Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?

- Season 1

(1973)

Bob is now engaged to Thelma with plans to move onto a middle class housing estate. On a visit to London, he visits a strip club, as does Terry, just demobbed from the army, though they miss each other. However on the train home the pair share a railway carriage but the lights go out and only go back on again after Bob has regaled the 'stranger' with the tale of how his friend Terry joined the army by default. The remainder of the journey home is not without incident.

Terry pays a surprise visit to his parents but they are away at a funeral so Bob agrees to his staying in his and Thelma's new house until they return. After telling Bob he is separated from his German wife, Terry goes to sleep on the bed settee but gets a shock when he wakes to find that Thelma has turned up and, thinking he was Bob, has hopped into bed with him. Needless to say Thelma is even more taken aback.

With their wedding only a matter of weeks away Bob is beginning to wonder whether he and Thelma should actually get married as he has always regarded her as socially superior and wonders whether they are compatible. Terry gives him advice - not exactly cheering, positive advice, as a result of which Bob makes his mind up. He should be marrying Thelma - probably.

Bob takes Terry on a tour of their old haunts, by which Terry finds out that most of them have been demolished, and becomes despondent because of this. Terry, declaring that he will get a good job, decides to move to Berwick to look up his old army mate Hughie, for whom the sky's the limit. After he has been absent for a while Bob travels to Berwick, to find that Terry is working in a car wash and living in a grubby bedsit, while Hughie is mortgaged to the hilt to buy his café. Bob brings his friend home.

Bemoaning the fact that all the girls in his little black book seem to have moved or married Terry comes across one who really turned him on on an outing to Blackpool but when he rings her number it turns out to be Thelma. Bob tries to fix his friend up with a couple of dates but both girls remember Bob, not Terry, as being the red hot lover.

Terry thinks everybody has forgotten his birthday but Bob and Thelma have organized a surprise party for him and send two girls to the pub to collect him. Unfortunately they have never met him and bring back total stranger Colin, who thinks he has been abducted by a coven. Bob eventually fetches the birthday boy and blindfolds him to keep the surprise going. However, not realising which guests are present, while blindfolded, Terry inadvertently offends and drives them all away with only Colin left to congratulate him.

England are playing Bulgaria at football and Flint, whom the lads meet in the hairdressers, bets the pair they cannot get through the day without learning the result. Despite Flint's efforts to pass the news on to them, they survive, or so they think, but Bob has left his front door open ....

Bob invites Terry to a trendy dinner party.

Bob plans to move some of his old belongings into his new house but Thelma, regarding them as junk, gives them to the vicar for the church jumble sale. Unaware of this Bob reports them stolen. Later he buys them back from the vicar but gets arrested for the 'burglary' he reported. Ultimately he disposes of his memorabilia only to find Thelma filling the house with her old things.

As Terry recovers from the Chilean Flu, Bob has to break it to him that, as he began planning his wedding before they met up again, he had already asked Frank Clarke to be his best man, denting Terry's expectations. So, to make it up to him Bob takes Terry for a meal where, for old times' sake, they test out whether they still have the old pulling power on two girls they meet. Unfortunately one of them turns out to be Thelma's younger sister Susan, who has returned from Canada for the wedding.

Preparations for Bob and Thelma's wedding are in full swing, largely down to Thelma's mother, who is organizing everything. Feeling redundant Bob and Terry join Thelma's father, all of them in their wedding suits, in the pub and drown their sorrows. After a few pints and shorts they decide to return their morning suits to the outfitters as a sign of rebellion but back down when they encounter Thelma's mother.

Bob and Terry plan to spend a quiet night in before the wedding.

The wedding day dawns with Terry, now reinstated as best man, less than happy about it being on a Saturday when he could be watching sports and bitter about Jutta, his estranged wife back in Germany. Nonetheless he is a tower of strength to nervous Bob in church and, at the reception, presents the happy couple with a photograph album and makes a complimentary speech about Thelma. As he sees the newly-weds off at the airport for their honeymoon in Norway he and Bob agree that it is the end of an era.