Bill Owen

Last Of The Summer Wine: Compo costume fetches £6k at auction

An "endearing" tattered jacket, knitted waistcoat, rope belt and woollen hat from Last Of The Summer Wine has sold for £6,000 at auction.

Compo costume from Last Of The Summer Wine up for auction

An "endearing" tattered jacket, knitted pullover, rope belt and woollen hat from Last Of The Summer Wine will soon be up for auction.

Summer Wine stars Compo and Clegg buried side-by-side

Actors Peter Sallis and Bill Owen became best friends during the 26 years they spent filming the sitcom together before Compo star Bill passed away in 1999. The two close friends now lie next to each other in St John's Church graveyard in the iconic Yorkshire Dales town of Holmfirth where they filmed the sitcom.

Poet Ian McMillan pays tribute to the pastoral sitcom that ends this evening on BBC1. Most of its long-standing characters have moved on to that tin bath in the sky, but Summer Wine has managed to carry on regardless until the axe fell in 2010. The line-up changed but that didn't stop the wry philosophising and gags about battleaxes and weak-willed men in episodes that still attract a respectable four million viewers. Here, McMillan ventures behind the scenes with writer Roy Clarke (scribe of all 295 instalments) and gets to chat with present cast members. There's also archive interview footage of the late Bill Owen and Kathy Staff, who provided many fondly remembered moments (most of which involved buckets of water, ladders and broom handles) as welly-wearing Compo and wrinkly-stockinged Nora Batty.

It's the end of an era, as the cork comes out of the bottle of Britain's longest-running sitcom for the last time. Roy Clarke's beloved tales of a group of hapless old men in a West Yorkshire village first appeared on our screens in 1973, but the show has gone on to carve a host of indelible characters, such as Bill Owen's Compo and Kathy Staff's Nora Batty, onto the television landscape. Tonight, Howard (Robert Fyfe) despairs of being allowed back into the marital home to retrieve his wedding suit.

Once more the BBC salutes itself. Honestly, if they had to pay for the airtime to promote themselves, as they do constantly, the bill would be enormous. Here's ubiquitous Ian McMillan with a tribute to the longest-running sitcom in TV history as it reaches its final episode. Who'd have thought a comedy about three old men in rural Yorkshire could last so long, win so many hearts (if not mine) and make its corner of the Dales a tourist destination? Perhaps not even writer Roy Clarke and producer/director Alan JW Bell although their casting of the three originals, especially that of wonderful Peter Sallis and the late Bill Owen, was a masterstroke.

Argument 'threatened Summer Wine'

Last Of The Summer Wine actor Peter Sallis has revealed how a political argument nearly derailed the comedy series before it started.

Speaking to Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, Sallis said his co-stars Michael Bates and Bill Owen fell out over their political affiliations when they met.