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Nearest and Dearest is a British television sitcom that ran from 1968 to 1973. A total of 46 episodes were made, 18 in monochrome (black & white) and 28 in colour. The series, produced by Granada Television for the ITV network, starred Hylda Baker and Jimmy Jewel as squabbling middle-aged siblings Nellie and Eli Pledge who ran a family pickle business in Colne, Lancashire, in the North West of England.^[1][2]

Series premise and history[edit]

The first episode set up the premise: in his will, Joshua Pledge bequeathed a large sum of money to his middle-aged son and daughter.. but only if they stay together for five years at his small pickle business, Pledge's Purer Pickles. However, hard-working spinster Nellie and her ne'er-do-well womanising brother Eli, rarely saw eye to eye.^[3] Nellie was played by comedian Hylda Baker, who was born and bred in Farnworth, eleven miles north of Manchester. Eli was played by Jimmy Jewel, a Yorkshire-born contemporary of Baker; he had made his name with Ben Warriss in the music hall (vaudeville) act Jewel and Warriss.^[4]

Also featured was the Pledges' second-cousin, Lily Tattersall, who was married to constantly-mute octogenarian Walter. Walter was unable to control his bladder, which led to one of the programme's oft-used catchphrases, 'Has he been?'. Lily was played by Madge Hindle, Walter by Edward Malin. Another regular character was the Pledges' toothless, cloth-capped old foreman, Stan Hardman (Joe Gladwin).^[5]

Much of the comedy was derived from Nellie's constant malapropisms. When asked by Lily if she knew the facts of life, Nellie replied with immense dignity, 'Of course I do! I'm well over the age of content!' In another episode, Nellie has a suitor named Vernon Smallpiece, whom she addresses as 'Vermin Bigpiece'. When Eli insists on playing the high-powered executive once he is in charge of the pickle business, Nellie asks him who he thinks he is 'sat sitting there like a big business typhoon!' In each episode, Nellie and Eli would hurl insults at each other to spectacular effect, as they fought over the family business or domestic matters, with Nellie's constant nagging and Eli's constant drinking and womanising fuelling their arguments. It was known that the insults continued off-screen as well, as Baker and Jewel disliked each other in real life,^[6][7] their working relationship being described as ' the most toxic in the whole of British sitcom history'.^[8] In later episodes, Baker struggled to remember her lines and relied on cue cards and prompting from co-star Madge Hindle. Baker would suffer greatly with dementia during her final years.

The third series, transmitted in October and November 1969, was the first to be recorded in colour, but given that ITV began broadcasting in colour from 15 November 1969, most viewers would have seen these in black-and-white on their first run.^[9] An industrial dispute at ITV in 1971, known as the Colour Strike, led to seven of the eight programmes from the fifth series being made in black-and-white.^{[citation needed]}

Episode list[edit]

Series 1: 1968[edit]

Series 2: 1969, summer[edit]

Series 3: 1969, autumn[edit]

Series 4: 1970[edit]

Series 5: 1970–71[edit]

Series 6: 1972[edit]

Series 7: 1972–73[edit]

Spin-offs and remake[edit]

In 1972, the main cast appeared in a film version of the series that was made by Hammer Films.^[10] The film included a vocal version of the series' theme tune sung by Hylda Baker.

In 1973, the series was adapted for the American market. Renamed Thicker Than Water,^[9] it starred Julie Harris and Richard Long as squabbling siblings Nellie and Ernie Paine, however, the US version was not successful and was cancelled after only 13 episodes.

After Nearest and Dearest[edit]

After the series ended in 1973, Baker went on to star in the sitcom Not On Your Nellie (made for ITV by London Weekend Television) in which Lancashire-born Nellie Pickersgill (the same character as Nellie Pledge in all but name) travels to London to run her ailing father's pub, the Brown Cow. In a 1973 interview with Baker and Jewel (available on the seventh-series DVD of Nearest & Dearest), Baker stated that the forthcoming Not on Your Nellie series was actually a spinoff from Nearest and Dearest and would follow Nellie's exploits in London after Eli practically deserts her. This would appear to follow on from the final episode of Nearest and Dearest in which Stan informed Nellie and Eli that there was an explosion at the pickling shed, implying that Pledge's Purer Pickles was now defunct. However, possibly due to an issue over legal rights regarding the Nellie Pledge character, Not on Your Nellie was ultimately made as an 'original' new series rather than a spinoff, despite the obvious similarities between the two.^[11]

