And finally...

ONE is being put down through old age, the other squeezed out by cash cutbacks. Both BBC1’s Last Of The Summer Wine, that distinctly non-alcoholic brew of beautiful Yorkshire scenery and crotchety old codgers, and ITV1’s The Bill, the Sun Hill cop shop drama, reach the end of the TV road within days of each other.

The Very Last Of The Summer Wine – note how the BBC, much criticised for axing the series, gets clever with the title to herald the final episode – brings the longest-running sitcom on TV to an end tomorrow.

Then on Tuesday, The Bill hangs up its truncheon and lets gangs on the Jasmine Allen Estate, scene of many a violent cops-and-robbers confrontation, fight it out among themselves.

Both will be sorely missed by their admirers, although some unkinder souls feel they’re doing a public service and making way for fresher faces.

Summer Wine, with 295 episodes since its 1973 debut, has been on life support for some years as BBC executives plucked up the courage to pull the plug. It was axed after the latest batch of episodes was filmed, meaning writer Roy Clarke – who has penned the entire series – had no opportunity to bring matters to a natural conclusion.

At least The Bill writers had enough notice to ensure the last episode rounds off matters neatly. There’s nothing worse for viewers than a series suddenly being pulled, leaving storylines and characters in mid-air.

Mind you, Last Of The Summer Wine was never going to end with a shootout or shootup.

Words like whimsical, gentle and cosy are more usually associated with the series about old guys and old girls.

The series originated when writer Roy Clarke was asked by the BBC to write a half-hour sitcom about three old men. Concerned this was a dull concept, he proposed instead that the trio should be unmarried, widowed or divorced and either unemployed or retired. That would leave them free to roam around like overgrown, if arthritic, schoolboys uninhibited by such restrictions as work or responsibility.

The name proved problematical. At one point it was The Library Mob. Clarke suggested The Last Of The Summer Wine, which lost the “the”

after the pilot show premiered in BBC’s Comedy Playhouse series in January 1973. Response was positive enough for a full series to be commissioned that year. Ratings weren’t that good, but the BBC persevered, ordering a second series in 1975.

Only Peter Sallis’ Norman Clegg remains from the original trio. Bill Owen’s Compo and Michael Bates’ Blamire are long gone, replaced by a succession of older actors. Russ Abbot, Burk Kwouk and Brian Murphy are filling the main trio’s roles as the series ends.

Sallis still make appearances along with former gang member Frank Thornton, although they’ve been confined to the studio in recent years because insurance premiums were too high to take them on location in Holmfirth.

The West Yorkshire village where the exteriors were filmed has become famous and muchvisited.

Like Goathland, where ITV’s soon-toend Heartbeat was filmed, the place will be poorer and less crowded with tourists once the summer wine has been drunk.

Ratings for the show, currently shown early Sunday evenings, are still respectable, but the BBC seems a little embarrassed to have such an old-fashioned comedy series in its schedules.

Not everyone’s a fan, seeing the wine as plonk not champagne. The royal family are said to like it (at least the Queen told Thora Hird it was her favourite TV programme, but perhaps she was just being polite) and it was placed 14th in a BBC poll to find Britain’s Best Sitcom.

But in 2003 Radio Times readers voted it the show they most wanted to see cancelled and another survey, carried out by Country Life magazine in 2008, named the show the worst thing about Yorkshire.

THERE was a time that the police themselves weren’t fans of The Bill, accusing British TV’s longest running police procedural drama of portraying them as a racist organisation. Relations have thawed, but that couldn’t save the series from the financial squeeze at ITV.

Budget cuts saw the series reduced from a single weekly hour-long episode and moved to a post-watershed 9pm time slot. For some of us the end was signalled when the familiar signature tune was changed. The opening shot of two pairs of officers’ feet had long since gone.

The Bill – the name comes from Old Bill, a slang term for the police – began, like Last Of The Summer Wine, as a one-off. Woodentop, written by Geoff McQueen, was shown in August 1983 as part of Thames TV’s Storyboard series of dramas.

A series was commissioned, beginning in October the following year. Since then, the series has been tweaked at regular intervals. In the late Eighties, it was increased to three halfhour episodes a week. Ten years later, hourlong stories returned, later still twice weekly.

These changes and a constantly changing cast of regular characters ensured that The Bill didn’t become stale. It collected awards, including a Bafta, and has been named the Inside Soap Awards best drama four years running.

The end, according to ITV, reflected the changing tastes of viewers and the broadcaster could not be persuaded to backtrack, despite a Save The Bill campaign on Facebook.

The death of these shows must give actors in other long-running series pause for thought.

They might be next. I reckon Casualty and its spin-off Holby City are prime contenders for the chop. Heartbeat too. ITV has “suspended”

production, but denies taking the axe to it.

The BBC’s awful sitcom My Family would be on my list of things to go. Even soaps aren’t immune.

Brookside and Crossroads have been axed in the past, although it’s unthinkable that old timers like Coronation Street – 50 years old in November – would ever come to an end.

For the moment, let us mourn the passing of two of British TV most enduring series, Last Of The Summer Wine and The Bill. Long may they rest in peace – although that’s unlikely, as the repeats will probably outlive most of us.

■ The Very Last of the Summer Wine: tomorrow, BBC1, 8pm.

■ The Bill: Tuesday, ITV1, 9pm. Farewell The Bill: Tuesday, ITV1, 10.35pm.