IndieLondon: Obituary: Brian Wilde

IndieLondon: Obituary: Brian Wilde

Wilde, who died last week at age 80, was on one of my favorite British sitcoms, Last of the Summer Wine. (It's not the usual zany madcap humor or a sharp irony you might associate with British comedy.
It's gentler humor -- imagine the characters in the comic strip Pogo transplanted from the Okefenokee Swamp to the hills of Yorkshire.) Wilde played ex-Army Cpl. Foggy Dewhurst, the third in a trio of retirees who wondered about the villages and countryside getting into mischief. Wilde was one of a series of bossy know-it-alls (a series that began with Michael Bates -- the one who played Montogmery in Patton) alongside Bill Owen as scruffy Compo and Peter Sallis as meek Norman Clegg.