Meanwhile, Jewel went on to appear in the sitcom Spring and Autumn (1973–1976), about a friendship between a lonely boy and an elderly man, created by Nearest and Dearest creators Vince Powell and Harry Driver.^[12] Jewel continued to work in television for many years, and in 1991 he appeared in an episode of the BBC hospital drama series Casualty in which he was able to use one of his famous catchphrases, referring to a nurse as 'a knock-kneed, knackered old nose bag' – a term he had regularly bestowed upon Nellie.^[13]

Harry Driver, who created and wrote many episodes of the series with Vince Powell, died on 25 November 1973, just nine months after the series ended, aged only 42—marking the abrupt end of a successful 13-year writing partnership with Powell. Edward Malin, who played Walter, was the first of the cast to die, on 1 March 1977, four years after the show ended.^[14] Hylda Baker spent her final years penniless and battling dementia, and died in a retirement home on 1 May 1986 of bronchial pneumonia, aged 81.^[2] Joe Gladwin, who played Stan, went on to other television roles, including Wally Batty in the long-running sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, a role he played until his death on 11 March 1987. Jewel continued to work in a variety of roles in both theatre and television until his death on 3 December 1995, the day before his 86th birthday. Co-creator Vince Powell died on 13 July 2009, aged 80.^[15]

Madge Hindle, the sole surviving member of the cast, went on to become a series regular in Coronation Street from 1976 to 1980, playing Renee Roberts, the wife of grocer Alf Roberts. Since then Hindle has worked in a variety of roles in television and stage.^[9]

DVD releases[edit]

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All seven series of Nearest And Dearest (in separate editions and also a 7-disc box set) have been released on DVD by Network. The 1972 film has also been released on DVD by DD Video.^[16]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^TV.com. 'Nearest and Dearest'. TV.com. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
2. ^ ^ab'Hylda Baker'. Prideofmanchester.com. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
3. ^'Nearest And Dearest – ITV Sitcom – British Comedy Guide'. Comedy.co.uk. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
4. ^Denis Gifford (5 December 1995). 'Obituary: Jimmy Jewel'. The Independent. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
5. ^'Nearest And Dearest – Character Guide – British Comedy Guide'. Comedy.co.uk. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
6. ^Fiddy, Dick (2003–2014). 'Baker, Hylda (1905-1986)'. BFI Screenonline. Retrieved 22 August 2020.
7. ^'BBC Radio 2 – Barbara Windsor's Funny Girls, Series 1, Hylda Baker'. Bbc.co.uk. 5 July 2011. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
8. ^Comedy Chronicles:Strained Relationships: Hylda Baker & Jimmy JewelGraham McCann, Comedy.co.uk. Retrieved February 24 2021.
9. ^ ^abc': Nearest And Dearest :'. Britishcomedy.org.uk. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
10. ^Nearest and Dearest
11. ^'BFI Screenonline: Baker, Hylda (1905–1986) Biography'. Screenonline.org.uk. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
12. ^'> Spring and Autumn: The Complete Series 1:'. Network ON AIR. 21 December 2010. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
13. ^TV.com. 'Jimmy Jewel'. TV.com. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
14. ^TV.com (3 January 1977). 'Eddie Malin'. TV.com. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
15. ^'Vince Powell'. The Telegraph. Retrieved 22 June 2014.
16. ^'Nearest and Dearest: The Complete Series [DVD]: Amazon.co.uk: Jimmy Jewell, Hylda Baker: DVD & Blu-ray'. Amazon.co.uk. Retrieved 22 June 2014.

External links[edit]

• Nearest and Dearest at IMDb
• ‹The templateTV.com show is being considered for deletion.›Nearest and Dearest at TV.com
• Nearest and Dearest at British Comedy Guide

Source:

Creator:
David J. Slate
Odesta Corporation; 1890 Maple Ave; Suite 115; Evanston, IL 60201
Donor:
David J. Slate (dave '@' math.nwu.edu) (708) 491-3867

Data Set Information:

The objective is to identify each of a large number of black-and-white rectangular pixel displays as one of the 26 capital letters in the English alphabet. The character images were based on 20 different fonts and each letter within these 20 fonts was randomly distorted to produce a file of 20,000 unique stimuli. Each stimulus was converted into 16 primitive numerical attributes (statistical moments and edge counts) which were then scaled to fit into a range of integer values from 0 through 15. We typically train on the first 16000 items and then use the resulting model to predict the letter category for the remaining 4000. See the article cited above for more details.

