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The Likely Lads
It’s 10 am and a couple of Scots tourists enjoy their “breakfast” :-) whilst watching a street dance exhibition on the banks of the River Thames, London.
The Likely Lads was a TV show which followed the friendship of two working-class young men, Terry Collier and Bob Ferris, in the north-east of England in the mid 1960s.Bob and Terry were two average working class lads growing up in the industrial north, whose hobbies were beer, football, and girls. They were “canny”, which is to say street-wise, yet they stumbled into one scrape after another as they struggled to enjoy the Swinging Sixties on their meagre incomes.
At the end of the third series, in 1966, a depressed and bored Bob attempted to join the Army, but was rejected due to his flat feet. Terry, however, who decided at the last minute to enlist to keep Bob company, was accepted A1 and shipped away for three years.
The word ‘likely’ in the show’s title (which in some northern English dialects means likeable) is somewhat ambiguous. It might be derived from the phrase the man most likely to, a boxing expression in common use on Tyneside (in Geordie slang: “a likely lad”). Another possible meaning is the ambiguous northern use which refers ironically to small-time troublemakers, usually young, as “likely”, either as an ironic comment on the above sense or as an expression of the sentiment that they are likely to be the cause of any trouble.
