Series Two, Episode One: Forked Lightning

First Broadcast – BBC1, 9.35pm, Wednesday 5th March 1975

In which Clegg slips a gear and the trio attempt to ride a bicycle made for one...

NOTE: Our thoughts on this episode were first posted to this site way back in 2011. The text below was revised and expanded as part of the preparation for the first Summer Winos book in 2020.

Andrew: So, we kick off Series Two, and all seems to be pretty much where it was left in 1973. There’s not a lot from the outset that would mark this out as a second run, except maybe an extra spring in Ronnie Hazlehurst’s step as he scores Clegg’s ill-fated bicycle ride.

After Clegg damages his... umm... equipment, slipping from his bike, he says the condition is “best described as forked lightning”. I have literally no idea what the episode title refers to here! Am I missing a reference?

Bob: You’ve clearly never impaled your cobblers on a bicycle frame! Ah, the youth of today. I think it’s just a reference to the sudden explosion of pain and knacker-wrenching torment that Clegg experiences when the accident happens.

Andrew: Someone who definitely doesn’t seem too sympathetic is the laughing witness played by an uncredited Jim Whelan, making his second appearance in the show after playing a car salesman in ‘The New Mobile Trio’. Thanks to our eagle-eyed friend Iain Bacon for spotting this one!

Bob: I’m going to claim a little bit of Summer Wine for Teesside here as well... the people queuing at the bus stop break into a sterling rendition of ‘Nice One, Cyril’. After being used as a slogan in a 1972 advert for Wonderloaf bread, this phrase was then adopted by Spurs fans as a chant in honour of their Middlesbrough-born left-back Cyril Knowles. Which itself then inspired a similarly-titled 1973 Top 20 hit for Cockerel Chorus. ‘Nice One, Cyril’ was still doing the rounds as a popular playground song and catchphrase during my own childhood 10 years later, even though we had no idea by then who “Cyril” actually was!

Andrew: When Clegg damages his... umm... hazlehursts for a second time, two passing women (one of whom is played by latter- day Emmerdale actor Paula Tilbrook) are on hand to offer a few sympathetic words. Not to him, of course, lest they raise suspicion by paying too much attention to “such a localised wound.” It seems odd to hand so many laughs over to characters that we’ve never seen before and probably won’t see again, but it’s totally true to British life. We see somebody have a bit of an embarrassing mishap – a bicycle incident, a trip over a loose paving stone, an unexpected eruption – and however much we may sympathise, we keep ourselves to ourselves. It’s a tiny moment of Greek chorus, but I love it!

Bob: You regularly have “unexpected eruptions” in the streets of Gateshead, do you?Clegg’s solo mishap means Blamire and Compo once again form an unlikely double act in the library. There’s some nice character- building here: Blamire describes the horoscopes in his newspaper as “Pagan rubbish’” but Compo keeps a lucky rabbit’s foot (and I genuinely saw some of these horrific severed limbs being carried around in the 1970s) and recalls how his mother would never “cross the knife and fork on a plate”. I can’t find any definitive explanation for this superstition, but I’m guessing the resulting similarity to the Christian cross puts it dangerously close to blasphemy.

Andrew: In our house, I seem to recall that it just vaguely meant bad luck. Not a superstition that we took seriously, though.

Bob: Compo also mentions “Our Dougie”, who seems to be doing a stretch at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. A brother, do we think? And I like the recovered Clegg’s flight of fancy about “Third Degree Burns” – the Irish policeman who would “let people off on St Patrick’s Day... by sticking them in a bottle and lighting the blue touch paper”.

Andrew: Go on then; you’re on cafe watch. How does the place compare to the last time we saw it?

Bob: It’s still a filthy hole! It’s a rare catering establishment that sees the proprietor attempting to repair a grubby bike with a broken chain, right in the middle of the shop floor. I can just imagine the oily fingerprints all over Ivy’s buns.

Andrew: With Sid swiftly forbidden to fix the bike inside the cafe, Clegg resolves to take it back to where he got it from: Huddersfield.

To do so, our trio need to take the bus and we see them attempting to board a number 47 that displays the destinations “Huddersfield” and “Holmfirth”. This might seem an unnecessary bit of detail to impart, but I think that this might be one of the very rare occasions on which the town in which the series is filmed is actually named onscreen. I can’t think of another example from the episodes we’ve covered thus far. For the most part Summer Wine seems to take place in a generic Yorkshire never-never land and I rather like it that way!

Bob: I didn’t spot that! I was too busy laughing at the saucy bus conductress, played by future Brookside regular Doreen Sloane. I loved Compo’s innuendo-laden comment that she “took a lodger”... in more ways than one, clearly. Ah, lodgers... such a comedy staple of the 1960s and 1970s, wiped out by Mrs ‘Fatcher’s property-owning boom of the 1980s! The possibilities of having a strange (and, obviously, young and virile) man living in the marital home kept British sitcom writers salivating for decades.

Andrew: “She’s got a new AirBnB guest,” doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?

Bob: Actually, that sounds even filthier. Good to see a very young Kenneth MacDonald as the Huddersfield mechanic whose services are requested by our trio: it would be another 10 years before he found fame as Mike, the landlord of the Nag’s Head in Only Fools and Horses. And, weirdly, around the time this episode was broadcast, he was acting as something of a mentor to a teenage Jonathan “Crusher” Linsley, directing him in a play at the Youth Theatre!

I think his performance jars a little bit here, actually. He’s very good, but he gives a traditional “big” 1970s sitcom performance, whereas everyone else in Summer Wine so far has underplayed things.

Andrew: Yeah, but the year before this he’d made his debut as Gunner “Nobby” Clark in the concert party of David Croft and Jimmy Perry’s It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. Perhaps he was already locked into the world of music hall vulgarity by this point! Still, Michael Bates managed to shake that off with ease.

