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Are You Being Served -- this got long
Aug. 28th, 2020 11:52 amI recently completed a watch through of all 10 seasons of Are You Being Served? If you are unfamiliar, this is a British sitcom that ran from 1972-1985. PBS aired it a lot in the 90s—it was so popular in the states that it got a spin-off/sequel series with the original cast (called Grace and Favour in the UK and Are You Being Served, Again? in the States, which is a much worse title).
The sitcom takes place in a department store—run apparently the way they were at the time, with all the clothing in drawers behind the counter, where you had to have a sales person take you through what you were looking for. I’ve never shopped at a store like this in my life, and honestly, if I had to have that much interaction with the salesperson to get a pair of socks I might shoot myself.
But in any case, it’s set in what was even then an old-fashioned department store. It was based on series co-creator Jeremy Lloyd’s actual experience at Simpson’s. For the first three seasons, he was drawing almost entirely on that experience. At it’s best, Are You Being Served? is a bawdy farce, with a set of self-interested character’s mainly focused on their class position. There’s the pompous manager, Mr. Rumbold, who is convinced everything is his idea, and really has no idea what’s going on. The staff are in a strict hierarchy (floor walker, senior assistant, junior assistant), and constantly obsessed with moving up the chain. There are many episodes where there’s a shake up in standing—someone is promoted or demoted—and suddenly they can’t sit at the same table in the canteen, or aren’t allowed to wear a certain hat. There’s lots of discussion of what using “dinner” instead of “lunch” means in terms of class, and whether one can claim to be middle class if one lives in a semi-detached house. Molly Sugden, who plays Mrs. Slocombe, is a master at code-switching between a posh accent when trying to impress and her own Northern accent when her feathers get ruffled.
There is also a huge amount of physical humor, and at least once a season (for the Christmas special) the whole cast dresses up in ludicrous costumes and has to do a musical number. John Inman (Mr. Humphries) was well known for doing pantomime dames, and many of the rest of the cast were musical theatre veterans. In the later seasons, Mike Berry (Mr. Spooner) had actually been a member of a pop band contemporary to the Beatles, though with far less success.
For me rewatching, I was enjoying both the humor and the view into a particular period of British history. From time to time there will be references to things like the metric conversion of the money or the coal miner’s strike meaning the heating in the store getting turned off that at this point in my learning of history, it’s interesting to see how this light entertainment show fits in with. It’s also fair to say that I missed 90% of the double entendres as a child. I’m still probably missing a lot—for example, I can know that “drawers” means underwear, but I don’t know the class marker difference between referring to them as “drawers,” “pants,” or “knickers.”
As is typical for sitcoms of the era, since it filmed 6-7 episodes a year, and no one conceived of marathoning anything at the time, the episodes are fairly formulaic. There will be a ridiculous edict from management, there will be an after-work staff meeting, a mechanical dummy will malfunction, Mrs. Slocombe will make some comments about her pussy and say she is “unanimous in this,” Mr. Lucas will make a bad come-on to Miss Brahms, she will smack him down, Mr. Granger will fall asleep, Mr. Humphries will wake him up by saying, “Are you free?” It is a formula that is as comfortable as an old shoe, but it means you can’t really watch more than one or two episodes at a go.
There is a problem, though, in revisiting fifty-year-old British comedy. The same reason that stopped my rewatch of Monty Python. There are things that are more, or less, yikes. I find that the type of sexism that I still see in media all the time doesn’t bother me particularly (I call it “air you breathe” sexism) and I can deal with it better in historical media than modern. But there are some things where we definitely have made progress in representation, and when I see some of that stuff, it just makes my jaw drop.
( This got long )
Tl;dr, if you want to watch a few episodes for flavor, these are my picks. The whole series is available to stream on Brit Box, which is a $6.99/mo add-on to Amazon Prime.
