Later, Bob and Terry visit their favourite pub, the Fat Ox, which is about to be demolished, along with the surrounding out-dated working-class housing where both used to live.

The now middle-class Bob feels great sentimentality for this loss, whereas Terry, who is now living in a newly-built high-rise council flat, is more optimistic about the city's redevelopment, pointing out that he now has a "modern kitchen, a lovely view and an inside lavatory".

Terry has just received his final divorce decree from his wife in West Germany, and is looking forward to a bright future; whereas Bob has become ambivalent about his married life with Thelma and their social activities together.

Bob and Terry soon after pick up two young female hitch-hikers, until, while stopped at a filling station, they discover Thelma and Chris are not in the caravan.

Both Bob and Thelma come to believe the other is having sexual relations elsewhere, and have a furious argument in the back of Terry's employer's van while he is working as an advertising demonstrator of a washing powder.

But when the landlady goes down to the front door to let Terry back in, it is Bob who enters, without his trousers, causing her to protest loudly and threaten to call the police.

At the last moment, Terry decides not to go and disembarks; but Bob falls asleep on board, and awakes in a lifeboat to discover the ship has sailed.

[5] It was announced in 1975 as part of a slate of films worth £6 million including adaptations of The Likely Lads and The Sweeney plus Aces High, Spanish Fly and Evil Under the Sun.

[8][9] Locations used include the Spanish City funfair at Whitley Bay, the Beehive public house, the Coast Road (A1058) flats and Tynemouth Pier.

"[14] Madeleline Harmsworth of Sunday Mirror praised it as a "real treat for longtime fans and newcomers", with the "humourous [sic] realism of suburban life in the North-East transfer[ring] happily from TV to film".

According to Sight and Sound, the film "sacrifices the series’ observation and comic logic in favour of trouser-dropping farce and a piecemeal narrative.

Bob suffers a mid-life crisis and is forced to think through his fears of the future and his struggle for conformity; Terry, meanwhile, flirts with domesticity and is also rehoused to a new, and already decaying, tower block."