Back in the overhanging Sixties, being mounted on a beige suedette lounge in a posh road residence by one of The Likely Lads was probably majority women"s dream.
Forty years on, however, it"s all a bit startling. Not only given Rodney Bewes - aka Bob Ferris in the BBC sitcom - has launched himself opposite me with no notice and a shrill "Wha-hey!"
But additionally given he"s 72 years old, unequivocally pink-cheeked from lunch and is right afar lying heavily on tip of me and nuzzling my neck with intensely soppy lips.
"Ooh, sorry, I contingency have slipped . . . ha ha!" he splutters. "Ha ha, I love creation people laugh. It"s what I"m here for! Unlike a small people I could mention, I don"t take myself as well seriously."
When they were still lads: James Bolam (left) as Terry and Rodney Bewes as Bob
It"s utterly a culmination to what"s been a flattering eventful lunch. So far we"ve had Rodney reciting complete Likely Lads sketches, violation in to song, stealing my phone in his slot and revelation large anecdotes and bad jokes.
But majority of all removing rather romantic about his longrunning argument with Likely Lads co-star and one-time most appropriate crony James Bolam.
The argument - now tipping 34 years and one of the longest in showbusiness - erupted again this week when Rodney indicted Bolam of condemning associate expel members to misery by restraint repeats of The Likely Lads on mainstream television.
"He"s abashed of The Likely Lads given he thinks it"s lightweight, given it"s humerous entertainment and he"s such a good actor," Rodney says, fluttering a langoustine at me crossly. "He thinks it competence lessen his overwhelming opening in [BBC drama] New Tricks. Urghh! Don"t get me started."
Too late, we"re off . . . "No one"s that critical - not even Jimmy Bolam, MB full of blood E, however severely he takes himself. Actors have to pointer a waiver to concede a array to be steady - and he killed The Likely Lads, mill dead!
"He stopped the repeats when he did New Tricks - and how majority times has that been repeated? Enough to have him unequivocally wealthy, but he doesn"t caring about any one else, however bad they are. To stop alternative people earning income is cruel. We were most appropriate friends once."
A dismayed Jane Fryer discovers that Rodney Bewes still has a wink in his eye
Oh dear. It"s all terribly sad. And rather ironic, given as any one over 35 will remember, The Likely Lads was all about an fast loyalty in between dual incompatible lads from the North-East - Bob, a socialclimber, unfortunate to posh-up, wed well and obstacle a good job, and Terry, for whom hold up was singular to football, drink and bird
Written by Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais (the award-winning partnership who went on to write Porridge, Auf Wiedersehen Pet and The Commitments), the array was watched by twenty-seven million people - half the population.
It incited Rodney and Jimmy in to domicile names - rich, famous, and in Rodney"s case, swanning around London in a code new immature Bentley that cost some-more than his house.
And it spawned an even some-more successful second array - Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads - in the 1970s and a underline movie in 1976, by that time Rodney and Jimmy had it all.
Rodney Bewes in Cornwall for a new transport feature
Fame, happening - Rodney was earning 250,000 a year in his heyday - remunerative voice-over jobs for chocolate bars and Bird"s Eye solidified foods, you name it.
For dual operative category lads from Yorkshire and Sunderland respectively, this was a new hold up light years from home.
For Rodney, it was head-turning. He partied with Mick Jagger, stayed in Paris with Omar Sharif ("Sooo large - you"d wish to burst in to bed with him"), common a prosaic with Tom Courtenay, picked up mini-skirted girls in bars and restaurants (one, Daphne, became his mom and the mom of his daughter and triplet sons) and cruised about locale in his white Porsche convertible, or the outrageous immature Bentley, or maybe the china replacement.
Not likely! Rodney gets a bit carried afar with Jane Fryer
While Jimmy was regularly the shyer, some-more not good with words of the two, the span were close.
"We were ever such good friends," says Rodney, unexpected all misty-eyed. "We were regularly spin each others" houses and out to dinner. We had fun, such fun and met lots of poetic people.
