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Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? is remembered as a sitcom from British television's 'golden age', when writers and programme makers were encouraged both to entertain and challenge a mass audience. The series was both funnier and more popular because it explicitly confronted the dilemmas facing viewers in the early 1970s.
Writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (later to create Porridge (BBC, 1974-76) and Auf Wiedersehen Pet (ITV, 1983-86)) had their first success with The Likely Lads (BBC, 1964-66). The story of Bob and Terry, two working-class young men working in a Newcastle electronics factory, it was essentially a comic version of stories familiar from British new wave films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (d. Karel Reisz, 1960) or A Kind of Loving (d. John Schlesinger, 1962), about young people in the North looking for a good time.
Set some ten years after The Likely Lads, Whatever Happened to... is particularly concerned with class and how we identify with it. Terry remains an unreconstructed working-class man, revelling in the old macho drinking culture of the North East; Bob wants to fit into the new middle class, with its badminton clubs and foreign holidays. In 1970s Britain, old certainties were being questioned, newfound wealth was threatened and social attitudes liberalised - and popular television was leading the debate.
The comedy comes from our understanding that Bob and Terry will never really change themselves. We know their flaws and how they will react to situations - Bob will always be pompous and feeble, Terry feckless and stubborn. In them we see the gap between our own aspirations and reality.
There is an obsession with time and its effects. The title song, set to images of slums being demolished, tells us, "it's the only thing to look forward to - the past." There is a melancholic edge to the laughter, as we realise how much our lives are mapped out for us. The Shape of Things to Come (tx. 9/4/74), makes this clear. The final episode of the series (bar a Christmas special), it encapsulates the themes and characters, and shows that nothing will really change between them.
Reruns have since brought new audiences to the programme. Although concerned with a particular time and place, it succeeds in making the local universal; despite the flares and the fondue sets, it is still as funny and poignant today. Philip Wickham *This programme is the subject of a BFI TV Classics book by Phil Wickham.
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1. Food and foreigners (1:33)
