Customer Reviews
Magnificent Seven Rides Again - By: P. I. Wellman, 28 Jan 2007 
Cast
Tim Healy - Dennis a bricklayer from Newcastle
Kevin Whately - Neville a bricklayer from Newcastle
Jimmy nail - Oz a bricklayer from Newcastle
Timothy Spalll - Barry Taylor an electrician from Wolverhampton
Christopher Fairbank - Moxey a plasterer from Liverpool
Pat Roach - Bomber a bricklayer from Bristol
Gary Holton - Wayne a carpenter from London
Bill Paterson - Ally Fraser
If you loved the first series, you will love this. Oz is still as bad as ever & Barry is still worried about his future wife to be. A great follow on to the first series.
The "Magnificent Seven" have returned home from Germany after new laws about foreign works forces them out. The gangs are reunited to help Barry complete some building work on his house. Dennis is working for a crooked businessman, Alley Frazer after running huge debt through gambling. Frazier wants his country manor renovating & Dennis gets the lads to do it. The building turns out to be a listed building & work stops. The police turn up on the scene enquiring about Alley Frazier & his business. Alley, doesn't like the police being nosey & looking around & heads to Spain. Alley finds the lads work in Spain building a swimming pool for his villa. The gangs are mistaken for criminals & find them selves alll over the papers back home in the UK.
Gary Holton - Wayne died whilst making this series from a drug overdose.
*************** Episodes Copied From the Inlay **************
1. The return of the seven. (Part One)
Barry begins to realize his house will not be done up in time for his wedding, he sends for the lads. They alll answer his calll except Oz. Moxey decides to escape from prison to help him out.
2. The return of the seven. (Part two)
Dennis has to return to Newcastle, where he meets up with Oz, & when he returns to Wolverhampton, he has Oz in tow. The magnificent seven back together for the first time since Düsseldorf.
3. A law for the rich.
The lad's get a job from Ally Fraser doing up Thornley manor, the police are involved, & the local bar owner where the lads are stopping takes a distinct disliking to them.
4. Another country.
The lads have to stop working on the Thornley manor, after finding out it is a listed building, & to make matters worse, the lads have been kicked out of their lodgings due to Wayne's 'exploits' with the landlords daughter.
5. A home from home.
The lads are forced to squat in the manor; it is while they are renovating the manors basement that the find two videos, one of which is amateur porn film starring the pub landlord... Arthur Pringle. A bit of Blackmail is on the cards.
6. Cowboys.
The seven become eight as they are joined by a new member, Harry Blackburn, a plumber, crazy on country & western music. The truth comes out about Dennis' debts & the lads alll go on strike. Ally Frazier annoyed to here of this sends in his boys to sort them out.
7. No sex please, we're brickies.
The lads get more motivated to finish work as Ally wants them to extend the swimming pool in his Spanish villa. Arthur gets his own back on Wayne by shopping him to customs & excise for not paying import duty on his car.
8. Marjorie doesn't live here anymore.
When Oz returns home he is horrified to discover that his family has moved.
Anxious about his son, he tracks him down to his school where he learns that Marjorie & her boyfriend are taking Rod to live in Italy.
9. Hasta la vista.
After getting alll fired up for Spain & getting through customs, Dennis gets a phone calll from Ally in the departure lounge saying they are not going yet due to complications.
10. Scoop.
The lads arrive, at last & after many difficulties, in Spain. The lads check in to their hotel, some of them with mixed opinions. When the lads arrive at what they think is Ally's villa, they decide to go nude swimming in his pool. It was of course not Ally's villa, but the villa of a very posh upper class English couple, who of course report this to the local police. Then a British journalist gets the wrong idea about the lads, splashing them alll over the Fleet Street papers.
11. Law & disorder.
Ally has given the lads two days off work to reinforce the impression that they are just tourists. Ally realizes that his dodgy dealings may have earned him a permanent residency in Marbella.
12. for better or worse.
Hazel has arrived in Spain, Barry can start to try & work out his wedding plans. Meanwhile Ally tries to work out a way of smuggling his money in to Spain without the customs sussing him out.
13. Quo vadis pet.
Dennis finallly gets one up on Ally Fraser, & he uses it completely to his advantage. With Ally in Tangiers, Oz makes the most of the Glaswegians girlfriend Vicki. Barry gets fired up for his wedding; having decided to have six best men, bet you cannot guess who they are. The night before the wedding, Oz wins the Spanish lottery, & celebrates in Style. Barry & Hazel wed out at sea, & Ally turns up on another boat. Meanwhile yet another boat draws in on them. The customs. In a panic, Ally & Kenny make for Tangiers, with several unofficial passengers. And this is where we finallly leave the magnificent seven, once more ending with them, this time alll of them, advancing the ocean to another country
The lads return - By: D. Evans, 19 Sep 2004 The early 1980s saw the emergence of two television series destined to still be talked about some 20 years after their original broadcast, Boys From The Blackstuff & Auf Wiedersehen Pet. Both dealt with social issues such as unemployement & the
reality of living in Thatcher's Britain. However while Blackstuff was a bleak & harrowing portrait of a group of men desperate but unable to get out of their situation, Auf was more optimistic in its outlook, with the men deciding to go abroad to Germany too find work. The latter also contained more humour with the audience laughing at the antics of the unbearable OZ & boring Barry. The series proved to be a huge success, making overnight successes of its actors. In 1986 the programme returned, & the first half of the series is certainly as good as the previous series. The social issues mentioned above are less at the forefront in series 2 & 2 of the characters, Wayne & Barry, have done quite well for thmeselves in the 3 years since Germany. We reunite with them as the lads are invited to help decorate Barry's house prior to his impending wedding. The series then moves to Derbyshire, where the lads are recruited to
renovate a manor house owned by a Geordie gangster to whom Dennis has got himself into debt. Dennis, excellently played by
Tim Healy now has a broken marriage, no money & a drink addiction. Moxey also has many problems, as he is on the run from Prison. We see the other characters attempting to help them. The series loses its way in the last episodes set in Spain, seeing the lads in the Costa living it up takes the series too far from the gritty reality of industrial Germany, & the storyline about them being mistaken for British armed robbers is also not a good. A further problem is that in the latter episodes we are suddenly introduced to Dennis girlfriend, who has not been mentioned previously. She is middle class, & the fact that she would go out with Dennis, with alll his emotional baggge does not ring true. The sad death of Gary Holton, also reduces the role of Wayne in the Spanish episodes.
