The Dustbinmen, 1969
The Dustbinmen was a spin off from a one off TV movie “There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah” (1968) written by Jack Rosenthal and directed by Michael Apted.
This TV sitcom ran for three series from 1969, totalling twenty episodes.
Summary
The series revolves around four misfits and their affectionately-named dustbin van – “Thunderbird 3”
Cheese and Egg (Bryan Pringle), Heavy Breathing (Trevor Bannister), Winston (Graham Haberfield) and Eric (Tim Wylton) were the crew of dustcart ‘Thunderbird 3’ of the Corporation Cleansing Department – the name obviously being an ironic reference to the spacecraft in Thunderbirds.
Also known as ‘Number 3 Gang’, throughout the day they would collect dustbins and generally be rude to each other or anyone else.
Cheese and Egg, whose real name was C. E. Petty, was a fervent communist and the natural-born leader of the gang; with his knowledge, the gang could get out of sticky situations if they were lucky.
Heavy Breathing was “the one with the good looks”, forced to spend much of his time pleasuring housewives – something he finds quite annoying when mostly he would rather just have a rest.
Winston Platt was a die-hard fan of Manchester City who saw one of the players Colin Bell as a god.
Eric was the sensitive Welsh Coronation Street fan who spent most of time talking about television and saving to buy a colour TV for his Mother.
Clips
Cast
Graham Haberfield
Bryan Pringle
Trevor Bannister
Tim Wylton
John Barrett
Details
Channel: ITV
Written By:
Jack Rosenthal
John Antrobus
Kenneth Cope
Adele Rose
Where To Watch
Sadly not available on the major streaming platforms.
In 2005 all surviving material from the series was released to DVD by Network On Air. Whilst there will be DVD’s scattered about Network On Air no longer trade and we wait to see what happens to their extensive catalogue.
Selected episodes are available to view on You Tube