"It's destiny, fate that brings us together. Redundancy. They just don't care that your mother used to eat insurance men and that yours was struggling to bring you up nicely as a little poof." So says Clegg (Peter Sallis) to his companions, Compo (Bill Owen) and Blamire (Michael Bates), three fellows getting on in years reunited by unemployment after knowing each other all their lives in a small Yorkshire town. There's no real story to Last of the Summer Wine, simply the well-observed banter of the central trio and a gallery of eccentric supporting characters. Compo, the irreverent and scruffy "village idiot" and Clegg, the amiable working man are well-loved figures, complemented by the middle-class Conservative Blamire (a nicely rounded portrayal by Bates) and Foggy (Brian Wilde), who joined the series in 1976. This set is a reminder of how good the longest-running comedy in British television history once was, when it was new, fresh, and laugh-out-loud funny. --Gary S. Dalkin