Last night before we left my
dad’s, we watched the 1974 Christmas episode of Whatever
Happened To The Likely Lads? on BBC4. In my opinion this is one of
the best Christmas versions of a sitcom ever made. It hasn’t been seen for ages
but both the series have been shown this year which means that James Bolam has
lifted his embargo on repeating the show. I remember reading that Bolam had
seen red over comments that Rodney Bewes had made to a newspaper and hadn’t
spoken since. This of course didn’t do Bewes any favours as the work dried up
and he didn’t have the income that a repeat run would have provided.
Anyway, the reason I bring
this up was a conversation between the two characters. Terry (Bolam) was
ranting against Christmas to Bob (Bewes), during which he declared Christmas to
be a commercialized con trick dreamed up by department stores and card manufacturers.
He also said that Christmas has lost its meaning, while Bob was all for it and
remembered old Christmases from his childhood. I was interested by the fact
that the programme was nearly forty years old, and yet this opinion is still
trotted out to this day. Has Christmas always had this criticism that it has
lost its meaning? How far back does this go? Maybe Christmas has never had any
real meaning?
On the subject of sitcoms, I
had been waiting for Still Open All Hours
with a certain amount of trepidation. With the same writer as the original series
and David Jason, who has never taken a duff role, then what could possibly go
wrong? It turns out that quite a lot can go wrong. How David Jason was ever tempted
to do this is beyond me, although one duff gig in 74 years isn’t a bad hit rate
so we can forgive him that, especially as nobody will remember this travesty
after today. I can only assume that Johnny Vegas and Mark Williams were
star-struck by David Jason and the legacy of the show, as they wouldn’t have
considered such a crap script for a brand new show. I especially can’t
understand what one of the Chuckle Brothers was doing working as an extra. The
script was contrived to include almost every single reference to the original
series as possible, which became especially embarrassing when Granville brought
out the old shop bike. Maybe there are still shops like that in the north of
England, but I’m sure that once Arkwright died then Granville would have sold up
to Londis and got the hell out of the place that emotionally imprisoned him for
all those years.
Interestingly enough, when it
had finished (yes, I saw it through to the bitter end) I turned over to GOLD
and watched The Two Ronnies Scrapbook. It used to be
quite a controversial opinion to say that The Two Ronnies were better than
Morecambe and Wise, indeed it was almost considered comic blasphemy, but I have
spoken to a lot of people who share the opinion. Just watching a compilation of
clips showed what a fine legacy of work that Ronnie Barker left behind, and
that his memory shouldn’t have been insulted by bringing back Open All Hours without him. I’m dreading next year’s
Christmas showcase, Still Doing Porridge, starring Christopher Biggins as Slade
Prison’s only surviving inmate.
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