It's not far short of 50 years since Whatever Happened To The Likely lads first appeared on television.
The classic sitcom told of the mid-life exploits of old pals Terry Collier and Bob Ferris, as notably played by James Bolam and Rodney Bewes.
The original 1960s black and white depiction of the Likely Lads had been set in some generic, unspecified Northern town. Even though the series is now identified as being set on Tyneside, the location was left unspoken.
As one half of the writing team, Whitley Bay-born Ian La Frenais, told ChronicleLive in 2019: "Newcastle was never mentioned. There were no Geordie accents on television at the time. People knew the show was set somewhere ‘up North’, but didn’t know exactly where. It might have been Hartlepool, Teesside or Wearside. Nobody really knew.”
The all-colour, much-improved 'Whatever Happened To...' when it returned to our screens was very deliberately set in Newcastle and the wider Tyneside. As La Frenais would say years later: "I wanted to put my home town on the map."
The first episode of the new series was broadcast on BBC1 on January 9, 1973.
The memorable title sequences showing 1970s Newcastle under transformation were accompanied by the poignant song Highly Likely, written by La Frenais and Manfred Mann's Mike Hugg. "Is the only thing to look forward to the past?" asks one of the song's nostalgia-laden lines.
The footage was captured around Newcastle in the summer of 1972 and featured locations in Byker, Ouseburn, Cruddas Park, the city centre, Gloucester Road in the West End, as well as Killingworth's new Highfields Estate (the fictional Elm Lodge Housing Estate) where Bob and his upwardly mobile wife Thelma would make their home.
After five years away in the Army, we see Terry finally returning to his home town where much is changing. In episode four, Moving On, Bob takes Terry out in the car to show him what remains of their old haunts.
The pair drive around scenes of mass housing demolition in Newcastle West End, they stop off at Gateshead's Brutalist multi-storey Trinity Square car park (the former venue of 'the Go-Go', we are told), and they find themselves staring at a solitary building, an old ramshackle chip shop, standing in the middle of nowhere.
"At least Eric's survived," jokes Terry. "Just," is Bob's deadpan response.
But, where on Tyneside was Eric's? It turns out the real-life chippy had been part of a terrace of shops on Tyne Street and Robinson Street, near Blaydon railway crossing. The cafe would be the last building in the street to be demolished.
Our photo/video reporter Tim McGuinness traced the modern location, near the railway station, which like other parts of Blaydon is now unrecognisable from what was there in the early 1970s.
We'll return with more Likely Lads then-and-now location features in due course.
Don't miss our Memory Lane local history website that's packed with archive photographs and has an easy-to-use picture colourisation tool.
