychotic murderer and the evidence just seems to keep piling up.
• Retroactive Recognition: Sian Gibson, better known as Kay's co-star in Car Share, makes a couple of brief appearances here.

---