AIBU to think James Bolam suffocates Rodney Bewes chances of a Likely Lads revival our of bitterness? For MN's of a certain age RIP RB

[dowsabel]

I was sad to hear of Rodney Bewes death tonight. I think James Bolam was a bit of a twat towards him over a fairly small slip. I would have l

Probably time to let it go now.

RIP Rodney Bewes.

Pre post issue

I would have loved to have seen them as granddads in their respective roles

You are right @Battleax I'm just reminiscing

It was funny. I agree more would have been nice

I think a lot of these comedy partnerships are strained. I read somewhere that in the end, Wilfred Bramble and Harry H Corbett took separate planes to a gig in Australia, so embittered with each other they were.

www.sussexlife.co.uk/people/celebrity-interviews/steptoe-and-daughter-interview-with-susannah-corbett-1-1571001

They might not have been friends in particular as it was-overall it was a relatively short time that they worked together.

Anyone would think that it was a long running thing like Only Fools!

Even if JB is an old misery it's hard to think that he would stop repeats out of spite.

How daft for one to have so much power!

For many years The Professionals werent repeated - not out of spite but Martin Shaw turned to Buddhism and wouldnt condone violence. Then he spent all his money and got over himself

For many years The Professionals werent repeated - not out of spite but Martin Shaw turned to Buddhism and wouldnt condone violence. Then he spent all his money and got over himself

I read that he was told that Gordon Jacksons widow was in poverty, and allowed repeats so she could receive the royalties from his performance.

There’s an article about this in the Guardian today and James Bolam says there was no feud , they worked together , they got on , they weren’t friends as such so they didn’t keep in touch after . Rodney Bewes wanted to do more Likely Lads , but the script writers had moved on to other things and it would have been with other writers and he thought it was best left where it was . All sounds perfectly reasonable to me , I suppose the difference was JB has never been particularly short of work and Rodney Bewes may well have been but that doesn’t mean he owes him a living .

Agree with you OP. It does make him seem small minded and petty. I have read that he also had the hump with Marc Bolan, because he 'stole his name' or something. Life's too short to hold grudges.

The story is Rodney Bewes accidentally let it slip that James Bolams wife was pregnant and James Bolam never forgave him. Don't know how much is true

Rodney Bewes did a one man play, something like, 'one man and his boat'

I heard him in a radio interview about it. He seemed circumspect to the point of grudging with is answers.

I'm surprised Rodney Bewes did not get more work. Middle and working class sitcoms were all the rage at the time i.e. Terry and June, Good Life, Liver Birds, Rising Damp etc

@Dippydippydora yes that's what I read. I also read that James Bolam blocked repeats for many years. He was still earning well and consistently from ongoing work and Rodney Bewes wasn't. That seems petty to me. Anyway, I'm not under the influence of gin at this hour compared to last night so it doesn't really matter haha!

I read that Rodney Bewes said he accidentally mentioned that James Bolams wife was going to have a baby, when he rang to apologise James Bolams put the phone down and they never really spoke again. Also he said that JB stopped repeats of the Likely Lads repeats which would have helped him out financially later.

Did RB die in penury have I missed something? For what it's worth I saw RB in the 1980s appearing rather well heeled and looking in jewellers windows in New Bond St. The Likely Lads was even then history and I was pleased that he had obviously kept a source of income.

"when he rang to apologise James Bolams put the phone down and they never really spoke again."

It does sound as if they were never really friends, doesn't it?

The 1980's were 40 years ago. The tax man took most of his money. High earners were crippled with 98% rates of taxation under Labour.

This one-sided feud cost Bewes dearly, as Bolam refused to sanction re-runs of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, denying him years of TV repeat fees of up to £4,000 an episode that would have radically changed his financial circumstances.

In 2010, he commented sadly that here he was, an old man in his 70s, still with a mortgage and an overdraft — which could have been wiped out by a single run of their 26 classic Seventies episodes together. (Only eight episodes of the original mid-Sixties series, simply called The Likely Lads, survived.)

At the time, viewers never suspected the resentment might be real. Yet to watch the show now — and some episodes are timeless — it’s possible to detect a genuine nastiness in Terry’s jibes.

Bolam did his oblique best to hint at his dislike for Bewes. He told one interviewer: ‘Just because one played great friends, it doesn’t mean that you are great friends.’

When fans called out in the street, ‘Hey Terry, where’s Bob?’ Bolam would snarl: ‘He’s dead!’

Bewes never understood it. He truly thought they were friends, recalling with fondness how they would go out for meals together with their wives after the show.

He commanded big fees for voiceovers, for Birds Eye TV advertisements among others, and at his peak earned £250,000 in a year — nearly £2 million today — though back in the mid-Seventies, the taxman took nearly all of it.

I wonder if JB will go to the funeral. I used to kill myself laughing at the Likely Lads.

"Bolam refused to sanction re-runs of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, "

How does that work?

I guess it was in their contracts, but it seems really odd, doesn't it?

I wonder how much he would have got-if he really still had a mortgage in in 70s, seems he could have been living well beyond his means as he continually worked, didn't he?

" He truly thought they were friends, recalling with fondness how they would go out for meals together with their wives after the show."

Perhaps they were friends at that time & it just fizzled out when they stopped working together?

I remember watching the likely lads with my dad when I was a teenager and I'm in my early 30s so it must have been repeated .

"He loved flashy cars, including a Porsche convertible and a Bentley limo. But, whereas Bolam itched to tackle more serious roles, Bewes was content to ride his fame. He never found another role that gave him so much so easily, and his screen acting career quickly wound down.
Bolam went on to great critical acclaim with When The Boat Comes In and The Beiderbecke Connection, before in 2003 taking a lead role in BBC1’s New Tricks, which ran for 12 years. It was when he got this role that he decreed there should be no more Likely Lads repeats, perhaps to avoid over-exposure.
Bewes couldn’t forgive that. ‘I’m not a pain-in-the-a**e serious actor who thinks: “Oh God, aren’t I important” and is ashamed of an absolutely brilliant show I was in more than 30 years ago,’ he said.
He loved to talk about himself, though. In 2005, he wrote his autobiography — and complained that the publisher cut more than 1,000 pages of his favourite stories.
Many of these he would tell in his one-man show in which he toured the country, often meandering on for hours on stage before settling down to sign autographs and swap anecdotes with fans"

this is some more from the article Spllinterz has copied + pasted.

@thecolonelbumminganugget I think he did relent eventually but was very difficult about it. I watched whatever happened to the LL first tome round when I was about 2 months old and a milk guzzler

Which could be taken as he (RB) was happy to rest on his laurels and let the money roll in from his one hit TV show, whereas James Bolam preferred to work and develop as an actor especially in challenging roles such as Grandpa In My Pocket .

splinterz you've just lifted seven paragraphs (out of eight) of your post straight from the Daily Mail without quotation marks or attribution.

Is this tit for tat? Because you know they do mention MN when they pinch stuff?