Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? is a British sitcom which was broadcast on BBC1 between 9 January 1973 and 9 April 1974. It was the colour sequel to the mid-1960s hit The Likely Lads. It was created and written, as was its predecessor, by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. There were 26 television episodes over two series, and a subsequent 45-minute Christmas special was aired on 24 December 1974.
The cast was reunited in 1975 for a BBC radio adaptation of series 1, transmitted on Radio 4 from July to October that year. A feature film spin-off was made in 1976. Around the time of its release, however, Rodney Bewes and James Bolam fell out over a misunderstanding involving the press, and never spoke again. This long-suspected feud was finally confirmed by Bewes while promoting his autobiography in 2005. Even while Bewes was alive, Bolam was consistently reluctant to talk about the show, and vetoed any attempt to revive his character. Following Bewes' death in November 2017, Bolam maintained there was never any rift. The show won the BAFTA Television Award for Best Situation Comedy in 1974.
The series
Set in Newcastle upon Tyne in north-east England, the show follows the friendship, resumed after five years apart, of two working-class young men, Bob Ferris (Rodney Bewes) and Terry Collier (James Bolam). The word "likely" in the title referred, in the 1960s series, to those showing promise, but also to those likely to get up to well-meaning mischief. The humour was based on the tension between Terry's firmly working-class outlook and Bob's aspirations to join the middle class, through his new white-collar job, suburban home and impending marriage to prissy librarian Thelma Chambers (Brigit Forsyth).
Since the ending of the original series in 1966, Bob has left factory life behind and now works for his future father-in-law's construction firm, something which makes him even more desperate to curry favour with Thelma and her family. At Thelma's urging, Bob is also joining sports clubs and attending dinner parties, which Terry views as Bob aspiring to join the middle class. This results in Terry viewing Bob as a class traitor and believing his own army experience and solid working-class ethos gives him moral superiority. To a considerable degree the comedy is built on class warfare. Whereas Bob, Thelma and Terry's sister Audrey have adapted to the various changes, Terry's failure to adjust to the changes that have occurred during his five years in the army result in him being left behind, a relic of the attitudes of the mid-1960s.
As implied in the lyrics to the programme's theme song, the 1970s series plays on both lads' feelings of nostalgia for the lost days of their reckless youth. Both of them are depressed by the demolition of so many of the landmarks of their childhood, though Bob, who works for a construction firm, sometimes sees it as progress. Bob has also bought his own house on a new estate, further distancing him from his and Terry's pasts. Reflecting the distinctions now separating the two young men, the opening credits show Terry waiting for a bus in the older and more industrial parts of the city, with Bob seen outside his new home with his own car in the modern surroundings of the Elm Lodge housing estate.
The conflict between what Bob had become, and what he saw himself as, led him to be impulsively inclined to follow the lead set by the more headstrong Terry, who led them recklessly into one scrape after another. Bob usually blamed his drinking, poor diet and reckless behaviour on Terry, a view with which Audrey and Thelma only too willingly agreed. This may have been true in part, but Bob needed little persuasion to stay out drinking with Terry or to behave accordingly. Bob does not actually move into his new house until after his wedding to Thelma due to fears of being judged by his new neighbours (although, in the final episode of the first series, both Bob and Thelma make it clear they have an active sex life), and for the first series lives with his mother. Terry lives with his parents (his father is never seen) in a 19th-century terrace, which he claims has far more character than Bob's new house, where "the only thing that tells you apart from your neighbours is the colour of your curtains".