Three retired men with no jobs, no wives and nothing but time began wandering the hills of West Yorkshire on British TV 53 years ago today. Last of the Summer Wine launched its first full series on November 12, 1973, and kept going until 2010, a 37-year stretch that left it recognized as the longest-running sitcom anywhere in the world.
The show had already been tried out once. A pilot called “Of Funerals and Fish” aired on January 4, 1973, as part of the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse strand, and drew enough of a response for the network to order a six-episode series before the year was out. That first run ended on December 17, 1973.
A sitcom about old men acting like teenagers
Writer Roy Clarke, who scripted every single episode, was close to turning the job down. The BBC’s original pitch, a comedy about three old men, struck him as dull. His fix was to make them free: unmarried, widowed or divorced, out of work or retired, and able to roam the countryside like boys on summer holiday.
The title carried the same idea. Clarke wanted to suggest his characters were still in the summer of their lives, if only the tail end of it. Executives disliked the name and swapped in “The Library Mob” as a working title for a while, before Clarke got his way.
The first trio was Bill Owen as the scruffy, impulsive Compo, Peter Sallis as the mild Norman Clegg and Michael Bates as the stiff Cyril Blamire. Bates left through illness after two series, and the “third man” chair was recast again and again over the decades.
The numbers behind 37 years
- 295 episodes across 31 series, counting the pilot, specials and films
- 18.8 million viewers for its biggest episode, on February 10, 1985
- 17 million for the 1981 Christmas special “Whoops”
- 25-plus countries showing it, including PBS stations in the US and VisionTV in Canada
Spread evenly, 295 episodes over 37 years works out to about eight new half-hours a year, and Clarke wrote all of them while also working on other comedies. The final episode, “How Not to Cry at Weddings”, aired on August 29, 2010, and Sallis, the longest-serving cast member, delivered its closing line: “Did I lock the door?”
How a small town became a set
Comedy producer Barry Took suggested Holmfirth after performing at a working men’s club there years earlier. Outdoor scenes were always filmed in and around the town, and under producer-director Alan J. W. Bell the show dropped its London studio audience altogether and moved all filming to Holmfirth. Episodes were then screened for preview audiences, whose real laughter was recorded and mixed in.
Holmfirth still trades on it. Sid’s Café, a regular location, became a tourist stop, and a cottage styled as the home of Nora Batty, Compo’s long-suffering neighbor, is rented to visitors.
Loved, mocked and hard to cancel
Critics often said the show had lost its edge, and a 2003 magazine reader poll even named it the program people most wanted axed. Clarke’s reply was that anyone who disliked it “shouldn’t switch it on” if they were “too idle to turn it off”. The show was praised for showing older people as active and funny, and Queen Elizabeth II reportedly told actor Thora Hird in 2001 that it was her favorite program.
Anniversaries keep pulling fans back to old favorites; we recently looked at how the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast reached far fewer homes than legend says and at the Matilda cast reunion at the Royal Albert Hall. More classic TV lives on our Entertainment page.
All 295 episodes are out on DVD, and a book marking the show’s 50th anniversary, 50 Years of Last of the Summer Wine: An Appreciation by Miles Eaton, came out in 2023.
Further reading
Image: Steven Haslington, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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