On the night prior to recording we"d be on the p*** all night and we"d get to the college of music and the initial thing we"d do is ask for the helper to get us a small headache pills. It was a smashing time - you felt you could do anything."
So it contingency have been a distressing shock when things went wrong. According to Rodney, it all stemmed from an misdeed in a journal interview.
"Jimmy told told me he"d been pushing along the Fulham Road and his mom Su had incited to him and said: ""Jimmy, you know Daphne had 3 babies at once. . . well I"m only carrying the one!" Poor old Jimmy was so astounded he mounted the kerb and scarcely strike a lamppost.
James Bolam stars as a crack investigator in strike TV show "New Tricks"
"It only sort of slipped out in an verbalise I did - that happens to me a lot. . . But it was a droll story, a honeyed story, not about a small lady in a nightclub or something and no one should have been offended.
"But Jimmy was regularly so altered about things similar to that and when I saw it in the paper on the Sunday, I knew I"d messed up and I called to apologise. But he was furious, positively livid and slammed down the phone on me."
And that was that, they never spoke again. Admittedly, Jimmy had regularly rhythmical his remoteness fiercely - but this does appear a bit extreme.
Meanwhile, the movie version of the array inebriated and so the good hold up came to a juddering halt.
Or at slightest it did for bad Rodney. Because with the passing of TheLikely Lads, the fortunes of the dual stars went in rather differentdirections: Jimmy"s up and Rodney"s down.
Anxious not to betypecast as the untimely Terry, Bolam sought out critical purposes - looming in When The Boat Comes In, and the Beiderbecke Connection,playing ruthless GP Dr Harold Shipman and former budding apportion HaroldWilson, popping up in countless West End productions and, some-more recently,starring in the fabulously successful New Tricks to one side DennisWaterman, Amanda Redman and Alun Armstrong.
Despite itsenduring popularity, he has regularly refused to remember about TheLikely Lads and says he finds the stability open mindfulness withthe array "irksome".
Even when they were still pals, Bolam was a bit peculiar about the series. As Rodney says: "Fans used to mess-up us with the characters and shout: "Hey Terry, where"s Bob?" and he"d say: "He"s dead."
"He claimed he pronounced it to close them up, but it"s still a bit peculiar don"t you think?"
Rodney has a rather opposite approach. He loves all about The Likely Lads and during lunch quotes complete sketches off pat, pausing for thespian outcome prior to the punchlines, and happily sings the thesis balance - "Oh whatever happened to you, whatever happened to me, what became of the people we used to be?" - as we wait for for the main courses to arrive.
"Why wouldn"t any one be proud? It gave wish to millions. And the script? The book was brilliant, glorious - we were both bowled over when we initial review it."
James Bolam in the strike comedy/mystery "The Beiderbecke Affair" to one side Barbara Flynn
He adores being worried by fans ("I"m still recognized with white hair, each day, and I love it!"), would verbalise about the Likely Lads all day given the possibility and is still smarting that his journal was cut down from over 1,200 pages to "a bizarre small 280-page thing" by his agent, huffing: "I"m certain the open would have desired to review it all."
Sadly, notwithstanding all the enthusiasm, Rodney"s career has been sketchy ever since.
Television purposes have eluded him. In the Eighties - whilst Jimmy was starring in Only When I Laugh and Andy Capp - Rodney"s representative was complaining: "I can"t even get Rodney arrested on television."
And notwithstanding a small important entertainment work, things haven"t changed.
"I did an piece of Heartbeat last year and all I could think was: "What a rubbish - I"ve got all this hold about radio - the technique, the essay and stuff, and I never get to make use of it."
" So instead, Rodney tours the nation with his acclaimed one-man version of Three Men In A Boat - pushing from venue to venue (last week was to a entertainment on top of a beer hall in North London; Apr sees him at the Vera Fletcher Hall in Thames Ditton) in his Ford Mondeo towing his props and view in a trailer behind, with mom Daphne along to help.
"It"s brilliant, and such fun, it"s something I"m unequivocally unapproachable of," he says. "There were outrageous laughs in Highgate last week - you should have been there."
