A Lesson In Local Government Politics

It’s Friday night and, while the rest of the world has got its eyes trained on “Big Brother”, I’m sitting here with my eyes trained on ITV3, watching the film version of the hit 1970s sitcom, “Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads”. There was a rush of these film versions of sitcoms in the early 1970s – “Please, Sir!”, “Are You Being Served?”, “Steptoe & Son”, “Dad’s Army” and “Bless This House” all got the big screen treatment and, somehow or other, the “On The Buses” franchise ran to three films. Mostly, they were appalling – at best, they were stripped down versions of the TV shows (one scene of the “Are You Being Served?” film, for example, is a straight copy of the first ever episode of the TV series), and at worst, they were little more than overblown and slightly more raunchy versions of the TV series themselves. The directors of these shows were certainly not above throwing in gratuitous naked ladies for the sake of it. This was the amazingly politically correct 1970s, after all.

The film version of “Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?”, however, was a cut above the rest, and survives as a fascinating document of change and which taps into a true story of local government corruption which seemed to sum up the mixture of progressive politics and chronic wastefulness of post-war Britain. The film opens with Terry & Bob bunking off work to visit their local, The Fat Ox, on the day that it is due to be demolished. These opening scenes, coupled with the numerous scenes showing Terry living in a high-rise block of flats in which the lifts never worked, tied in with the news of the time. The film was made in 1976, two years after the imprisonment of Newcastle’s vainglorious council leader, T Dan Smith, after a series of events that would have graced an episode of “Dallas”. Smith was a former communist who was elected the leader of Newcastle City Council in 1960. His vision was to rebuild Newcastle as an ultra-modern city, to be nicknamed “The Brasilia Of The North” (as a tribute to the recently completed puropose-built Brazilian capital city). Vast tracts of the city’s slum tenements were bulldozed and replaced by high-rise blocks, and a sizeable part of the city centre was replaced with a huge shopping precinct. Smith, however, had betrayed his socialist background by getting involved in corruption on a grand scale with the architect John Poulson and, although he was acquitted in a trial in 1971, when Poulson was declared bankrupt in 1974 further details of Smith’s involvement became public, and he was imprisoned for six years.

There is something very bleak about all British television from this era, but the film version of “The Likely Lads” is unique in its outlook – as far as Ian La Frenais appears to be concerned, Britain is falling apart at the seams, with slum buildings being replaced by slum tenements. Bob had moved up the social ladder, and was in a white collar job, living the middle-class dream with his overbearing wife, Thelma. Terry, meanwhile, was “keeping it real” on a council estate where the lifts didn’t work and the kids would nick the wing mirrors off your car as soon as it was out of your sight. The pessimistic feeling permeates every aspect of the film – even the opening music, a song called “Remember When” (written, as the theme tune to “Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?”, by the former Manfred Mann drummer Mike Hugg, with, notably, lyrics by La Frenais himself) has a melancholy feel to it, with lyrics such as, “we used to think that we’d have forever, now I’m not so sure”.

Equally important in making this film work are the performances of an excellent ensemble cast. Rodney Bewes and James Bolam  are, of course, excellent as Bob and Terry – Bob on the edge of a full-blown mid-life crisis, and Terry’s working class bravado being little more than a veneer papering over his insecurities at a world that is changing faster than he can. The two characters are clearly such a bad influence on each other, but their relationship is the dynamic that keeps the whole film ticking over. As you could say about so many other “odd couple” male friendships, they should have married each other.