Classic British telly, and the people who made it — where they are now.
Seven men, one cramped hut on a Düsseldorf building site, a kettle, a card game and a very long way from home. Auf Wiedersehen, Pet first went out on ITV in 1983, from an idea by Franc Roddam and scripts by D**k Clement and Ian La Frenais, and it did something British television had barely attempted: it let brickies, chippies and sparks from the North East sound exactly like themselves, with no punchline attached. It grew straight out of what was happening outside the window — whole streets that had gone from full employment to nothing, and men who did the only arithmetic available and got on a coach to Germany. Forty-three years on, five of the seven are still with us.
Where they are now.
Barry Taylor was played by Timothy Spall, now 69 in August 2026 — a Londoner from Battersea who built that Brummie accent from scratch and never once slipped. He came through acute myeloid leukaemia in 1996, and in 2014 took the Best Actor prize at Cannes for playing Turner. Barry from the building site, in a top hat, holding the room.
Oz was Jimmy Nail, now 72. He was a glazier with no training and no agent when he walked into a Newcastle audition on a dare. He went on to create Spender, write and record the Crocodile Shoes songs himself, and put Ain't No Doubt at number one for three weeks in 1992 — then quietly stopped, and has stayed out of public life ever since.
Neville Hope was Kevin Whately, now 75. He was training as a chartered accountant before he walked away to drama school, and four years after the hut he was cast as Sergeant Lewis alongside John Thaw in Inspector Morse — a part he played, on and off, for the better part of three decades.
Dennis Patterson was Tim Healy, now 74, a Benwell lad who had laboured and wired houses long before acting was realistic. Later Les in Benidorm, still working, still based in the North East — and now regularly stopped in the street to talk about his son, Matty Healy of The 1975.
Moxey was Christopher Fairbank, now 72, and he is the reason you keep half-recognising someone. He is Aaron in Alien 3, one of Napier's henchmen in Batman, and the Broker in Guardians of the Galaxy. He has said he would rather not be recognised, because the moment an audience knows your face they stop believing the character.
Those we've lost.
Pat Roach, the gentle giant who played Bomber, was a professional wrestler before he was the German mechanic in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He was told he had throat cancer in the spring of 2004 and died on 17 July that year, aged 67, only weeks later, with work still booked in.
Gary Holton played Wayne, and he was the frontman of the Heavy Metal Kids before he was an actor. He was found dead in London on 25 October 1985, aged 33, with the second series nearly finished. The production rewrote what it could and used a double, filmed from behind and at a distance, for the scenes it could not lose. The cast were grieving while they filmed it. The audience did not know until it went out.
Which of the seven do you remember most clearly — and did anybody spot the joins in those last episodes at the time? Tell us below. Subscribe to RETRO TELLY if you would like more of these.
A note on sources: ages, dates and figures here were checked against publicly available records as of August 2026, and any amounts mentioned are estimates. The narration on this channel is AI-assisted. RETRO TELLY is made as a respectful tribute to British television and to the performers and families behind it.
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