Best episodes:
1x2 “Dear Sexy Knickers” – The first regular series episode after the “lost” pilot. They hadn’t settled into their formula quite yet. The plot revolves around Mr. Lucas sending a note addressed to “Dear Sexy Knickers” to Miss Brahms and it getting misdirected so a series of increasingly improbable people think it is addressed to them. Classic farce.
4x1 “No Sale” – My favorite episode. Mr. Grace decides to open the store a half an hour earlier to get the pre-work sales crowd. The staff decide they don’t want to get up earlier, so sabotage their sales numbers.
4x5 “Fifty Years On” – The staff find out it’s Mrs. Slocombe’s birthday. This features an afterwork staff meeting to brainstorm what to give her that is the perfect encapsulation of every terrible work brainstorming session I’ve ever had.
7x4 “Mrs. Slocombe, Senior Person” – One of many episodes to feature a shake up in the hierarchy. Mr. Rumbold is out with food poisoning, and Mrs. Slocombe is temporarily promoted to his position. The power, obviously, goes to her head.
10x4 “Gambling Fever” – After about season four, the writers seemed to run out of ideas. Seasons five, six, and seven were pretty rough—just regurgitating older plots. But towards the end of the series, there are a number of truly original ideas—most of them pretty far from the premise, though. This entire episode exists to justify an extended scene where Mr. Humphries has to do charades for the results of a horse race, and it is worth watching solely on that basis.
Yikes episodes:
3x6 “German Week” – This episode only exists for the staff to dress up in lederhosen and make fun of Germans. It’s not as bad as it could be, but, you know, WWII…it’s not complimentary.
4x4 “Fire Practice” – Features a sheikh and a harem and…yeah. Orientalism like whoa.
4x7 “The Father Christmas Affair” – warning: blackface
6x3 “Do You Take This Man?” – Mrs. Slocombe gets engaged to a Greek man, and…yeah, everything having to do with Greeks in this episode is pretty iffy. Mrs. Slocombe tops it off by using something that contextually sounds like a slur, but I couldn’t confirm if it was one.
8x8 “Roots?” – warning: blackface
9x5 “Monkey Business” – The inevitable Japanese takeover episode. God, why did every show from the eighties and nineties have one of these? They’re all awful.
This is not a complete list. There was one with a really awful Asian stereotype, but as it was completely inessential to the plot, I can’t ID it in the episode summaries or the credits lists, since of course it was not played by an Asian man.
Worst episode for reasons not having to do with offensive content:
5x2 “A Change Is as Good as a Rest” – The staff take over the toy department. The bulk of this episode is literally just explaining the various children’s toys of the era. Like. No jokes. Just showing the Weebles toy set. It has some nostalgia value for me, as these are the toys of my childhood, but pretty typical of the mid-series writing slump. Weirdly, this is Jeremy Lloyd’s favorite episode he wrote and—why?
I watched the film for completeness sake. It is garbage. It has the problem of recycling old jokes from the show, and of trying to graft on a plot of some sort, but the main problem is that the show was performed in front of a live audience, and so had a laugh track. This didn’t. So the same sort of jokes they did on the show land like dead fish. Things that should be playful innuendo come off as creepy or cruel. I mean, I knew it was bad going in, but. It’s bad.
I also watched the pilot of the attempted 2016 spin-off. It is awful. The bases of the humor of Are You Being Served? are dated, and watching a modern actor attempt to recreate Mr. Humphries…no. Just no.
Other random thoughts:
- A number of episodes have the staff coming in early or staying late for a staff meeting and complaining about not getting paid for the time. Under modern US law, assuming they’re hourly, this would be illegal. I looked into UK law, and not only was this legal at the time, it still is. US has mandatory time and a half for overtime over 40 hours. UK only has a law requiring that average hourly pay not be below minimum wage. Given that the UK usually has much stronger labor laws, I’m flabbergasted.
- British sitcom names of this era are absurd. You’ve got Are You Being Served?; but also Take a Letter Mr. Jones; Please Sir!; Come Back, Mrs. Noah; At Last, the 1948 Show; How’s Your Father; It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum; You Rang, M’Lord? I fell down a Wikipedia hole trying to find more about these, but discovered that a) the BBC wiped most of its tapes from the fifties through seventies, so a lot of these shows are lost, and the ones that aren’t lost were mostly not distributed in the US.
