Likely Lads locations

The death of Rodney Bewes, who played Bob in the 1970s BBC sitcom Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, reminded me of how, as a child, I’d watch the programme hoping to recognise a local location.  I often did.

The two-handers between Bob and Terry still crack along despite the passage of the years (although some of the other scenes can seem a bit slow moving, to me at any rate.)

Many people last night posted links to their favourite Likely Lads scene on Twitter.  Probably the most popular was the one I’ve put in this post.  It’s my favourite too: not only is it a superb and characterful one-liner, it was shot on Tynemouth pier.  At school , the day after it had aired, we were all, “did you see Tynemouth on telly last night?”

There’s a fun little short here, comparing some of the locations then and now, with Ian Le Frenais one of the co-writers.

Incidentally, we all used to puzzle over the accents in the series.  Terry and Bob were supposed to have grown up in Newcastle.  Yet Terry’s accent was pure Sunderland and God knows what Bob’s was.  The best Geordie accent was Bob’s wife, Thelma (Brigitte Forsyth) who managed to capture the upwardly-mobile “posh Geordie” of the time, despite (or perhaps because of) hailing from Edinburgh