Poet Ian McMillan pays tribute to the pastoral sitcom that ends this evening on BBC1. Most of its long-standing characters have moved on to that tin bath in the sky, but Summer Wine has managed to carry on regardless until the axe fell in 2010. The line-up changed but that didn't stop the wry philosophising and gags about battleaxes and weak-willed men in episodes that still attract a respectable four million viewers. Here, McMillan ventures behind the scenes with writer Roy Clarke (scribe of all 295 instalments) and gets to chat with present cast members. There's also archive interview footage of the late Bill Owen and Kathy Staff, who provided many fondly remembered moments (most of which involved buckets of water, ladders and broom handles) as welly-wearing Compo and wrinkly-stockinged Nora Batty.

It's the end of an era, as the cork comes out of the bottle of Britain's longest-running sitcom for the last time. Roy Clarke's beloved tales of a group of hapless old men in a West Yorkshire village first appeared on our screens in 1973, but the show has gone on to carve a host of indelible characters, such as Bill Owen's Compo and Kathy Staff's Nora Batty, onto the television landscape. Tonight, Howard (Robert Fyfe) despairs of being allowed back into the marital home to retrieve his wedding suit.

Nora Batty 'alive and bossing men 1000 years ago'

Nora Batty, the archetypal Northern battleaxe portrayed by the late Kathy Staff in the BBC TV comedy Last of The Summer Wine, had a historical counterpart, a study claimed.