THE LIKELY LADS

Just before I entered my teens, ‘The Likely Lads’ began airing on BBC. The final episode was in 1966. Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais were excellent writers whose scripts were well-plotted with great lines. I guess I also liked the series because it was set against a working-class background in the North-East, although I did take exception to one scene. As the pair checked their football pool coupons, Bob announced, ‘Sunderland won!’ ‘Never’, said Terry, ‘they must have shot the ref!’

In the early Seventies, almost ten years later, there was a sequel series, ‘Whatever happened to the Likely Lads’. It had a brilliant theme song by Manfred Mann. The lads had been separated when Terry joined the army, and in the intervening period, Bob has actively pursued an upwardly socially mobile status; tension between the pair over ‘betraying class roots’ became an underlying theme. In the first episode, they meet again by chance on a train journey. In the original series, Bob had been going out with Thelma, and now they are engaged. Her mum never liked Terry, rightly considering him a bad influence. He once said, ‘whenever she sees me, she has that look on her face.’ Bob asks, ‘what look is that?’ Terry replies, ‘the one she uses when she opens a new wing of the abattoir!’

Bizarrely, this was all brought to mind as I recently exited our local supermarket. My English teacher used to refer to a ‘chain of thought’; when one mental prompt leads you seamlessly through a sequence of apparently unrelated thoughts, ending far away from where you started. In this case, my attention was first drawn to a Yorkshire Terrier. His lead had been tied to a bike rack while his owner was inside the shop. Whenever I see a Yorkie, I immediately think, ‘dentures’, because they always look as if they have just had a new set fitted. That quickly led me to more of my alternative dog descriptors, such as ‘mad’ for Springers, ‘can’t catch’ for Retrievers and ‘uhh’ for Boxers, who generally look puzzled.

Out of nowhere, I suddenly recalled a scene where Terry was describing his antipathy toward other people. He virtually dismisses the whole world’s population with a series of one-word stereotypes; Americans are brash, Chinese are inscrutable and so on. He ends his tirade by observing that he doesn’t even like his next-door neighbour. From that point, more memories of the Likely Lads were flooding in.

II first met my oldest friend when we started senior school, aged 11, in September 1963. We never completely lost touch, but there was a long period of minimal contact. Maybe it’s a case of getting older and facing up to one’s mortality, but over the last couple of years, we have firmly re-established our relationship. Typically, we meet up for a coffee and a chat each week. There’s plenty of reminiscing, but we also try and put the modern world to rights. I like to think that somewhere, Bob and Terry are doing exactly the same.

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