The sitcom takes place in a department store—run apparently the way they were at the time, with all the clothing in drawers behind the counter, where you had to have a sales person take you through what you were looking for. I’ve never shopped at a store like this in my life, and honestly, if I had to have that much interaction with the salesperson to get a pair of socks I might shoot myself.
But in any case, it’s set in what was even then an old-fashioned department store. It was based on series co-creator Jeremy Lloyd’s actual experience at Simpson’s. For the first three seasons, he was drawing almost entirely on that experience. At it’s best, Are You Being Served? is a bawdy farce, with a set of self-interested character’s mainly focused on their class position. There’s the pompous manager, Mr. Rumbold, who is convinced everything is his idea, and really has no idea what’s going on. The staff are in a strict hierarchy (floor walker, senior assistant, junior assistant), and constantly obsessed with moving up the chain. There are many episodes where there’s a shake up in standing—someone is promoted or demoted—and suddenly they can’t sit at the same table in the canteen, or aren’t allowed to wear a certain hat. There’s lots of discussion of what using “dinner” instead of “lunch” means in terms of class, and whether one can claim to be middle class if one lives in a semi-detached house. Molly Sugden, who plays Mrs. Slocombe, is a master at code-switching between a posh accent when trying to impress and her own Northern accent when her feathers get ruffled.
There is also a huge amount of physical humor, and at least once a season (for the Christmas special) the whole cast dresses up in ludicrous costumes and has to do a musical number. John Inman (Mr. Humphries) was well known for doing pantomime dames, and many of the rest of the cast were musical theatre veterans. In the later seasons, Mike Berry (Mr. Spooner) had actually been a member of a pop band contemporary to the Beatles, though with far less success.
For me rewatching, I was enjoying both the humor and the view into a particular period of British history. From time to time there will be references to things like the metric conversion of the money or the coal miner’s strike meaning the heating in the store getting turned off that at this point in my learning of history, it’s interesting to see how this light entertainment show fits in with. It’s also fair to say that I missed 90% of the double entendres as a child. I’m still probably missing a lot—for example, I can know that “drawers” means underwear, but I don’t know the class marker difference between referring to them as “drawers,” “pants,” or “knickers.”
As is typical for sitcoms of the era, since it filmed 6-7 episodes a year, and no one conceived of marathoning anything at the time, the episodes are fairly formulaic. There will be a ridiculous edict from management, there will be an after-work staff meeting, a mechanical dummy will malfunction, Mrs. Slocombe will make some comments about her pussy and say she is “unanimous in this,” Mr. Lucas will make a bad come-on to Miss Brahms, she will smack him down, Mr. Granger will fall asleep, Mr. Humphries will wake him up by saying, “Are you free?” It is a formula that is as comfortable as an old shoe, but it means you can’t really watch more than one or two episodes at a go.
There is a problem, though, in revisiting fifty-year-old British comedy. The same reason that stopped my rewatch of Monty Python. There are things that are more, or less, yikes. I find that the type of sexism that I still see in media all the time doesn’t bother me particularly (I call it “air you breathe” sexism) and I can deal with it better in historical media than modern. But there are some things where we definitely have made progress in representation, and when I see some of that stuff, it just makes my jaw drop.
( This got long )
Tl;dr, if you want to watch a few episodes for flavor, these are my picks. The whole series is available to stream on Brit Box, which is a $6.99/mo add-on to Amazon Prime.
Best episodes:
1x2 “Dear Sexy Knickers” – The first regular series episode after the “lost” pilot. They hadn’t settled into their formula quite yet. The plot revolves around Mr. Lucas sending a note addressed to “Dear Sexy Knickers” to Miss Brahms and it getting misdirected so a series of increasingly improbable people think it is addressed to them. Classic farce.
