I read recently that since WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE LIKELY LADS finished, the two stars Rodney Bewes and James Bolam have seldom spoken to one another. This is a crying shame, because one of the series' chief assets was the way in which they interacted with one another. They were always two "likely lads" looking back into their past lives and wondering what had happened to them since their halcyon days as teenagers, when the prospects for success seemed unlimited both personally as well as professionally.
This elegiac note was one of the reasons why the sitcom worked so well. Although Bob (Rodney Bewes) was happily married to Thelma (Brigit Forsyth) and living in a recently-constructed housing development, he was always disappointed that life hadn't turned out as favorably as he had hoped. This explained his enduring friendship for Terry (James Bolam), who had spent a long time in the armed forces and returned to the north-east jobless and disillusioned. The two of them spent long hours in the Fat Ox or the Black Horse reminiscing about what might have been, as well as good-naturedly making fun of each other by recalling their days at high school.
What rendered WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE LIKELY LADS? so good was the quality of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais's scripts. They did not structure them in the usual sitcom way, with a series of dialogues culminating in a laugh; they were more interested in character. Bolam and Bewes had long sequences together, mostly filmed in two- shot, where their conversations had a Pinteresque quality combining the significant with the banal. Although the tone of their speeches remained light-hearted, there was always that element of melancholy lurking underneath; the series could have been easily turned into a tragedy rather than a sitcom. Clement and La Frenais caught the tone of mid-Seventies north-east England, a place where heavy industry no longer prevailed, and the concept of a job for life - which had so dominated the earlier years of the twentieth century - was long gone. Hence Terry's difficulties in finding a job.
This Christmas special not only caught Bob's yearnings for an alternative to his humdrum suburban life, but also depicted Terry's rather shiftless existence as he moved from job to job without actually finding anything permanent. The ending was funny yet predictable but did not propose any resolution: the two Likely Lads were in as much of an emotional and professional predicament as ever.