The show changed from passive to active, and with that change the inner dynamics also had to change, permanntly. James Gilbert wanted Bates as Blamire because of his reputation as a comedy actor, and Bates loved the role. Peter Sallis starred as his younger self’s father, and the series was very successful in finding actors in their late teens/early twenties who could convincingly portray the people they would grow up to become, forty-plus years later. Bill Owen also wrote a different version of the lyrics but this version was never used during an episode of the show.

In none of these cases was the story, as such, ever really a story, not even to the extent of later series. Even when it was finally cancelled, to choruses of relief and high condecension from people who hadn’t watched the series in decades but still thought it shouldn’t offend their sight, Last of the Summer Wine was pulling in 6,000,000 viewers a week. Like the cast-against-type of Arthur Lowe and John le Mesurier in Dad’s Army, you can’t go wrong – or at least you couldn’t – with a bit of class strife in a British comedy.Meanwhile, a regular audience in excess of five million found their viewing diminished in favour of those who wanted something completely unrelated.

In those very early days, and based on my parents’ attitude to the music, I kinda thought of all pop music as occupying an insulated cocoon, with no bearing on or from any other kind of more respectable music whatsoever. Once the sequence played through, once Tom Owen had arrived to play the role of his father’s son (this would not work though the younger Owen stayed with the series), I drifted away again. This is not to say that everyone who watched it did so in full enjoyment: I’m far from the only one who watched out of curiosity and concluded it was a waste of time. Maybe I’m just being impossibly idealist, but although I had not watched the show in many years, I was angry at its cancellation following hounding by people who ought simply to have ignored it.

Both Sid and Wally had died offscreen, between series, without fanfare but, given that their widows remained in the series, their loss was, unsentimentally and gently acknowledged, although not directly. Bell, in an effort to get each scene exactly right, was known for his use of more film and more takes than his predecessors [6] and for using wider angles that feature more of the local Holmfirth landscape.

This division into male and female casts was carried over into LOTSW‘s first and only spin-off, First of the Summer Wine. It’s a valid question, especially for a national, public broadcaster, with a duty to reflect the nation and its tastes. Don’t get me wrong, I do not wish to see this uninspired and meaningless revival proceed but if there is an audience for it, sometimes we should remember that they have no less right to have programmes that suit their taste than we do. Citing differences with the BBC and his dislike of their indifference towards the series, Bell said, "I have now decided I will not do it again. I’m disappointed to find that the boxset does not include the Pilot episode, ‘Of Funerals and Fish’, broadcast as part of the 1973 Comedy Playhouse series in January, and which starts with the almost archetypal Roy Clarke gag (Norah Batty and a neighbour are watching Compo arguing with two workmen manhandling something out of his cellar lodgings: NB – They’re tekking his telly again, neighbour – Oh God, is it Thursday already?It worked for a long time but gradually, then floodingly, the variety had to be recreated by doubling, trebling, quadrupling the supporting cast, each coming on and off to do their schtiks in multiple cameos. The final episode of the show, "How Not to Cry at Weddings", was subsequently broadcast on 29 August 2010. In short, the BBC were saying to that section of its audience that it should fuck off, because we’re not prepared to make programmes for you any more.

It was confirmed on 26 June 2009 that a 31st series of 6 episodes had been commissioned for transmission in 2010. W. Bell, Last of the Summer Wine became the first comedy series to do away with the live studio audience, moving all of the filming to Holmfirth. One additional development meant that the extended cast began to divide, explicitly, along gender lines, adopting a caricature pose reminiscent of Peter Tinniswood’s Brandon Family novels, in which the men, overall, took on child-like aspects, dreaming and obsessing over things that were essentially games, whilst the women acted as hard-headed and practical, looking down on their menfolk as idiots in need of firm schooling, as they had received in school. The 1983 film, Getting Sam Home, used those two verses, with an additional two and played them over the opening credits.The trio hang around the Library, reading the papers, observing the would-be passionate romance between the Marxist Librarian ‘Bloody’ Wainwright (Blake Butler), and his assistant, Mrs Partridge (Rosemary Martin), whose eagerness to conduct an illicit affair is very much tempered by her fear of her neglectful husband no longer being the only person in Holmfirth who doesn’t know about it, oh, and whether her back would let her do that. Of more lasting import, the fourth episode introduces the brilliant Joe Gladwin and his fantastic throaty Lancashire burr as Wally Batty. And the real world differences between Michael Bates and Bill Owen lend an edge of authenticity to their dialogue. Cyril Blamire, who has never married, has retired from a post at the local Water Board which he believes makes his superior, from being a civil servant. Apparently, there was a live appearance on Top of the Pops which I missed due to the weekly parental ban, though ‘Mr Bloe’, so far as this single is concerned, is a rhythm section assembled by arranger Zack Lawrence (who plays the piano) and a session harmonica played by jazz harmonica veteran Harry Pitch, whose harmonica can otherwise be heard on such diverse items as Frank Ifield’s ‘I Remember You’, and the theme music for Last of the Summer Wine.