And Daphne - does she have a role?
Rodney Bewes graphic with his second wife, engineer Daphne Black on their marriage day
Daphne"s what I call a civilian, since I"m a turn. So after the fool around I lay in the club signing books and programmes and she packs the props and the view in the sleet outward the venue. No really, she does. She"s unequivocally good and I"m ridicule lucky.
"In actuality I"m a unequivocally jolly, happy man. I"m not sour - I mustn"t be bitter. And I"m not a pain-in-thearseserious actress who thinks: "Oh God, aren"t I important" and is abashed of an positively shining show I was in some-more than thirty years ago."
Rodney spends a lot of time observant how happy and ridicule he is. And I"m certain on majority levels he is. He has a poetic home in Henley-on-Thames, a legal holiday residence in Cornwall with a red token of office dwindle that he raises each time he arrives "to let the villagers know I"m there", a unequivocally constant mom and 4 grown-up children.
But the passion with Jimmy is obviously eating afar at him. Since their bust up, the latter has finished an glorious pursuit of erasing both Rodney and the Likely Lads from his life.
When Rodney featured on This Is Your Life in 1980, Bolam refused to participate. "Thames Television couldn"t hold it - they"d never had such a incident and it took them ages to find an comical shave of the array that didn"t have him in it given we were regularly together."
And when in the Nineties publisher Richard Webber interviewed the expel and writers for a book about the show, Bolam refused to speak.
James Bolam stars as Harold Shipman in the 2002 TV play "Shipman"
Webber says: "It was unequivocally bizarre given Jimmy"s mom Su [who played a small piece in the strange series] was happy to chat, but he would have zero to do with it. It was peculiar to think of him hovering in the credentials as she chatted afar about it all on the phone. It"s roughly as if it never happened."
Even the series"s co-writer, Dick Clement, who lives in the U.S., is saddened by the rift. "It"s unequivocally odd," he said. "James never longed for to be compared with only one role. He should have got over that now, though, given he"s had a sundry career."
While Rodney and Daphne aren"t on the misery line, income is obviously a regard and he functions given he has to.
"If they only steady Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads once some-more in the whole - all twenty-six episodes - I could compensate off my debt and my overdraft.
"Repeats are the homogeneous of pensions for actors (David Jason"s on all the time) and the rest of the expel would be anxious to pieces if it were steady - I"m perpetually essay to the executive ubiquitous of the BBC and the head of scheduling, but they only reply "We"ve no plans to repeat the array at the moment" and Jimmy won"t budge."
Rodney claims if the complete array were steady he"d consequence over 100,000, about 5,000 per episode.
So as if it"s flattering sorrowful to see Jimmy and the new New Tricks squad on telly each alternative night. "It"s on all the time - there contingency have been thousands of repeats! I gamble it"s not as good as The Likely Lads."
Doesn"t he watch it? "Oh no! I"ve never seen it. I couldn"t bear to - it"d be as well hurtful. I"ve never watched anything he"s been in. I only couldn"t."
Oh dear. It"s a unhappy situation. And unequivocally unclear. Because this week the BBC denied meaningful of any issues that would forestall them from repeating the series. Which creates it even odder that Bolam won"t, only once, mangle his overpower and set the jot down straight.
Not slightest given for all his bluster, Rodney is obviously pining for his old friend.
"We"ve never bumped in to each alternative in all these years. I"d love it to be at a railway hire and we run in to each others" arms in delayed suit similar to in Brief Encounter."
Unfortunately, Bolam seems some-more expected to run the alternative way. In a singular verbalise he once said: "You see, only given one played good friends it doesn"t meant that you are good friends."
Which is a great shame, given underneath all his big chat, demoniac story-telling, ridicule singing and shocking high jinks on the sofa, Rodney seems unequivocally rather sad.
And once I"ve shoehorned him off me and transient to the station, I can"t assistance anticipating that a teenager spectacle competence take place and, 34 years after he last slammed it down, Jimmy Bolam competence collect up the phone again and try to straighten things out.
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Richard Ford, Home Correspondent & , : {} 