On-screen chemistry that so nearly bubbled over into violent reactions

LIFE in the big, comfortable mobile home parked high on the moors above Holmfirth was rather less than harmonious.

On screen, the trio of ageing adolescents were the firmest of friends; off it, the three actors who brought Britain’s most popular comedy to life shared a wary and sometimes acrimonious relationship.

It was the early 1980s, and Last of the Summer Wine had no rival as the nation’s favourite comedy series. Some 18 million viewers – more than a third of Britain’s population – tuned in every week to watch the exploits of the scruffy, disreputable Compo, the flat-capped philosopher Clegg and the barmy would-be leader of men, Foggy. This was comedy that transcended social status and age; the Queen never missed it, and nor did countless children who had voted it their favourite series in the annual poll carried out by the top show for youngsters of its day, the Saturday morning Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, hosted by Noel Edmonds.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It had made unlikely stars of its central trio of actors in middle age. Bill Owen, Peter Sallis and Brian Wilde shared a magical on-screen chemistry as Compo, Clegg and Foggy, served brilliantly by the writing of Roy Clarke, who from his home near Doncaster, was creating one of the finest of all sitcoms. It would run for an astonishing 37 years in total, a longevity unrivalled by any other comedy series anywhere in the world, spanning 31 series and 295 episodes, and it was at the peak of its popularity.

Once the cameras stopped rolling, though, the rapport between the three principals cooled. A shooting schedule that saw them spend months in the Pennines filming meant they were thrust together for long periods of time whether they liked it or not, and the vagaries of the weather often meant they were confined to the mobile home they shared during days on location.

Everybody on set knew that relations between Owen and Wilde were cool, just as they knew that the quiet interventions of Sallis prevented the tensions between them boiling over into open warfare. Sometimes he could joke them out of it, at others he would need to go farther and remind Owen that the success of the series was paramount and must not be jeopardised by arguments.

There were huffy silences and sharp exchanges; barely controlled tempers and snide remarks, and the quiet of the mobile home could be more oppressive than companionable. It never got out of hand; there were no screaming tantrums, all three were far too professional for that, and they were scrupulous in trying not to let the tensions show, even though they were an open secret on set.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

They worked together closely and valued each others’ skills, knew that magic happened once the director called “Action”; nobody was more delighted than them at the success the show had become, and so they accommodated each other and coped with the tensions by putting as much distance between themselves as they could at the end of each day, shrugging off any contact as surely as they left their costumes behind until the next morning’s call.

The flashpoint for problems lay in the prickly relationship between Owen and Wilde, who shared a gift for rubbing each other up the wrong way. Owen had a high opinion of himself and made no effort to conceal his view that he was the star of Last of the Summer Wine, however much he spoke in public of its success being down to the chemistry of the trio.

That irritated Wilde, as did aspects of Owen’s performance, whether it be playing to the crowd in the studio or his sometimes approximate delivery of his lines. And then there was Owen’s fondness for venting his political beliefs. Wilde was a man of conservative outlook who had neither time for Owen’s Left-wing views nor his willingness to air them irrespective of whether his audience wanted to listen or not. Wilde kept his politics to himself and failed to see why Owen should not do likewise.

Yet the trigger for the most serious disputes that arose between them came from Wilde, whose awkward streak manifested itself over money, contracts and even scripts. He would eventually manage to argue his way into being paid more than Owen and Sallis, which enraged them when they discovered the disparity.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Nevertheless, the disagreements were kept under control – until Wilde blew the gaffe with an unguarded comment in a newspaper interview. “There is friction between Bill and me,” he said, and the tensions at the heart of the show were laid bare.

The problems that resulted between the stars would see Wilde leave the show soon after, weary of disagreements. His career outside Last of the Summer Wine did not prosper, however, and he would return some years later, a chastened and more mellow man.

Those difficulties were one of a series of headaches that the show coped with over the course of nearly four decades, from its beginnings as a one-off half-hour comedy in early 1973 until it finally drew to a close last year.

They would include death, illness, mental breakdown, hostility from the BBC and occasional antipathy from the people of the Yorkshire town that the series put on the map. Yet Last of the Summer Wine retained an extraordinary affection from a large section of the public until its final episode.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Throughout its life, it was one of the BBC’s most reliable crowd-pullers; even at the end, five million people were still tuning in, far more than for some much-vaunted newer series.

Along the way, it became a home for some of Britain’s favourite comic actors. Thora Hird and Jean Alexander became fixtures after initial guest appearances, and there would be slots for John Cleese, Norman Wisdom and Eric Sykes.

The loyalty of the viewing audience was mirrored in the faithfulness of the actors to the show. Owen’s 26-year tenure only ended with his death at 85, and he struggled on through the intense pain of cancer to complete his final scenes only a couple of weeks before he died, telling Sallis: “I don’t want to go, Peter, there’s so much left to do.” Hird, aged over 90 and desperately frail, insisted on being released from hospital and taken to the studios by ambulance so that she could film.

