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GRANADA’S BIGGEST-SELLING situation comedy. Eli Pledge (JIMMY JEWELL) and Nellie Pledge (HYLDA BAKER) are feuding siblings who have inherited a pickle factory and a workforce which appears to have escaped from a genetic experiment: all old, bent, shortsighted, deformed, scruffy and looking like pre-1914 factory fodder. Nellie was all malapropisms, methodist propiety and teetotal. Eli was all beer, fags, gambling and improbably copping off with girls a quarter of his age. Lancashire setting milked for all it was worth, with the house they lived in looked, to the teak-veneer-contiboard-and-G-Plan 1970s, old and Victorian and dark and damp and smelly. Nellie’s catchphrases: “big girl’s blouse”, “Defective Inspector”, “he knows, you know” “it’s quarter-past – oh I must get a little hand put on this watch” and the eternal “Have you been, Walter?” (to doddering octogenarian husband of Madge Hindle, aka Alf Roberts’ wife-before-last in Corrie). Eli’s catchphrase was “You knock-kneed knackered old nosebag”.
Lee James Turnock
May 1, 2010 at 12:32 pm
Jimmy Jewel revived the “knock kneed knackered old nosebag” line when he guested in an episode of Casualty. I hate myself for knowing that.