Son of Compo: Dad never put his arms around me, says Tom Owen, himself a veteran star of Last Of The Summer Wine

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His father played Compo in Last Of The Summer Wine for 26 years - but he was also a matinee star and a querulous, distant Dad. Now as the series ends for ever, Tom Owen (himself a veteran of the epic comedy) paints a revealing picture of his father Bill and asks: Why couldn't the BBC commission a decent final episode?

Sitting opposite Tom Owen is a slightly unnerving experience, partly because he looks and sounds so much like his father Bill - the man who will always be remembered as Compo, the incorrigible scruffy pensioner from the gentle BBC comedy Last Of The Summer Wine.

The unmistakable family resemblance, of course, is what gained Tom his most famous acting role - for the last 11 years of the world's longest-running comedy, he has played Compo's long-lost son.

Bill's boys: Tom Owen with his father Bill and sons James, 7, and William, 5, all dressed up as Compo for a joke in 1985

Yet by his own admission, Tom was never close to his 'brilliant butstrange' father, who died from pancreatic cancer in 1999, aged 85.

'I know this will sound odd,' says Tom. 'But looking back it seemslike we were two men who just happened to be father and son. there wasno real bond between us.'

Yet as Last Of The Summer Wine begins its final series next weekafter an extraordinary 37-year run, Tom becomes the very image of hisfamously irascible father, berating the pennypinchers of the BBC forfailing to give the show the ending it deserves.

'They're the proud owners of the world's longestrunning comedyseries and they can't even commission a decent ending,' he rails. 'Ithink it's the height of bad manners not to allow the writer Roy Clarketo bring it to a proper close. my father would have been hopping mad,although I daresay he wouldn't have expressed it quite like that.'

Tom was cast as Compo's son only after Bill's untimely death. Anewspaper photograph of Tom at his father's funeral alongside PeterSallis, who plays Cleggy, caught the eye of Roy Clarke. He thought thatintroducing a son would be a neat solution to filling Compo's famouslyturned-down wellington boots.

'It was a very peculiar experience, losing a father and then beingcast as his fictional son,' Tom recalls. 'But I just blanked out myfeelings. It was a great job and good money.'

What would Bill have said? Tom smiles. 'People thought he would haveloved it, but I'm not totally convinced. Knowing him as I did, I thinkhe would have thought I was encroaching on his territory.'

Tom has a calmly realistic view of his father and of his own placein his life. 'He was a complex man, whose abiding passion was hiscareer,' adds Tom. 'He was always at his happiest when he wascentre-stage.'

Strangely for a man who made his name as an archetypal Yorkshiremanand who came to love Holmfirth - the town where Last Of The SummerWine was filmed - as a home from home, Bill Owen was a working-classboy from Acton, West London.

A lifelong Labour Party supporter, he nevertheless packed off hisson to Dorset House, a preparatory school in West Sussex, when he wassix and then to Lancing College, near the family home in Brighton.

Bowing out: Tom, centre, as Compo's son, alongside Peter Sallis, left, and Frank Thornton

'I hate the principle of private education but I have to admit that it did instil a survival instinct in me,' Tom says now.

It was to be a useful skill, especially as his parents' marriage wasnot a happy one. one fault line was the social gulf between Bill andhis wife Edith, who came from a prosperous middle-class Scottish familyand who loved the raffish showbusiness world in Brighton.

'They loved one another but they fought constantly throughout theirmarriage and I was caught in the cro ssfire, a lonely little boy,'admits Tom. 'There was no family discipline because my parents were toobusy warring. They never operated as a unit.

'My father's only rule was that you should never tell lies becausethey always find you out. I did tell a lie once - something to dowith a fish I pretended I had caught - and he gave me a realroasting. It was only verbal, though - he never laid a finger on me.

But then you could never have described him in any sense as ahands-on father. I can't ever remember him putting his arms around me.In many ways, I never really knew my father. for example, living inBrighton, I would see other families on holiday together but we neverwent away on a family holiday. Not once.'

Indeed, the only shared pursuit that Tom can remember enjoying with his father was fishing off Brighton's Palace Pier.

'It was as though his emotions were closed off,' says Tom. 'It wasthe same all those years later with my sons, James and William. I'mcertain he loved his grandsons

sons but he either couldn't or wouldn't get close to them. I don't think he knew how.'

If possible, Edith was even lesstactile than Bill. 'I was keen on horse-riding so she bought me apony,' recalls Tom. 'I could have anything I wanted except, of course,the one thing I craved.

