It may be part of TV history but Last of the Summer Wine has become “inscribed, embedded and appropriated into the town of Holmfirth and its people.”
That’s the verdict of academics at Leeds Beckett University, who used Holmfirth and the long-running show as a case study to show how the town literally changed over almost 40 years to accommodate the madcap adventures of Compo and Co.
Dr Lynne Hibberd and Dr Zoe Tew-Thompson, senior lecturers in media and cultural studies, led new research that explored how the series has permanently changed people’s memories of Holmfirth. Their findings have been published in the latest edition of the Memory Studies journal.
One of their principal findings was that just as any business trading over four decades will produce a physical presence, employment, footfall, and a hub of other businesses around it, the presence of Last of the Summer Wine has had an impact on Holmfirth.
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“We see that residual remnants of the TV series are peppered around the town. Businesses are named after key characters, shops sell tourist memorabilia, and the whole area is often referred to as being Summer Wine Country,” said Dr Hibberd.
“These embedded elements of the series are interesting because over time they start to exist as independent entities which no longer bear any relationship to a TV text.”
Dr Tew-Thompson said the show’s longevity meant many people were aware if it even if they had never watched it, referring to it as ‘television wallpaper’ with a stabilising presence and its own rituals.
“For us personally, these rituals involve memories of families, Sunday evenings, bedtime routines, tense homework experiences, smells of favourite meals, prints on pyjamas – all the kinds of tiny details that make up our daily lives but that we often don’t focus on.”
Respondents also underlined Last of the Summer Wine as defining a sense of shared cultural memories.
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“We found that the show connected to people’s memories of specific times,” said Dr Hibberd. “One interviewee related that she knew exactly when the first episode was shown on television because it was the day that she came out of hospital with her youngest son. By acting as a form of cultural memory television can evoke a sense of community, nostalgia and belonging.
“Although the series broadcast its final episode in 2010, its presence has been inscribed, embedded and appropriated into the town of Holmfirth and its people. It is not just a cultural artefact.”