Main Menu

Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 29, 2024, 12:22:19 AM

Login with username, password and session length

Three men in a bathtub

Started by Mister Six, May 04, 2011, 02:50:39 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Mister Six

Whenever anyone mentions Last of the Summer Wine they end up mentioning the bathtub sequence. Why? Surely this only happened the once, unlike every other joke in that show? How did one scene end up being the definitive Last of the Summer Wine gag? Was it in the first episode, or featured in the highest-rated episode or something? Please, CaB, explain it to me!

Gulftastic

And was it used to define the show before or only after this Reeves & Mortimer advert?

Hmmm.

SavageHedgehog

There's an episode called Stop that Bath!, so I'm guessing so. It's from 1993. However lame it may be, however it got its status, it's quite impressive for a show to have its defining moment two decades after it started.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

63% of Dad's Army episodes involve the gang contriving to fall into a quite shallow unthreatening river.

Jemble Fred

Peep Show is that one about arseholes shagging at parties or something.

Shuggie

I'd always thought the three men in a tub thing was apocryphal? The only bathtub related hijinx I remember seeing involved just compo in a bath on a trolley, was there another bathtub careering through the streets episode?

Tiny Poster

I think it just got picked up as short-hand after the Reeves & Mortimer parody. Ralf Little used the same phrase to dismiss it on some talking heads thing a few years later.

I first heard it on an episode of Room 101. I can't remember the guest, or even which host it was.

Bath shenanigans here:

last of the summer wine stop that bath part 5

vdbn

Anecdotal Evidence Alert: During the Seymour era of the show, when I was 10-12ish, I distinctly remember saying to my brother 'This show only has two endings: Compo goes flying through the air or Compo falls in the water'.

Tiny Poster

The ones I always remember from childhood are:

Compo has to be a human cannonball

Compo mans a home-made submarine.

Which neatly conform to your theory, vdbn.

Jemble Fred

And of course, the classic:

They wander around trying to dispose of Sid's body so Ivy doesn't find out he died fucking his mistress.

It's because it's very funny!

Ocho

Here's something almost interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_of_the_Summer_Wine_%28series_16%29

Series 16, episode 2 is called "The Glory Hole".

Serge

The bathtub thing is just a lazy shorthand along the lines of 'kids hiding behind the sofa when the Daleks appear' or 'They drive through a pile of cardboard boxes in every episode of Starsky & Hutch' usually said by someone who hasn't spent a great deal of time actually watching the show in question. Though in this case, I guess it does derive from the fact that as 'Summer Wine' went on, more episodes did seem to lead up to some sort of physical slapstick type ending invariably involving Compo going down a hill in something runaway on wheels/ flying over a wall/ going in the river, etc. The earlier episodes certainly don't have these kind of set-ups and were largely based on the three main characters just walking around talking.