'I had a half-sister by my mother'sfirst marriage but she was 12 years older than me. I quite quicklyworked out that I was alone and just had to get on with it.'

Tom was always going to be an actor.'I wasn't academically gifted so I felt I had to prove myself. I was alittle guy, not particularly goodlooking, who wore glasses and who hada famous father. I compensated by telling gags, by becoming the classclown. at home, I'd mix with working-class kids from Newhaven andRottingdean but I never felt comfortable with them.'

Tom's mother was a failed actressand a social butterfly who loved the Brighton set and their endlessparties. 'There was nothing she liked better than filling the housewith famous faces,' says Tom. 'She was a pretty woman who liked beingthe centre of attention and liked, too, the idea that if she weresurrounded by gifted, glamorous people, a little of their stardustwould rub off on her. Bill hated all of that.'

Togetherness: Compo and his old flame Nora Batty and, above right, Tom with his faithful friend

It is evidence of the distance between father and son that Tom speaks of him as though he were simply a friend. 'I've called him Bill ever since his death but he was always Dad when he was alive.'

There was no shortage of celebrities to indulge Edith's fondness for gloss and glamour. 'I remember parties with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, with Dora Bryan, Alan Melville, even Judy Garland on one occasion. She was brought to the party by David Jacobs, the leading showbusiness lawyer of the day.

'Her wrists were bandaged where she had tried to commit suicide. She was tiny, birdlike. I was 14 at the time and frightened to shake her hand because I thought she would shatter into a million pieces. She was just so frail.'

Bill and Edith finally parted when Tom was 16. Bill would go on to marry again - he wed his second wife, former actress Kathy O'Donoghue, in 1977.

Referring to the break-up of his parents' marriage, Tom says: 'I found that hard. And, once again, I was expected to deal with the situation on my own.

'The legacy of it all is that I've never been able to talk intimately to anyone close to me, although I have no trouble opening up to someone who's one step removed.

'When my parents separated for good, Edith stayed in Brighton and Bill got a flat in Marylebone, Central London. I lived there for a while when I got my first job as a lift attendant at Hamleys toy shop in Regent Street.

'Bill had a friend called Jack Grossman, a jeweller who had connections with the theatre. His wife, Vera, was one of those people who was a good shoulder to cry on and I remember pouring my heart out to her.

'Bill went on to marry again but never lost his love for my mother. She was the only woman who really understood how complicated he was. part of the problem, I think, was that he'd been happy to accept her money on the one hand but he'd felt guilty doing so on the other.

'To his dying day, I think he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about his humble origins. Mind you, Edith could be very dismissive of him. when he was cast as Compo in 1973, I remember her saying to me, "I don't know why he's doing rubbish like that."

'She was dying of emphysema by then. In the end, she committed suicide. She planned it down to the last detail, writing to her GP the night before she swallowed the pills that killed her. but I suspect by that stage she was proud of what Bill had achieved by being part of a TV institution.'

Bill had always had an aptitude for performing, but few Last Of The Summer Wine fans realise that he was supremely gifted musically.

He first played rhythm guitar in the Joe Loss band and went on to write the words for hits recorded by Cliff Richard, Ken Dodd, Sacha Distel, Nana Mouskouri and Matt Monro. He also wrote the book and lyrics for the stage musical The Matchgirls.

'But, most of all,' says his son, 'he was a wonderful actor with comic timing second to none.

He was far from ideal father material, though. He was too bound up in himself. He was a driven man, something I have to acknowledge I inherited from him. I haven't always been successful in my relationships and the underlying reason, I think, is because I'm selfish.

'I'm an actor. I have to be. And, if that's your game, that's the way you have to play it. It's something, consciously or not, I learned from my father. We're all caught in the genetic trap, to a greater or lesser extent.'

But, clearly, it was more than that. By common accord, Bill was a difficult man.

'Almost everyone who worked with him will tell you the same,' says Tom. 'He hated the glitterati - superficial nonsense, he'd say.

'But on top of that, he could be terribly rude. dear Thora Hird worked with him first on a film called when The Bough Breaks. She was sitting in the canteen one day, unaware that Bill was behind her at the next table. "Oh, that Bill Owen," she said to someone. "Grand actor but a pain in the a***." She laughed when she told me the story years later.'

His father, in Tom's view, could have become one of the stars of the popular Carry On films.

'He was in the first four but he must have upset someone becaus he was suddenly dropped.

Breaking in: Bill, with Tom in 1965, only helped his son once at the beginning of his career with a stage assistant's job for