THE LONG GOODBYE
Gone but not forgotten. MARION McMULLEN looks at famous TV show exits
1 Derek Thompson, left, has said goodbye to Casualty after 38 years of playing charge nurse Charlie Fairhead in nearly 900 episodes of the BBC drama. He survived being stabbed by a patient and was seen driving from the hospital in a vintage yellow Volkswagen Beetle – the same type of car he drove in his first Casualty episode in 1986.
2 John Thaw bowed out of ITV’s Morse in 2000’s The Remorseful Day with 13 million watching the crossword-loving character breathe his last following a heart attack. Some of the most moving scenes involved Kevin Whately as Morse’s long-suffering sidekick Sergeant Robbie Lewis.
3 Sergeant Robbie Lewis went on to appear in popular spin-off series Lewis. Robbie his final made appearance in the ITV police drama in 2015 in a two-parter called What Lies Tangled, which saw him fly off to New Zealand for a six month trip with his new love, forensic pathologist Dr Laura Hobson.
4 Wheeler Daley (George dealer Cole) Arthur was held hostage at gunpoint by escaped prisoner and former employee “Cranky” Frankie Connor in his last episode of ITV’s Minder in 1994 entitled The Long Good Thursday. Arthur managed to escape with his life but ended up being arrested and driven away in a police van for sheltering a prisoner on the run.
5 One Foot in the Grave’s grumpy Victor Meldrew met his end in 2000 when he was killed by a hit and run driver in the BBC sitcom. Actor Richard Wilson made the cantankerous Meldrew famous for his crotchety catchphrase “I don’t believe it!”.
6 Ben Miller played the first detective to solve the crimes in Death in Paradise as DI Richard Poole. He became the murder victim himself in the BBC drama in 2014 during a Cambridge University reunion on the island with some of his old fellow students.
7 Downton Abbey’s Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) made a shock exit when he died in a car accident after visiting his wife Mary and new-born baby son and heir George in hospital at the end of the third series. Dan has since gone on to enjoy roles in films such as Beauty and The Beast and A Night at the Museum sequel.
8 In 1989, when Captain Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson), Private S Baldrick (Tony Robinson) and Lieutenant George St Barleigh (Hugh Laurie) went “over the top” in the First World War-set series Blackadder Goes Forth, it became one of the most poignant and powerful endings of any sitcom.
9 The final episode of classic BBC comedy Dad’s Army in 1977 saw butcher Corporal Jones (Clive Dunn) finally marry Mildred Fox in an episode called Never Too Old. The cast raised a toast to “Britain’s Home Guard” in the final scene.
10 It was also wedding bells for Miranda Hart in 2015 in her BBC sitcom Miranda. Her character finally got her happy ever after with Gary (Tom Ellis) and the episode, called The Final Curtain, saw the entire cast doing a joyful gallop in slow motion.