Fifty years ago ITV's top sitcom was called On The Buses. It ran from 1969 to 1973 and featured the exploits of a driver and conductor working for the Luxton and District Motor Traction Company.
The driver was Stan Butler, played by Reg Varney.
The conductor was Jack Harper, played by Bob Grant.
Their nemesis was Inspector Blake, or Blakey, played by Stephen Lewis.
The only surviving lead actor is Anna Karen who played Stan's sister Olive.
The fictional town of Luxton was supposed to be somewhere in Essex.
On The Buses was thinly plotted, culturally suspect and critically panned, but wildly popular. It ran to 74 episodes, attracted a peak audience of 16 million and spawned three spin-off movies.
It was a bit like Mrs Brown's Boys today - either flatly hilarious or insulting tosh.
It's the sort of thing they show on ITV3, though thankfully not recently.
The first movie - On the Buses - was Britain's highest grossing film of 1971.
There's still an On The Buses Fan Club, if you like websites with a 2010 vibe.
I don't remember it at all. We weren't an ITV household so I wouldn't have been plonked in front of it on a Sunday evening.
During the 1970s my brother and I were packaged off on Mondays to stay overnight at my grandmother's house where we were treated to an evening of Thames Television. I could tell you all about Crossroads, Opportunity Knocks, Coronation Street and World In Action because they were Monday night staples, but On The Buses was a London Weekend Television production so totally passed me by.
Stan's regular bus was the number 11 to Cemetery Gates.
Hilarious - a comedic representation of life's journey to the grave.
In the TV series Stan's bus was a Bristol FLF-type Lodekka, and it was green.
In the film it was a Bristol KSW with an Eastern Coach Works body, and it was red.
While I was up in Enfield I went to visit the actual Cemetery Gates used in On The Buses.
It's just north of Gordon Hill station, if that helps you place it.
It's across the railway from Chase Farm Hospital, if that helps you place it.
Unless you live in borderline suburbia it's not somewhere you'd ever stumble upon.
The main entrance has stone gate piers and wrought iron gates.
Lavender Hill Cemetery dates back to the 1870s.
It has symmetrically placed Anglican and NonConformist chapels.
It's pleasantly conifered and slopes down towards the Turkey Brook.
I didn't walk very far inside, I didn't have time.
Cedar Road is not on any current bus route.
The W8 passes closes by, and was introduced in the year On The Buses started.
I haven't been able to find a photo of Stan's bus at the Cemetery Gates, so this was not as exciting a visit as it could have been.
Still, I did better than if I'd gone to see the location LWT used for Luxton bus depot, which was the Eastern National garage in WoodGreen, because that's long since been replaced by Mecca Bingo.
What I did do was take a photo of London's most northerly Co-Op, which is close by.
I did this to educate the person who left a comment last Saturday saying "Surely the most northerly CoOp isn't Lavender Hill, unless there's another Lavender Hill that isn't in Battersea." There is indeed another Lavender Hill - in Enfield, between Gordon Hill and Chase Side - and it does indeed have a Co-Op. Never risk a surely.
It's a lowly Co-Op, quite small and yet to be upgraded to the new branding.
At least it's doing better than Paula's Petals nextdoor, a previously bijou nook specialising in funeral flowers, which has abandoned its physical shop and now operates from an unnamed location nearby, please ring this number.
On The Buses actor Reg Varney's chief Enfield claim to fame is that he was the first person in the world to use a cashpoint, which he did at Barclays Bank in the town centre in June 1967. There is of course a plaque.
What I didn't know until yesterday afternoon is that Reg Varney was born in Canning Town. This is annoying because I went for a walk through Canning Town yesterday morning and could have stopped to take a photo of his birthplace had I known.
I only took one photo in Canning Town yesterday morning, which was when I spotted a random sidestreet with a lot of fluttering England flags. Imagine my astonishment to discover, later, that this was the actual street where Reg Varney grew up. Imagine my further astonishment to discover that I'd been standing right outside his house when I took it.