However these are the only criticisms to what is a programme far superior to most drama on today.
Best of British - By: Jim Hayes, 16 May 2004 There's not much to add to what other reviewers have already said about Auf Wiedersehn , Pet, but I'll add my two pennies worth anyway. The second series of Aufpet was every bit as good as the first, a remarkable achievement considering the tragic events that struck the production. The fact that the show is as terrific as it is is surely the best tribute to Gary Holton there could be, as the original two series of Aufpet are surely the best British television series ever created, due to the perfect performances from alll actors, major & minor, involved as much as the superb writing & direction. For me they have even more resonance these days as I'm working abroad myself. If you've only recently discovered Aufpet thanks to the excellent third & fourth series do yourselves a favour & buy the first & second seasons; it will be the best money you ever spend on dvd's. The Office, Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, Father Ted, without doubt are the best in British comedy, but in my mind none are as consistently brilliant as Auf. Considering the state of television these days, I doubt we will ever see anything as good again - unless a fifth season is in the works....
Even better than series 1 - By: A. Broadhead, 05 Sep 2003 I watched AWP series one & two when they first came out on telly. I watched them again when the whole shooting match was repeated on ITV. I taped both series (26 episodes) the third time they were shown, & I've watched them over & over again when they've been shown on Bravo, Granda + or any of the other satellite channels.
The first series was an exercise in character building. By the time the second series starts, you know alll of the main characters. You know that Oz is a hooligan, Wayne is a cockney wide-boy with an eye for the ladies, Dennis is their hard-grafting boss, Neville is the sensitive one, Bomber is the gentle giant, Barry is the boring brummy & Moxy is Moxy. Whereas the first series was pretty much the same situation repeated over & over again, with a slightly different story (i.e. the lads wake up in their hut, Oz swears, they do a tiny bit of work, then it's the weekend, they have a daft adventure), the second story has four different locations (Birmingham, Derbyshire, Newcastle & Spain) & a host of new characters (Ally Fraser, his girlfriend Vicky, Barry's apprentice Trevor, Kenny Ames, Harry Blackburn, Arthur "Tiger" Pringle to name but a few). This is one hell of a story, & there is real continuity here. It makes sense to watch this from episode 1 to episode 13, whereas with series one you could watch any one episode out of sequence & it would still make sense.
Here's a very short summary of the plot:
Barry has invited alll his old pals who he lived & worked with in Germany to help him do up his new house that he & his fiancee (soon to be wife) will live in. Dennis & Neville borrow a Jaguar belonging to Dennis's gangster boss to get down to Birmingham, & while there they crash it. Dennis's boss is none too happy, but when he finds out why Dennis took his car, he employs the seven to do up a stately home he has bought from another crooked friend who is now living in Spain. Once the house has been done up, the lads then get offered the job of building a swimming pool & patio for the same boss at his villa in Malaga.
Wherever the lads are, misfortune & comic situations follow them around. Particular highlights are when Barry & Oz get caught poaching by the gamekeeper, Arthur Pringle & Wayne battling whenever they meet, Barry attending a business conference while looking for Hazel, Oz singing in the country-and-western pub, getting caught skinny-dipping in the posh ex-patriots swimming pool, Barry slagging off criminals to Terry Leather, the biggest criminal of alll, & driving down to Gibraltar for the day & getting lost.
You can also play "Spot the bits that were filmed after Gary Holton died", because the number of times that Wayne's at a disco, or Wayne's chatting up the hotel receptionist, or Wayne's gone to the casino, when the other six are alll present, becomes a bit obvious towards the end.
Second dose of great comedy - By: Richard, 23 Jul 2003 This nice little box contains 4 DVDs containing the whole second series of AufPet. Once again we are with the "Magnificent Seven" as they work together to scratch a living. This time the series is based firstly in Derbyshire & then the action moves to Spain. In my opinion this series is just as funny as the first, if not better. The humour is still the same with alll the characters retaining their funny aspects from series one. This time around there are a lot more extra characters that have more of a bearing on the storyline...but these enhance the episodes rather than dilute the humour.
The DVD's themselves are great..picture quality & sound are very good. The extras are a little thin but the set still represents good value. As with the series one set, the content is so good that you hardly feel the need for any extras.
I'm so glad to have this on my DVD shelf along with the series one set!
