Although it is 43 years since Rodney Bewes last played his career-defining role on TV – as the Thatcherite social-climber Bob Ferris in the Geordie sitcom Whatever Happened to The Likely Lads? – fans of the series will feel sharp loss at the news of his death, at the age of 79.
Viewers will have particular memories of Bewes as Bob because it represented an unusually perfect piece of casting. He had previously played the character in The Likely Lads, a black-and-white BBC sitcom broadcast between 1964-66, with James Bolam as Terry, a former schoolmate whose downwards trajectory was as steep as Bob’s rise towards the middle class. But it was when writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais suggested a sequel, answering the question, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (BBC1, 1973-74), that Bewes found his ideal role. Colour TV was the perfect vehicle for Bob’s blue-pinstripe suits, fat-knotted floral ties and shiny company cars, further emphasising the contrast with Terry, seemingly forever entombed in a beige windcheater.
Relatively unusually for the time, Clement was also the producer of these sitcoms, an early UK example of the now common phenomenon of showrunner. This crucially gave the writing team power to choose actors who spoke the scripts as they heard them.
Pairing Bewes with Bolam followed the old comedy music-hall tradition of putting together performers who were physically, vocally and temperamentally opposites. Where Bolam was lean, growly and projected pessimism, the chubby Bewes radiated optimism and had a natural tenor register that, under stress, could rise to a soprano of alarm.
The canniness of this contrast casting is that, in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Bob and Terry were, in effect, a double-act suffering from creative differences, with Brigit Forsyth’s Thelma, the eventual Mrs Ferris, attempting to encourage the split. In one episode, Thelma symbolically forces Bob to throw out two tea-chests full of mementoes of his life with his old mate.
The narrative arc series also deliberately forced the two men further apart in class and material terms. While Bob worried about the next promotion at work, Terry was battling attempts to remove his long-term unemployment benefit. In a key set piece, Bob and Thelma catastrophically fail to incorporate Terry into one of their first middle-class dinner parties. Almost all classic British sitcoms are about class clashes, and Bob and Terry are one of the greatest examples. But the cleverness of the writing and acting was that Bob was prosperous but insecure and Terry downtrodden yet confident.
Bewes also subtly suggested Bob’s social ambitions and political drift by progressively poshing-up the north-east idiom in which Clement’s and La Frenais’s dialogue were written. Terrified of Thelma, but wanting the cachet she represented, the character desperately tried, when with Terry, to disguise the extent of his betrayal of his roots.
As has often been the case with chalk-and-cheese comedy double-acts, the two actors had a sometimes tense relationship off-screen, partly due to the fundamental difference in personalities – Bewes outgoing and convivial, Bolam taciturn and wary – that had made the casting a masterstroke. After 27 episodes that achieved ratings of up to 27 million, and a 1976 movie spin-off, Bewes suffered the two worst fates any star of a TV super hit could face: unable ever to find another part that suited him so well, he was also forced to stop being Bob long before he would have wished because Bolam had no interest in reviving the show. There were persistent rumours of a falling-out between the stars, but Bolam maintains that new projects led simply to a parting of the ways.
For four decades, in interviews, Bewes would plaintively suggest it was time to revisit the series. When Ant & Dec, in an act of Geordie cultural homage, remade for ITV the No Hiding Place episode, in which the lads try to avoid finding out the score of an England football game before the highlights are screened, Bewes accepted a poignant cameo as a newspaper seller.
The actor had had a pre-Bob TV hit with Dear Mother … Love Albert (ITV, 1969-72), a comedy in which he played a mother-smothered young man trying to enjoy the freedoms of London. Bewes co-created and co-wrote this series, evidence of a self-starting drive that belied his outwardly easygoing persona.
Later in his career, as it became clear that Bolam would never agree to a Likely Lads reunion, the actor again showed an ability to take charge of his career by diversifying into theatre, devising a one-man version of Jerome K Jerome’s book, Three Men in a Boat, and a biographical monologue about Dylan Thomas, which enjoyed numerous successful runs at the Edinburgh festival and elsewhere.
One consolation when stars of TV classics die these days is that their shows are far more likely to have been seen again by original admirers, and found, in some rerun stream or other, by younger viewers. The work of earlier television legends had often been wiped from the archives (only eight of the 20 episodes of The Likely Lads survived), or remained mothballed within them.
Luckily, though, all of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? is preserved and accessible, ensuring that the haplessly ambitious Bob will never be forgotten by admirers of high-class TV comedy or social historians seeking illustrations of the cultural convulsions in working-class northern English communities that began with Thatcherism and smoothed the path to Downing Street of one north-east MP, Tony Blair.
