Sorry to all our American friends who may have never heard of this show. Its 30 years old and has been remade here in the UK. I watched it last night on ITV2 and it struck me how much like Seinfeld it was.
(i) Nothing really happened. They were trying to avoid hearing a football score so they could watch it later. The plot was them just going to a few places where no one liked football. They managed to not find out that the match was cancelled anyway. That was it.
(ii) The lack of plot was compensated for by some sparkling dialog between the two friends.
(iii) They kept getting interupted by an annoying friend trying to tell them the score.
One could imagine in the early days of Seinfeld, George and Jerry trying to avoid hearing the Yankees scoreline and going to a few places to hide out and Numan costantly disturbing their funny conversations.
I wonder how many other shows have gone for the good dialog approach as opposed to plots. Even towards the end Seinfeld became more like this where the 4 farcical subplots converged in a contrived way at the end. This was still very good (and clever) but I prefered the ones where the 4 of them would just talk and not much would happen. Its even rarer for a British sitcom to try this approach as most of ours go for the farce approach. Sadly we dont have to many good ones at the moment , thats why we are remaking 30 year old ones!
Anyway if you dont get to see the likely lads check out the new James Bond film. I beleive the writers of the likely lads (Dick Clement and Ian Le Franais) have written the script so you never know Bond might talk to Moneypenny for half an hour about how most books are red in the bathroom before he goes out to tackle the villans.
Paul