Bob: I think he might provide us with an historic Summer Wine moment here, actually. Obviously Compo is a scruffy little herbert, but is the mechanic’s grimace the first direct evidence we have that our hero actually smells? Of horseshit, seemingly.

Interesting to hear about the history of Clegg’s bike, too: it was bought from this same garage in “late spring, early summer 1946”. I like to think of the twentysomething Clegg deciding to explore Yorkshire in a flush of giddy, post-war enthusiasm. Or, at least, pedalling down to the Co-op every morning to flog his lino.

Andrew: The episode in general does seem a tiny bit broader than those we’ve grown used to. In fact, does this instalment boast our first example of three men rolling down a hill atop a rickety contraption (the car in ‘The New Mobile Trio’ doesn’t count), only to crash into a heap at the bottom? The little “wah-wah” stab on the soundtrack when Clegg’s bike is run over also puts us closer to traditional sitcom territory.

Bob: If we’re discounting that car crash, it is definitely Summer Wine’s first-ever “rolling downhill on a contraption” scene! At 17 minutes 13 seconds precisely... mark this down as a historic moment, Drew. Is it actually Bates, Sallis and Owen on the bike as well, for at least a few of these shots? Understandably, I don’t think they carried on doing their own stunts for very long, but it’s nice to see them taking the plunge at this early stage in the series.

Andrew: I wonder if part of the reason for this lighter touch is that this series sees the introduction of a new producer-director – with Bernard Thompson stepping into the considerable shoes of James Gilbert. Just before this, he’d been a largely uncredited director on Are You Being Served?

There’s still a naturalness to all this, though. The slapstick feels like an extension of our trio’s acknowledged second childhood. It’s not like one of the batty showpiece stunts that came to embody the series in later years.

Bob: Yes, it’s nicely done. And it drives them to seek solace in the pub, where Compo refers to Blamire as “shagbasket”! I think this insult might be a Roy Clarke invention, but it’s very close to one of my dad’s pet names for me when I was a grubby little boy: “Shagnasty”. It was just used in those days to describe someone of questionable personal hygiene, but I can’t find the origin of it. Possibly the tiny, uninhabited Shagnasty Island in South Orkney, so named because its rocky surface is absolutely coated in the grotty residue left by the native birds, the blue-eyed shags. Oh now, please. Stop giggling at the back, or we can all stay behind. It’s not my time you’re wasting, it’s yours.

Andrew: Actually, our friend David Brunt has once again done the research that we couldn’t be bothered with, and tells us that “Bolivar Shagnasty” was a loudmouthed braggart character, popularised after the Second World War by the American comedian Red Skelton. Episodes of his television series were being repeated on ITV as late as 1967, which might explain the continued cultural relevance here.

Anyway, this is a very genitally fixated episode, what with Compo’s revelations about the attention he has historically devoted to his “whole person”!

Bob: Yes, it’s a strange little sequence that raises a few unsure titters from the studio audience. “Any distinguishing marks on your... person?” There’s another Summer Wine first in this scene, when Compo refers to Blamire as “Elsie”. For the next 27 years, he’ll regularly call the authority figure of the trio by a traditional lady’s name, but this is the first time he does it, isn’t it?

Andrew: I’d never noticed that particular motif, but now that you mention it... yes!

Speaking of recurring themes, I love the way Ivy continues to respond to Compo’s cheeky advances. It almost seems like a gut reaction for her to chase him off, but once the scruffy git is out of sight she’s quite clearly pleased by the attention. This kind of little character moment keeps cropping up, and for me at least really does elevate the series above standard sitcom fayre. There’s always something more to the characters than the stock types they might first appear to be.

Bob: I loved that, too! “Tha’s got a chest like a proud pigeon,’’ says Compo. She gives him his usual comeuppance, but then – when he’s out of sight – admires said heaving bosom proudly in the cafe mirror. This is all combined with a heavy hint that Sid has regularly been caught playing away from home: “You’re either tinkering with some woman, or somebody’s damn bike”. God, she doesn’t have much in her life.

There’s some classic Roy Clarke dialogue in this one, actually. I liked Clegg’s comment on Compo’s smoking habit: “On a clear day, you can hear the wind rustling through the undergrowth in your lungs”. Poetry, that.

And a glorious homage to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the end, with Sid freewheeling Clegg’s bike around the square as our heroes break into a chorus of ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head’.

Andrew: Ronnie Hazlehurst has been firing on all cylinders throughout this episode, as has everybody else. Is it just me, or is Blamire miming playing the upright bass? If so, that’s a perfect character choice; his mother would never stand for him having common-as-muck guitar or drum lessons.

Bob: Definitely a bit of air bass! Mind you, as much as I love this feelgood finale, I’m a bit taken aback by the exterior of the cafe. This is the best view we’ve had of it to date, and it’s just as grotty as the interior! Totally unfamiliar brown paintwork and blacked-out windows... it’s unbelievably gloomy. It hasn’t seen a lick of paint since the Festival of Britain.

Andrew: It’s worth pointing out again that the world famous cafe was not in fact a real-life cafe at this point in the series’ run. It would go on to be converted into a genuine dining establishment in later years, but at this point the building was being used for things like paint storage.

Bob: Still, everyone is suppressing genuine, bubbling laughter, Ronnie Hazlehurst’s music does indeed swell to accompany them, and it’s all clearly been filmed on the most beautiful, sun-drenched 1970s afternoon. Heavenly.

Andrew: All in all, this is a very confident start to the new run!

Bob: Yes, lovely. And, keeping a beady eye on the cafe blackboard, I can report that, at time of filming, it was 10p for an egg and lettuce sandwich.