glossy, violent films in the later 1990s were also popularly linked to lad culture. Most important in shaping and popularising lad culture, though, was the lad mag a new style of lifestyle magazine for young, heterosexual men that became suddenly popular in the mid-1990s. Lad mags Lad mags included Maxim, FHM and Loaded. Television The television sitcom Men Behaving Badly. Bottom, Al Murray's Happy Hour and They Think It's All Over were television programmes that presented images of laddishness dominated by the male pastimes of drinking, watching football, and sex. Film Lad culture grew beyond men's magazines to films such as Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Irony Lad culture was strongly associated with an ironic position. The strapline of the leading lad mag Loaded was "for men who should know better." The BBC in a 1999 review called "Our Decade: New Lad Rules the World" identified that one of the key concepts associated with lad culture (alongside curry and foreign stag weekends) was "anything being acceptable if its "ironic"." Humour in lad mags and in television comedy was a major element of lad culture: the ironic position allowed comedians to both identify themselves as opposed to and, at the same time, indulge in racist, sexist and homophobic jokes. Part of the ironic position can be seen in relation to the term lad itself. Despite the ubiquity of lad culture in the media of the 1990s there was no expectation that real, individual men would seriously identify themselves as lads: to do so would be to invite ridicule. This was a form of distinctively British class play: middle class - or aspiring middle class - men were playing at being working class. A 2012 National Union of Students report citing the academic John Benyon identified how "Uncensored displays of masculinity during the 1990s were deemed by those involved to be ironic by their very nature. He [Benyon] highlights how the magazine Loaded consciously reduced working class masculinities to jokes, interest in cars and the objectification of women, and dismissed criticisms as humourless attacks on free speech which failed to see the ironic nature of the representations." Oddly, the lad was both ironic and authentic. Irony was the lad's defining behaviours but the lad himself was often presented as the authentic form of masculinity. For example GQ in a press-release from 1991 wrote, "GQ is proud to announce that