Roy Clarke could hardly have dreamed when he sat down at his typewriter in 1972 to start work at the invitation of the BBC to try his hand at a sitcom that it would turn into a project that occupied half his life. This former policeman from the farmlands between Doncaster and Goole had struggled to break into writing as a career, and he initially faced another struggle in making the concept of a show about three old men getting up to mischief work.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

He did make it work, though, and in doing so wrote one of the most extraordinary chapters in entertainment history – and helped to create a whole new industry for a down-on-its-luck Yorkshire town.

Last of the Summer Wine: The Story of the World’s Longest-Running Comedy Series, by Andrew Vine, is published by Aurum Press at £8.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk Postage costs £2.75.

Towns that fell under spell of Summer Wine Land

PETER Sallis christened what appeared on screen “Summer Wine Land” for its evocation of a quaintly attractive town, complete with cobbled streets, set against a backdrop of majestic hills and moorland.

He insisted the scenery was the real star of the show, the factor that made it a huge hit, and if he was right, the star in the number-one dressing room was Holmfirth. This mill town five miles from Huddersfield had not crossed Roy Clarke’s mind when he started writing the show.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

He had thought of Rotherham, where he had been a policeman, but the producer who brought the series to the screen, James Gilbert, was not taken with its then heavily-industrialised landscape.

Instead, his mind turned to a place that the comedian and writer Barry Took had told him about. Took had worked as a stand-up comic during the 1950s, and had endured an excruciating gig at a working mens’ club in an out-of-the-way place called Holmfirth. Nobody laughed, and he never forgot it – but nor did he forget the charm of the town itself.

Clarke and Gilbert paid a visit, and were immediately beguiled. So was Bill Owen, for whom it became a second home and ultimately his final resting place.

Not that Holmfirth was ever referred to in the programme – the name could be seen on the destination boards of buses and on signposts, but it was never uttered in dialogue. Yorkshire as a whole, and nearby Huddersfield in particular were name-checked on a regular basis, but the trio customarily referred to their town and the countryside as “round here”, because Summer Wine Land was much more than Holmfirth – it was a composite drawn together from differing landscapes, towns and villages edited together into what appeared to be a seamless whole.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

A couple of key locations, Nora Batty’s house, and Sid and Ivy’s cafe belonged to Holmfirth, but other settings were some way away. As a location, Holmfirth had its limitations, not least its narrow streets were all too easily brought to a standstill by filming.

Nevertheless, Holmfirth was emblematic of the series, and the interest it attracted was something of a culture shock. The Holme Valley in which it lies had been home to 50-odd mills, supplying only the finest worsteds and cashmeres well into the 1960s. But as the following decade dawned, the textile trade was in trouble , and the town was suffering. Fame changed all that. As the series worked its way towards being the country’s favourite comedy show, the numbers of tourists increased relentlessly, eventually reaching 60,000 a year.

The house where Nora Batty – the fearsome battleaxe with the wrinkled stockings – shooed Compo off her immaculately scrubbed steps was regularly besieged by sightseers. The family that lived there grew used to seeing droves of people outside taking pictures, and even found visitors walking into their kitchen, believing it to be a set as opposed to a real home.

An undercurrent of ambivalence in Holmfirth at the intrusion had shown itself early, as Gilbert discovered as he put the finishing touches to location filming for the pilot. “I sometimes think the people of Holmfirth have no cause to thank us for choosing the town. I remember the end of the first week’s filming, and we were just about to wrap, and an old lady came up, she was taking her dog for a walk. She stood beside me by the camera and she couldn’t have been sweeter or nicer, and she said, ‘Have you enjoyed yourself here?’, and I said, ‘Yes, we’ve had a very good time and been very successful, and we’re very sorry we’re going back home this afternoon’. She just said, ‘Good’, turned on her heel and went off with the dog.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Owen had no time for the grumblers. “There is a body of opinion, of course, that would wish us elsewhere and their feelings have been expressed to me personally and to our director in no uncertain terms. Do they really wish to return to those days when we first arrived, when the river was a mess and changed colour according to what material was being dyed up at the mill at the end of Hollowgate?”

He had, though, all the time in the world for the vast majority who welcomed cast and crew year in and year out. “I went out of my way to be a part of that community of Holmfirth, by mixing and offering to do anything and everything,” he said.

Other settings in the Pennines would also become familiar to viewers – Marsden, Meltham, Slaithwaite and Hepworth among them. All were woven together into a glorious tapestry of Yorkshire countryside against which the comedy was played out. Some settings, though, were less than glamorous. A Christmas special, The Loxley Lozenge, ended with a shot of Compo, Clegg and Foggy silhouetted against the sunset, apparently on one of the highest Pennine hills. It was, in fact, a slag heap.

It was all part of the illusion, just another magical moment in the fantasy world that so enchanted the audience; in Summer Wine Land, even a slag heap could be made to look lovely.

Related topics: