American fan has Summer Wine café off to a tee

Taking up one wall of a suburban dining room in the “sunshine state” of Florida is a little corner of Yorkshire – an exact replica of the café in Holmfirth that featured in the much-loved sitcom Last of the Summer Wine.

Although it is about 4,200 miles from the real thing, the reproduction is identical in every detail – from the lettering on the plate glass window to the green gingham curtains and hanging baskets.

It even features a green woolly hat, in tribute to Compo, played by Bill Owen, the incorrigible scruff whose escapades with Clegg and Foggy in the show’s heyday – along with his pursuit of Nora, the grim-faced siren of the wrinkled stockings – saw it become the UK’s most popular comedy, watched by more than a third of the country’s population.

The replica is the work of mechanic Darin Iscrupe, 40, who, perhaps surprisingly, had the full agreement of his wife, Cathy, and their two children, Christina, 12, and William, nine, when he decided to convert part of their home near Tallahassee, Florida’s state capital, into a tribute to UK sitcom history.

He’s never visited the UK, let alone Holmfirth, where the series was filmed, but got bitten by the Last of the Summer Wine bug while watching the show, which ran on US cable channels, with his wife’s grandmother, whose husband was British.

For the family, Saturday nights were spent watching UK sitcoms on the television, with Last of the Summer Wine, the creation of Yorkshire writer Roy Clarke, a particular favourite.

The scenes in Holmfirth’s cobbled streets, where the starring trio would gather at the cafe to mull over the way of the world – and plot their latest escapades – captivated Darin, who decided to bring a place he knew only from the television to life in his own home.

“Why did I build it? When someone asks me ‘why’, I have a tendency to ask ‘why not’ more than ‘why’,” said Darin.

“If I had to answer the question, I guess it would be if I can’t live in Holmfirth or near the cafe, then why not bring the cafe to Tallahassee. I believe the exact conversation between me and my wife went as follows: ‘How cool would it be sitting in front of the cafe every evening for dinner?’ Her response, ‘Do it’.”

There was another reason for paying homage to Last of the Summer Wine. “My father, Herman, acted very, very much like Compo at times. He would sneak up on my mother as Compo would to Nora. He even had the same little laugh. My father passed away in 2003, so I think the show helped me have a way to somewhat still have my dad around. My mother can be quite sharp-tongued and harsh like Nora also, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The Holmfirth that he saw on screen also reminded Darin of his home town in Pennsylvania, Ligonier, which he explored as a child in much the same way that Compo, Foggy and Clegg wandered the streets and the surrounding hills. “As a young man, my friends and I walked all over town getting in trouble and such. Also, everyone knew us, so it reminds me how, in many episodes, folks would refer to ‘those three lots’. That was us as young men, ‘those three lots’.”

Darin spent four months building the cafe replica, after an engineer friend sketched its outline on the dining room wall in pencil.

“At times our dining room looked more like a woodworking shop than a dining room,” said Darin. “Many nights of eating wherever you can find an open spot.”

In Last of the Summer Wine, the café in the centre of Holmfirth was run by Sid and Ivy, played by John Comer and Jane Freeman.

When the series started in 1973, the building was a former fish and chip shop being used as a paint store by a nearby hardware shop. The BBC set designers turned the frontage into a café, and the interior scenes were filmed in the studios. But once Last of the Summer Wine became a runaway success, attracting as many as 60,000 tourists a year to Holmfirth, the building was brought into use as a real café, which it remains, complete with a statue of Compo outside.

As for Darin, his fascination with bits of iconic Britishness remains – his next project is to convert his pantry into a replica of a red public telephone box.