Nostalgia TV - Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads

I spent the morning on a nostalgia fest watching episodes of an old favourite ‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads’ a sequel to the earlier The Likely Lads. Rarely does a sequel turn out better than the original but this is the case here.

The lads are now older but certainly not wiser. Bob is now a rising executive on the verge of marriage to childhood sweetheart Thelma. Terry following a spell in the army is returning home and has not changed, and is proud of his working class background and always the chancer.

In the first episode, Terry and Bob are reunited, but first they past like a ship in the night at a Soho strip club. We then see Terry sitting in the train carriage and has Bob walks in the lights go off, standard British Rail back in the day. After a few pleasantries, Terry mentions he is just out of the army.

This leads Bob to tell him about his best mate who followed him into the army has he could not stand being parted and joined up as well. But Bob was release with flat feet leaving mate (Terry) in the army for three years. He does not know he is actually telling his old mate Terry.

So when the lights came back on Terry is fit to bust but he soon calms down until he makes derogatory remarks about Bob’s future wife Thelma. Terry gets off the train at Doncaster and when Bob sees him thinks he left him on the train and jumps off and confronts Terry who informs him “it’s not Newcastle” looking up at the station sign.

Unfortunately for Bob, when he gets on the next train he jumps back off having left the present he bought for Thelma in the waiting room. At the same time Terry is jumping on the train with the present leaving Bob stranded at Doncaster railway station with the train pulling out. His waiting fiancée is none too pleased when it is Terry who turns up at Newcastle not Bob.

The whole of the first season is leading to the wedding of Bob, Thelma, and her worrying that the reappearance of Terry to the safety of her upcoming marriage and the destruction of their old stomping ground due to redevelopment. There are some classic episodes my favourite is,

No Hiding Place

They try to avoid learning the result of an England football match before the TV highlights are shown that evening. Flint (Brian Glover) tries to spoil it for them, having bet them £10 that they won't get through the day without learning the result. The Lads get to the TV highlights none the wiser about the score, except for Terry seeing a newspaper headline that says "England F...". When Flint tracks them down to Bob's new house, an angry Terry pays him off with £10 (borrowed from Bob). After all that, the match turns out to have been postponed due to a waterlogged pitch: "England – flooded out..." and ice skating was on instead.

The second series sees them uneasily settling into domesticity with Terry on hand to stir the pot from time to time. The dialogue is consistently superb as are the performances throughout. There was a Christmas special and a big screen made in 1976, which was pretty much a remake of the first few episodes with Terry returning home once more and having trouble settling into society.

In Terry and Bob, writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais created down-to-earth characters who also reflected the rapidly changing social climate. And they liked a drink and they were funny.