Attribute Information:

1. lettr capital letter (26 values from A to Z)
2. x-box horizontal position of box (integer)
3. y-box vertical position of box (integer)
4. width width of box (integer)
5. high height of box (integer)
6. onpix total # on pixels (integer)
7. x-bar mean x of on pixels in box (integer)
8. y-bar mean y of on pixels in box (integer)
9. x2bar mean x variance (integer)
10. y2bar mean y variance (integer)
11. xybar mean x y correlation (integer)
12. x2ybr mean of x * x * y (integer)
13. xy2br mean of x * y * y (integer)
14. x-ege mean edge count left to right (integer)
15. xegvy correlation of x-ege with y (integer)
16. y-ege mean edge count bottom to top (integer)
17. yegvx correlation of y-ege with x (integer)

Relevant Papers:

P. W. Frey and D. J. Slate. 'Letter Recognition Using Holland-style Adaptive Classifiers'. (Machine Learning Vol 6 #2 March 91)
[Web Link]

Papers That Cite This Data Set¹:

Nearest Letter Box Near Me

Jaakko Peltonen and Arto Klami and Samuel Kaski. Improved Learning of Riemannian Metrics for Exploratory Analysis. Improved Learning of Riemannian Metrics for Exploratory Analysis. Neural Networks. 2004. [View Context].
Xiaoli Z. Fern and Carla Brodley. Cluster Ensembles for High Dimensional Clustering: An Empirical Study. Journal of Machine Learning Research n, a. 2004. [View Context].
Giorgio Valentini. Ensemble methods based on bias--variance analysis Theses Series DISI-TH-2003. Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze dell'Informazione . 2003. [View Context].
Dmitry Pavlov and Alexandrin Popescul and David M. Pennock and Lyle H. Ungar. Mixtures of Conditional Maximum Entropy Models. ICML. 2003. [View Context].
Kristin P. Bennett and Ayhan Demiriz and Richard Maclin. Exploiting unlabeled data in ensemble methods. KDD. 2002. [View Context].
Stephen D. Bay. Nearest neighbor classification from multiple feature subsets. Intell. Data Anal, 3. 1999. [View Context].
Thomas G. Dietterich. Approximate Statistical Test For Comparing Supervised Classification Learning Algorithms. Neural Computation, 10. 1998. [View Context].
Georgios Paliouras and David S. Brée. The Effect of Numeric Features on the Scalability of Inductive Learning Programs. ECML. 1995. [View Context].
Thomas G. Dietterich and Ghulum Bakiri. Solving Multiclass Learning Problems via Error-Correcting Output Codes. CoRR, csAI/9501101. 1995. [View Context].
Arto Klami and Samuel Kaski and Ty n ohjaaja and Janne Sinkkonen. HELSINKI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Department of Engineering Physics and Mathematics Arto Klami Regularized Discriminative Clustering. Regularized Discriminative Clustering. [View Context].
Shailesh Kumar and Melba Crawford and Joydeep Ghosh. A versatile framework for labelling imagery with a large number of classes. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. [View Context].
Amund Tveit. Empirical Comparison of Accuracy and Performance for the MIPSVM classifier with Existing Classifiers. Division of Intelligent Systems Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. [View Context].
Hirotaka Inoue and Hiroyuki Narihisa. Incremental Learning with Self-Organizing Neural Grove. Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Science, Kure National College of Technology. [View Context].
Jaakko Peltonen and Arto Klami and Samuel Kaski. Learning Metrics for Information Visualization. Neural Networks Research Centre Helsinki University of Technology. [View Context].
Adil M. Bagirov and Julien Ugon. An algorithm for computation of piecewise linear function separating two sets. CIAO, School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, The University of Ballarat. [View Context].
Miguel Moreira and Alain Hertz and Eddy Mayoraz. Data binarization by discriminant elimination. Proceedings of the ICML-99 Workshop: From Machine Learning to. [View Context].

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