Been thinking about watching this as I’ve seen clips over the years but can’t recall ever seeing a full episode.
I understand it’s supposed to be very representative of the times and has been held in high regard but have always been a bit weary that it may be too light for me though perhaps I’m wrong.
Anyone else a fan? have an opinion?
Depends whether you mean ‘The Likely Lads’ or ‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads’, which is the one more often shown because it’s in colour.
It is striking how melancholy ‘Whatever’ actually is - it’s mostly about desperation, either Bob’s desire to fit in with a perceived version of what middle class Britain was supposed to be about or about how everything had changed after Terry had come out of the army and he no longer fitted in.
Everyone remembers the football score episode, but that was pretty much an outlier in terms of levity.
As @silentcommand says, Whatever Happened To… is desperate and frequently very bleak. It’s often one of the most wonderful and warm TV ever made as well.
Cheers, I will check. I was referring to ‘Whatever’ really but want to start from the very start so might get the boxset. Seems I had it all wrong then so happy to be proved wrong if it’s worth a look.
Presume you saw that Rodney Bewes passed away last week? The stories about his 40 year feud with James Bolam were a. quite interesting and b. rather sad
It’s mad how many episodes of classic stuff isn’t available for whatever reason. I know they were different times, but with this and plenty of others film was lost, wiped, damaged, stolen, etc. Think several were found when Monkhouse passed as he kept his own VHS archives. Blows my mind a bit that even then it wasn’t possible to keep or make duplicates, and/or the BBC archiving was so half-arsed.
Yep, the tapes were so expensive back then they re-used them. Only kept certain things indefinitely, like every recording of Trooping of the Colour…