Page 16 - Fujifilm Exposure_24 Stephen Fry_ok

QUIETLY
FLOWS THE WINE
AN INTERVIEW WITH PAT O’SHEA
N otsomucha for more than 20 years, this
meant effectively more of the successful same.
“The big thing about the programme is, of course, the characters and the countryside. Most, probably about 70 per cent, is exteriors. It always looks bright and glossy. In reality – as I’ve already said – it’s often far from
that. It’s technically the summer, but in this part of Yorkshire, summer can be technically anything but.
“We’ve had times when we just sit there endlessly under umbrellas, maybe done one shot of the day’s schedule and hung around the rest of the day. It can then change back as quickly.
“There was one occasion on an episode which had Norman Wisdom in it when there was a police car chase. It started at 2pm and ended with them going into a lake literally around 9pm at night. It was almost pitch black. I was trying to do that with a battery light in a row boat and a bit of polystyrene. Only semi-successful,” he smiles.
The weather, the tightness of some of the more remote locations and the
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programme more an annual re-union as they gather next month in West Yorkshire for
the start of shooting on the 31st year of BBC’s Last Of The Summer Wine, the world’s longest-running sitcom.
What started out as a
Comedy Playhouse ‘pilot’ in 1973 before emerging as a series in its own right that same year seems by now to have acquired the status of an award- winning national TV ‘treasure’.
Some of the much-loved charac- ters (not to mention their equally- admired interpreters, like Bill Owen and Dame Thora Hird) have inevitably fallen by the wayside down the years but writer Roy Clarke’s timeless geri- atric universe set in a sun-dappled North Country neverland lives on.
Returning yet again this summer to pastures familiar are Peter Sallis (timid Norman ‘Cleggy’ Clegg), Kathy Staff (the formidable Norah Batty, and Jane Freeman (café proprietor Ivy) who were there at the very start.
Producer-director Alan J W Bell weighs in at 22 years. But with just seven years of the series under his belt, director of photography Pat O’Shea is a comparative novice.
New Zealand-born O’Shea had been a 25-year BBC man when he first joined the LOTSW team in the mid-90s.
Although a globe-trotting veteran of hazardous news gathering, gritty documentaries and the occasional drama, O’Shea could hardly have been fully prepared for one particular aspect of the new assignment... its mercurial meteorology.
“It can go from brilliant blue skies to snow in the space of twenty min- utes without a hint of it arriving. You can find yourself caught out at the top
of the hill – you’re all in t-shirts at the time – and being so high up, the winds sweep it in very quickly. There are no great laughs to be had then,” he says, wincing at the memory.
“The schedule has to be got through [pause] whatever the weath- er.” For a moment it seemed that Shea was about to add, with perhaps some justification, “come hell or high water.”
He goes on: “The first year I was on it, I remember we were once two days into shooting and already a week behind because of the weather. Of course, Alan is so adept at jumping around and knows the area very well.”
He recalls he was fully ‘briefed’ about the ‘look’. For a series which had, even at that stage, been around
Photos main: Pat O’Shea; above: A scene from Last Of The Summer Wine (photo © BBC)
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