The Real Wartime Service Behind the Cast of Last of the Summer Wine

For thirty-seven years, three old men walked the hills above the Yorkshire town of Holmfirth in the longest-running situation comedy the world has ever seen. One of them, the tall and magnificently deluded Foggy Dewhurst, never stopped talking about his wartime exploits as a trained killer. The joke, which ran for twenty years, was that his war record was almost certainly a fantasy. What the audience never knew was the richest irony in British television. The actor who played the fake war hero, Brian Wilde, appears on the public record never to have served at all. And almost every other man in the central cast had genuinely been to war. Compo was played by Bill Owen, blown up in an army training explosion. Clegg was played by Peter Sallis, whom the Royal Air Force turned, almost by accident, from a bank clerk into an actor. Blamire was played by Michael Bates, a Major who fought the Japanese in the jungles of Burma. Seymour was played by Michael Aldridge, a Flight Lieutenant who flew across three continents. And Truly was played by Frank Thornton, the airman who helped discover Peter Sellers. This is the story of the real soldiers behind the gentlest comedy Britain ever made — and the one man, playing the loudest soldier of them all, who had never fired a shot. — Cinema Peek CHAPTERS: 00:00 The Soldier Who Never Was 01:48 The Comedy That Never Ended 04:16 Bill Owen — The Man Blown Up in Training 07:35 Peter Sallis — The Man the War Turned Into an Actor 10:56 Michael Bates — The Major Who Fought in Burma 12:54 Brian Wilde — The War Hero Who Never Was 16:36 Michael Aldridge — The Flight Leftenant 18:57 Frank Thornton — The Airman Who Found Peter Sellers 21:28 Norman Wisdom — The Comic Legend Who Met Churchill 25:43 The Generation Behind the Gentleness 27:46 Closing ABOUT CINEMA PEEK: Cinema Peek is a research-driven channel about the real men and women behind classic British and American cinema and television. Each documentary is written from primary sources — Wikipedia is the starting point, never the ending point. The voice is generated, but every fact, date and quote has been verified. If you spot an error, please leave a comment. The next video will be better for it. SUBSCRIBE:    / @cinemapeek-xxx   Research, writing and narration by Cinema Peek. #LastoftheSummerWine #BritishComedy #BBC #ClassicTV #CinemaPeek