Over recent months we've been marking the 50th anniversary of the classic television sitcom Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? with stories comparing some of the outside locations used in the 1973 series and how those same scenes look today.
First broadcast on BBC1 in January 1973 - and a sequel to the original 1960s black and white offering The Likely Lads - the two series and a Christmas special would run until the end of 1974. Written by Whitley Bay-born Ian La Frenais and his sidekick Dick Clement, the rebooted show - now in colour - charted the escapades of two lifelong pals Terry Collier (played by James Bolam) and Bob Ferris (played by Rodney Bewes) now approaching middle age, mourning their lost youth, and doing their best to adapt to the changing world of the 1970s.
Whatever Happened To... was a major success, at its peak drawing 27 million viewers across the country. The show - then and now - held a special affection for people in our part of the world. Despite Bolam actually hailing from Sunderland and Bewes from West Yorkshire, the series was set on Tyneside, with many of the outdoor scenes captured on location in Newcastle and Northumberland.
READ MORE: The North East under transformation 1986-2022: 12 stunning photographs
Among the locations we've recently recalled are the Northumberland pub that featured in The Great Race, the Tyneside housing estate from where Terry and Bob set off on their ill-advised bike ride in the same episode, and the residential street in Heaton where Terry was filmed taking his driving test in the 1974 Christmas special.
The show's iconic title sequence, backed by the nostalgia-laden theme song Highly Likely, showed different areas of early 1970s Newcastle under transformation. Perhaps the most memorable image from the sequence is that of Terry left fuming at the bus stop as his bus zooms past without stopping. (Upwardly-mobile Bob, meanwhile, owned a car).
A typical Tyneside terraced street of its kind from the era, the exact location was said to be the subject of much speculation in homes, pubs and clubs across our region when the show was first broadcast. Some reckoned the scene was filmed on Sunderland Road, Gateshead - others said it was somewhere in Newcastle's West End. The location was, in fact, Commercial Road, Byker, in the East End of the city. If you went searching for it in 2023, you’d find a very different scene - although the bus stop is still there as our modern image shows.
Byker, like other areas of post-war Tyneside, was going through a period of major physical change. Many of the old terraced streets here would soon be swept away. Much of the housing took the shape of Victorian-built two-storey ‘Tyneside flats’ with one family living on top of another. Fifty years ago, the writing was on the wall for many of the homes where generations of Newcastle folk had lived contentedly for 100 years, but were now considered sub-standard.
Demolition work had begun in 1966 and lasted well into the 1970s as swathes of 19th century-built streets were bulldozed. What replaced them was altogether different: an eye-catching 1.3 mile-long housing development, incorporating the now-famous Byker Wall, designed by Swedish architect Ralph Erskine.
As for the Likely Lads, there would be no more TV series, but there was a spin-off feature film released in 1976, before James Bolam and Rodney Bewes fell out soon after and never spoke again. Bewes died in 2017, a week before his 80th birthday. Bolam, 87, today lives quietly between homes in London and Sussex.
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