Auf Wiedersehen Pet

1 9 8 3 - 1 9 8 6 (UK)
26 x 50 minute episodes

In the first series, with jobs scarce in the recession-ridden UK, a crazy bunch of bricklayers make their way across Germany looking for work. Oz the boozing, brawling Geordie (the first TV role for Jimmy Nail), boring Barry the Brummie, Moxey the Scouse, drippy Neville, girl-mad Cockney Wayne and moderately sane Dennis - cliché's one and all, and didn't we love 'em for it!.

They are taken on as laborers on a Dusseldorf building site where our seven heroes shared each others joys, hopes, despairs and worries while drinking and womanizing through their tour of duty, edging from scrape to scrape and from scam to scam.

Making the series in Germany proved tricky, especially for the Germans. One actor attacked a hotel porter and was chased by gun-toting cops who'd earlier had to separate rowing actors and locals in a bar. The producers hired a coach load of working girls from Hamburg's red light district to appear in a scene, only to find some were men - a few of whom had cut themselves shaving. They also hired 70 squaddies from a nearby army camp to play extras in a bar; lads who promptly got into the mood by downing more than 600 bottles of beer before filming started and were so obviously drunk that the scenes had to be scrapped.

One cast member broke a leg, another broke a foot; but somehow episodes were made, and by February 1984 the show was challenging Coronation Street at the top of the ratings.

In the second set of 13 episodes (shown two years later) the lads renovate the Derbyshire mansion of gangster Ally Fraser and then bugger off to Marbella in Spain for more "Brits on the continent" high jinx. Gary Holton died of a drug overdose halfway through filming, but with re-writing and clever re-editing and the occasional use of a double, Wayne was seen in every episode screened in the spring of 1986, and the series again proved a ratings success.

A third series was made in 2001 with the gang relocating the Middlesborough Transporter Bridge from the River Tees in the north of England to the Arizona desert! The BBC made a fourth series of Auf Wiedersehen Pet in 2003, with the action now taking place in Cuba as the gang renovate the British embassy in Havana. The new series again reunited the original 1980s writing team of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais with most of the original cast.