A sad showing this evening at the Beaker Last of the Summer Wine Club, of the episode "Magic and the Morris Minor". It's not, by quite a long way, the best ever episode of that amazingly long-lived series. But it's the last episode to feature Bill Owen (aka Compo).
Goodness knows how, between using doubles and filming in front of blue screens, Alan Bell got that last programme out. And Owen's timing, though still funny, is terribly laboured and slow - unsurprising in a man in his 80s who was dying of cancer.
I watch the episode and think of the loveable if disreputable urchin - barely past bus-pass age - of Short Back and Palais Glide or Of Funerals and Fish 25 years earlier - unable to resist jumping on a wall or climbing a tree. I consider the pain and tiredness that the programme must have brought on even before his illness. And I do feel a sense of great regret.
Thus passes the glory of the world - from a sprightly 60-year-old to a dying man of 85. Happens to all of us, of course, if we live that long. But let's jump on walls and climb trees and gather rosebuds while we may. You're a long time dead and, if you believe there's a bloke at the pearly gates with a clipboard, I doubt very much if the correct answer to the question "did you ever walk along a wall or climb a tree" is "no - that's terribly childish and uncivilised."
I used to be Bill Owen's role trainer.
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