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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spells &amp; Karma" data-source="post: 128656" data-attributes="member: 23">Series Twenty One really has seen the best and the worst of times so far. Compo's final four episodes, as mentioned above, were very well done. It was very moving seeing Bill Owen looking so frail. I've now read that filming finished on Last Post And Pigeon just days before he died of pancreatic cancer. No wonder everyone seemed so emotional as they waved Compo off.The three episodes covering Compo's death and funeral were just beautiful. Written and performed with real feeling and very moving indeed. The look on Peter Sallis's face as Cleggy received the news in the hospital waiting room broke my heart. The balance of humour and pathos was just pitch perfect. Kathy Staff's dramatic background, too, shone through. What really got me was the montage where the camera visited many of the different places where Compo had stood with his friends, now empty as his funeral service took place. The hearse driving through the Holme valley was also very touching - not even the raucous laughter of some of the audience could take the power away from that moment.The opening credits of that first Compo-less episode softened the blow of Bill Owen's absence by bumping Kathy Staff and Jane Freeman's credits up to sit directly under those for Sallis and Thornton, which I liked. There seems to have been a bit of experimentation with the credits since then, culminating with Mike Grady bizarrely getting "third man" credit in the final episode of the series. I suppose it made a kind of sense here since Barry's role in latter part of the episode - freewheeling on an escaped trailer while sitting at a spangly piano in a bright white suit - was very much the kind of situation Compo would get himself into. But I really couldn't cope with Barry as a lead on a more full time basis.With Compo's absence, the rest of the Twenty First year has felt in some ways like a series struggling to find itself. And the irony is that it really didn't need to. With the ensemble so large now, Clegg and Truly would have been fine as a twosome for a while. They need a mischief-maker, certainly, but there are enough of those in the village. Howard lives right next door to Cleggy, after all.Tom Owen's stint playing Tom, the son of his late father's character, is certainly a very brave move on behalf of the actor, and I can imagine it was a little strange for everyone involved who presumably knew him (Sallis's friendship with Bill Owen aside, Tom had appeared in an episode some years earlier). Beyond the initial episode, Tom (the character, but also to a lesser degree the actor) isn't really working for me. Which really has to do with how he is being used. Rather than integrate the newcomer into the established cast, he's operating in a vacuum, living in a mobile home with Julie T. Wallace and a generic goth/punk/emo girl, coming up with tedious moneymaking schemes. This has been a huge misstep on the part of Clarke. Tom and co have only appeared in four episodes but it feels like ten. And not in a good way.There's just so much wrong with this situation. We're taken away from the village proper. All the characters are new, so it's very jarring. But most of all, the characters aren't likeable. None of them. Which would be fine if they were funny, but they aren't. I get the feeling that we're supposed to like them, but it's just not happening. Gothy Babs is the worst offender. She's a token young person being written by a seventy year old man whose strength is writing for older character actors. The end result is cringeworthy. They feel forced - almost like they're meant to be Summer Wine's equivalent of Daisy, Onslow and Rose, but without any real ties to the rest of the cast. The end result is that I feel no connection to them and even less interest in what they're saying or doing. There's something very wrong with a scenario in which, rather than following the story, I spend all of their scenes trying (and failing) not to look at Julie T. Wallace's nipples.It's not all bad news, though. It was good to see Liz Fraser in her brief role as Reggie Unsworth. And Dora Bryan (yet another of Bill Owen's Carry On compatriots) had a promising introduction as Edie's long-lost sister, Ros. All the same, I don't feel Ros is meeting her full potential at the moment and I'm hoping for some more verbal sparring and snide comments between Edie and Ros in the episodes to come.</blockquote>

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