The Losers | |
---|---|
Genre | Sitcom |
Starring | Leonard Rossiter Alfred Molina Joe Gladwin |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
No. of series | 1 |
No. of episodes | 6 |
Production | |
Running time | 30 minutes |
Production company | ATV |
Release | |
Original network | ITV |
Original release | 12 November – 17 December 1978 |
The Losers is a British sitcom that aired on ITV in 1978. Written by Alan Coren, [1] it stars Leonard Rossiter and Alfred Molina. The Losers was made for ITV by ATV and was produced and directed by Joe McGrath. [2]
In The Losers, Rossiter plays Sydney Foskett, a wrestling promoter who discovers a young new wrestler called "The Butcher", played by Molina, who Foskett ensures loses to get the public's love.
Sydney Foskett is a wrestling promoter who discovers young new wrestler and part-time footballer, "The Butcher", whose real name is Nigel. Foskett, realising that the public love a loser, devises ways for "The Butcher" to lose without the dimwitted Nigel to know what is happening. Foskett often gets paid well for rigging the matches. [2]
The Losers aired on ITV from 12 November to 17 December 1978. All episodes aired on Sundays at 9.15pm and are 30 minutes long. [2] The broadcast masters for all six episodes were later wiped for reuse, though episodes one through five were later found to have survived as poor quality off-air domestic video recordings. [3] However the final episode, "Togetherness", is still missing from the archives and can be presumed lost. [4] The Times obituary of Alan Coren in 2007 said the series "sank with all hands". [1]
A region 2 DVD containing restored editions of the surviving episodes was released by Network on 21 January 2013 [3]
Leonard Rossiter was an English actor. He had a long career in the theatre but achieved his highest profile for his television comedy roles starring as Rupert Rigsby in the ITV series Rising Damp from 1974 to 1978, and Reginald Perrin in the BBC's The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin from 1976 to 1979.
Alan Coren was an English humourist, writer and satirist who was a regular panellist on the BBC radio quiz The News Quiz and a team captain on BBC television's Call My Bluff. Coren was also a journalist, and for almost a decade was the editor of Punch magazine.
Rising Damp is a British sitcom, written by Eric Chappell and produced by Yorkshire Television for ITV, which was originally broadcast from 2 September 1974 until 9 May 1978. Chappell adapted the story from his 1973 stage play The Banana Box. The programme ran for four series and a spin-off feature film of the same name was released in 1980. The series won the 1978 BAFTA for Best Situation Comedy. Rising Damp was the highest-ranking ITV sitcom in the BBC's 100 Best Sitcoms poll of 2004, coming in 27th overall.
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