Monday 15 December 2008

Last of the Dutty Wine...Batty Rider Dead.


Tributes have been paid to Staff, 80, who played the redoubtable Yorkshire battle-axe in 243 episodes of the popular sitcom.
She starred in the very first show in January 1973 and made her last appearance in August, before ill health forced her to stop.
Sallis, who plays Norman Clegg in the series, told BBC News that he did not know if the series could continue without her.He said: "I can't actually say that I loved Kathy Staff but I'm terribly upset that she's not with us, I just think we don't know quite for sure whether we're going to do any more, but if we do she's going to be terribly missed."
He added: "She dominated anything that she was in. You could stop acting when Kathy was there because she was going to do it all for you."
Sallis is now one of only two of the original cast remaining, the other being Jane Freeman, who plays Ivy.
Staff died after a lengthy illness,born in Dukinfield, Greater Manchester, she had a long acting career that included stints in Emmerdale Farm Coronation Street and Open All Hours alongside David Jason and Ronnie Barker. She was also the cleaner Doris Luke in the ITV soap Crossroads.
But it was Nora Batty's skirmishes with the likes of Compo, Clegg and Foggy that will linger in most viewers' minds.
Brian Wilde, who played the pseudo-intellectual ex-Army corporal Walter 'Foggy' Dewhurst, died in March aged 80.
Bill Owen, who played Compo, died in 1999 aged 85.
Last of the Summer Wine in numbers:
35 years - the length of time it has been running for, making it the longest-running comedy programme in Britain
243 - the number of episodes produced so far
18.8 million - the number of viewers one episode attracted in 1985
1/3 - proportion of people who wanted the show cancelled in a 2003 Radio Times poll, making it - on that measure - the leas popular show in the survey
5 - the number of times it has been nominated for a BAFTA. It has never won.
3 - number of the Royal Family known to have been viewers - the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the Queen, and the Prince of Wales
25 - number of countries in which Summer Wine has been broadcast
1 - number of Afghan presidents who love the show - namely Hamid Karzai

2 comments:

Average said...

Last of the Summer Wine gets no love here (apart from Wallace & Grommit bloke). The only good thing is that the cast are starting to die off one by one although the BBC are cheating by bringing in long lost sons and daughters to carry on the series.

I want to live to see the day there is a "final series of LOTSW"

And I'm surprised at you Pepa, being a southern fag hag, you can't be watching "northern" programmes let alone blogging them... Blogging some french language sitcom would be more relevent

Average said...

and no, Bergerac doesn't count...

I used to like that as a kid but I watched it on Sky a couple of years go and it looked very dated