4x1 “No Sale” – My favorite episode. Mr. Grace decides to open the store a half an hour earlier to get the pre-work sales crowd. The staff decide they don’t want to get up earlier, so sabotage their sales numbers.
4x5 “Fifty Years On” – The staff find out it’s Mrs. Slocombe’s birthday. This features an afterwork staff meeting to brainstorm what to give her that is the perfect encapsulation of every terrible work brainstorming session I’ve ever had.
7x4 “Mrs. Slocombe, Senior Person” – One of many episodes to feature a shake up in the hierarchy. Mr. Rumbold is out with food poisoning, and Mrs. Slocombe is temporarily promoted to his position. The power, obviously, goes to her head.
10x4 “Gambling Fever” – After about season four, the writers seemed to run out of ideas. Seasons five, six, and seven were pretty rough—just regurgitating older plots. But towards the end of the series, there are a number of truly original ideas—most of them pretty far from the premise, though. This entire episode exists to justify an extended scene where Mr. Humphries has to do charades for the results of a horse race, and it is worth watching solely on that basis.
Yikes episodes:
3x6 “German Week” – This episode only exists for the staff to dress up in lederhosen and make fun of Germans. It’s not as bad as it could be, but, you know, WWII…it’s not complimentary.
4x4 “Fire Practice” – Features a sheikh and a harem and…yeah. Orientalism like whoa.
4x7 “The Father Christmas Affair” – warning: blackface
6x3 “Do You Take This Man?” – Mrs. Slocombe gets engaged to a Greek man, and…yeah, everything having to do with Greeks in this episode is pretty iffy. Mrs. Slocombe tops it off by using something that contextually sounds like a slur, but I couldn’t confirm if it was one.
8x8 “Roots?” – warning: blackface
9x5 “Monkey Business” – The inevitable Japanese takeover episode. God, why did every show from the eighties and nineties have one of these? They’re all awful.
This is not a complete list. There was one with a really awful Asian stereotype, but as it was completely inessential to the plot, I can’t ID it in the episode summaries or the credits lists, since of course it was not played by an Asian man.
Worst episode for reasons not having to do with offensive content:
5x2 “A Change Is as Good as a Rest” – The staff take over the toy department. The bulk of this episode is literally just explaining the various children’s toys of the era. Like. No jokes. Just showing the Weebles toy set. It has some nostalgia value for me, as these are the toys of my childhood, but pretty typical of the mid-series writing slump. Weirdly, this is Jeremy Lloyd’s favorite episode he wrote and—why?
I watched the film for completeness sake. It is garbage. It has the problem of recycling old jokes from the show, and of trying to graft on a plot of some sort, but the main problem is that the show was performed in front of a live audience, and so had a laugh track. This didn’t. So the same sort of jokes they did on the show land like dead fish. Things that should be playful innuendo come off as creepy or cruel. I mean, I knew it was bad going in, but. It’s bad.
I also watched the pilot of the attempted 2016 spin-off. It is awful. The bases of the humor of Are You Being Served? are dated, and watching a modern actor attempt to recreate Mr. Humphries…no. Just no.
Other random thoughts:
- A number of episodes have the staff coming in early or staying late for a staff meeting and complaining about not getting paid for the time. Under modern US law, assuming they’re hourly, this would be illegal. I looked into UK law, and not only was this legal at the time, it still is. US has mandatory time and a half for overtime over 40 hours. UK only has a law requiring that average hourly pay not be below minimum wage. Given that the UK usually has much stronger labor laws, I’m flabbergasted.
- British sitcom names of this era are absurd. You’ve got Are You Being Served?; but also Take a Letter Mr. Jones; Please Sir!; Come Back, Mrs. Noah; At Last, the 1948 Show; How’s Your Father; It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum; You Rang, M’Lord? I fell down a Wikipedia hole trying to find more about these, but discovered that a) the BBC wiped most of its tapes from the fifties through seventies, so a lot of these shows are lost, and the ones that aren’t lost were mostly not distributed in the US.
