Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
English television programme

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (German pronunciation: [ʔaʊf ˈviːdɐˌzeːən ˈpɛt]) is a British comedy drama television programme about seven British construction workers who leave the United Kingdom to search for employment overseas. In the first series, the men live and work on a building site in Düsseldorf. The series was created by Franc Roddam after an idea from Mick Connell, a bricklayer from Stockton-on-Tees, and mostly written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who also wrote The Likely Lads, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and Porridge. It starred Tim Healy, Kevin Whately, Jimmy Nail, Timothy Spall, Christopher Fairbank, Pat Roach and Gary Holton, with Noel Clarke replacing Holton for series three and four and the two-part finale. The series were broadcast on ITV in 1983–1984 and 1986. After a sixteen-year gap, two series and a Christmas special were shown on BBC One in 2002 and 2004.
In 2000, series 1, set in Germany, was ranked number 46 on the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes in a list compiled by the British Film Institute. In 2015, the 1980s series was voted ITV's Favourite TV Programme of all Time in a Radio Times readers' poll in order to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the station. The show was the subject of the first episode of the BBC documentary series Drama Connections in 2005.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” enters the record as english television programme. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wiedersehen, English and television can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Wiedersehen, English and television provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3234742. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1983, 1984, 1986 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.