Of more lasting import, the fourth episode introduces the brilliant Joe Gladwin and his fantastic throaty Lancashire burr as Wally Batty.

It would have made more sense to number the DVD sets with the series number and "Part 1" or "Part 2". I had been a Last of the Summer Wine fan for many years though, and whilst I’d lost interest in the series in the early Nineties, I’d been a more or less constant viewer for twenty years by then. The first two episodes are very much a quasi-picaresque approach, the trio moving from place to place as an excuse to vary the scenes of their dialogue but ‘Pate and Chips’ struck out in a welcome direction by not only taking up a change of scene to Upperdyke Hall, but introducing, very briefly, Compo’s nephew, Chip, complete with lovely wife Connie and four or five kids (they ran around so much you could never get an accurate count). In contrast, ‘The New Mobile Trio’ is inspired by Clegg who, after making a hash of things on a Road Safety Exhibition Driving Simulator, gets to hankering to use his barely-touched Driver’s Licence to make the Library Mob mobile, spread their wings, extend their horizons, run into tractors.The programme was nominated for numerous awards and won the National Television Award for Most Popular Comedy Programme in 1999. It used to be that this kind of demand came from the Clean Up TV brigade, the spawn of Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford, insisting that any programme which showed a flash of tit, or some direct intimation of sexuality, or even too many examples of the ‘B’ word (Bloody, for the less timid of mind) be withdrawn, wiped clean and its Commissioning Editor burnt at the stake. We will publish your review of Last Of The Summer Wine: Series 1-31 on DVD within a few days as long as it meets our guidelines.

The England World cup Squad’s ‘Back Home’ was just breaking into the charts, and I was allowed to turn over early to BBC1, just the once, before Top of the Pops had ended, to see the dinner-jacketed squad sing it. Brian Wilde left again, to be replaced by Frank Thornton, as Retired Detective Inspector Herbert Truelove, aka Truly of the Yard. The joy of Bill Owen's Compo is not what he does with the words but where he takes the character beyond what's in the script. The BBC was not supposed to follow that imperative, although the barrage of attacks from commercial interests over several years have forced them far too far along that route.Its popularity made this decision hard to justify, however, since even repeats sometimes received ratings of as many as five million viewers per episode. Anyone can be, and several times an episode is the butt of the joke (actually it’s usually either Cyril or Compo but Cleggy can cop it too). Which is just what you'd expect from Britain's oldest, if not wisest adolescents, and their equally eccentric fellow townspeople. Entwistle, played by Burt Kwouk, had been a supporting character brought in to replace We

Michael Bates was wonderful in the part, and it’s a genuine shame that his (ultimately fatal) illness kept him from continuing after series 2. Actually, given that in later series, Compo was treated as being on his own, it was interesting that at this stage he was constantly referring to relatives. He’s just taking advantage in the happy knowledge that there will be no long term commitment, until Blamire and Clegg deliberately bugger it up for him by convincing him that Wally really is going for good, down the airport with his passport, which makes him revert pretty damned quickly. All three are working class men but they represent different strands that match up to the Social Classes.

FOTSW was set in 1939 and featured the trio of Clegg, Compo and Uttherthwaite, plus the young Foggy, and other similarly aged youngsters, in their late teens, with the Second World War approaching (War was declared in the final episode, which saw Clegg’s cousin Brad enlisting). 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. Inventor of the Forty Foot Ferret’ meanders along a loose storylime about getting the atheist Compo to go into a Church (which church was actually the one where Bill Owen was buried in 1999) whilst ‘Pate and Chips’ (a double-sided pun) was about a day out at a stately home with Compo’s nephew Chip and his brood. The humour, especially in the exchanges between the trio, may be many degrees more abrasive than the LOTSW we remember, but this was always intended to be cosy comedy. Last of the Summer Wine is a British sitcom set in Yorkshire created and written by Roy Clarke and originally broadcast by the BBC from 1973 to 2010.