Last Of The Summer Wine: The Complete Collection [DVD]

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Clarke chose the original title, The Last of the Summer Wine, to convey the idea that the characters are not in the autumn of their lives but the summer, even though it may be "the last of the summer".

Though I’d been listening to Radio 1 daily since just before Xmas Day 1969, I never really started to take things in until, being a tidy-minded person and something of an anal-retentive in psychological terms, I started writing down the Top 30 every week. Last of the Summer Wine inspired other adaptations, including a television prequel, [12] several novelisations, [13] and stage adaptations. I don’t, however, think that this development was solely down to the introduction of Foggy, but rather a development that the show would have needed anyway: as originally played, the trio got themselves into trouble naturally, by accident. He directed all but two episodes of the third series [6] [23] – Ray Butt directed "The Great Boarding House Bathroom Caper" and "Cheering up Gordon".

The advent of Foggy was a necessary change without which the show, in my opinion, would not have outlasted the decade, let alone become television’s longest-running sitcom ever. The episodes were filmed and then shown to preview audiences, whose laughter was recorded and then mixed into each episode's soundtrack to provide a laugh track and avoid the use of canned laughter. Of more lasting import, the fourth episode introduces the brilliant Joe Gladwin and his fantastic throaty Lancashire burr as Wally Batty.

In between, Compo loses his doorkey at the Library whilst Blamire and Clegg are bouncing him on his head. It was not edgy, it never would be, but at first it contained a genuine abrasion that it put aside in exchange for surreality and daftness. There were twenty-one Christmas specials, three television films and a documentary film about the series. Brian Murphy was chosen as Nora Batty's neighbour because of his work on George and Mildred, where he played the hen-pecked husband to a strong-willed woman.Clarke, who initially saw Owen as an archetypal cockney who could not play as solid a northern character as Compo was meant to be, recognised Owen's potential only after going to London for a read-through with him. The joy of Bill Owen's Compo is not what he does with the words but where he takes the character beyond what's in the script. Note: Our refurbished grades - Pristine, Very Good and Good - are solely based on the cosmetic condition of the phone. Compo and Clegg tagged along, watching Foggy get himself (and them) into awkward and silly situations. Once the sequence played through, once Tom Owen had arrived to play the role of his father’s son (this would not work though the younger Owen stayed with the series), I drifted away again.