The Oldie May issue 413

Page 14

As Are You Being Served? reaches its half-century, Roger Lewis salutes Grace Brothers – and Mrs Slocombe’s legendary pussy

Service with 50 years of smiles

BBC

A

nthony Powell made fun of the sort of credulous reader who, if a novelist mentions in a novel something left behind in a Brighton hotel room, will try to visit that hotel room in Brighton and look for it. I am just that sort of person, my disbelief totally suspended. Applying Powell’s dictum to my behaviour as a telly-viewer, I’d give anything to stay at Crossroads, dine at Fawlty Towers, travel on Reg Varney’s bus. The settings are always enchanted for me – Walmington-on-Sea is exactly like St Leonards-on-Sea, and perhaps I live in the vicinity for that very reason. I’m always on the lookout for Private Godfrey’s sister Dolly. I’d work in a factory if it had a canteen like the one in Victoria Wood’s Dinnerladies, where people can ask the staff, ‘Are you as good at sex as you are at chips?’, and where to the question ‘What would happen if I asked for camomile tea?’ the answer is an unimprovable ‘Nothing. We haven’t got any.’ The department store in Are You Being Served? is another magical spot – the malfunctioning lift, the glass display cabinets, the brownish mannequins. Everything is antiquated, more than slightly shabby. Grace Brothers is exactly like the ones I remember in Cardiff, Howells and David Morgan, where people went to order wedding-present crockery, curtains for the front room, rolls of carpet and fancy goods. There were tea rooms with doilies. The atmosphere was genteel – and everything was being swiftly swept away by supermarkets and out-of-town shopping malls. Debenhams was the last of the behemoths, and that chain has quite gone. The forlorn mood is what David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd (one of Dame Lumley’s earlier husbands) captured in their classic comedy series. There is a distinct sense the department store is the Last 14 The Oldie May 2022

Stand for a certain sort of Dunkirk-spirit Britishness, found also in the Carry Ons, Arkwright’s corner shop, anything involving Richard Wattis and, latterly, Peter Kay’s Phoenix Club. There were 69 episodes of Are You Being Served?, stretching from September 1972 until April 1985. That’s to say, the programme covered the entirety of my later childhood and early adulthood, and 22 million people tuned in every week. If it’s a shop, there were never many customers. There was plenty of time, therefore, for the cast to mess about. And, as with the Home Guard platoon in

Dad’s Army, or the National Servicemen in Malaya in It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, or the duff holiday-camp stalwarts in Hi-de-Hi!, what we had was a fine ensemble of pantomime ghouls. My favourite was Mollie Sugden’s Mrs Slocombe, in the ladies’ department, her bouffant hair in mad shades of purple or bright red. The sheer ribaldry of the gynaecology jokes, ie feline references, makes me wonder even now whether the seventies was either very innocent or very sophisticated: ‘Ooh, what about this fog? My pussy’s been gasping all night.’ Mrs Slocombe’s legendary pussy, firmly remaining offscreen, was always


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Articles inside

Getting Dressed: William Dalrymple and Olivia

5min
pages 92-97

Ask Virginia Ironside

5min
pages 98-100

Crossword

3min
pages 89-90

Taking a Walk: Blean Woods

3min
pages 87-88

Overlooked Britain: Park Lane’s Animals in War

6min
pages 82-84

How the British made the

6min
pages 80-81

On the Road: Maurice Gran

4min
pages 85-86

Bird of the Month: Common

2min
page 79

Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

2min
pages 69-70

Drink Bill Knott

4min
page 73

Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson

4min
page 68

Television Frances Wilson

4min
page 66

Music Richard Osborne

3min
page 67

Film: Downton Abbey

3min
page 64

History David Horspool

4min
pages 61-62

Bad Relations, by Cressida

5min
pages 59-60

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, by Simon Kuper

4min
page 56

Circus of Dreams Adventures in the 1980s Literary World, by John

4min
pages 57-58

English Gardening Eccentrics by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

4min
pages 54-55

The Palace Papers, by Tina

6min
pages 48-50

Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose, by Alison Weir

5min
page 53

Small World Jem Clarke

4min
page 47

Readers’ Letters

8min
pages 44-45

Country Mouse Giles Wood

4min
page 37

The Doctor’s Surgery

3min
page 43

Postcards from the Edge

4min
pages 38-40

Town Mouse

3min
page 36

Media Matters Stephen Glover

4min
page 35

Never too old for netball

4min
pages 32-34

The genius behind Casablanca Nick Brown

6min
pages 30-31

The first child star, William

4min
page 29

How to buy a picture

6min
pages 26-28

My two dads Allegra Huston

6min
pages 22-23

Branston, king of pickles

4min
pages 24-25

The Old Un’s Notes

9min
pages 5-8

Are You Being Served? turns 50 Roger Lewis

7min
pages 14-15

The joy of dropping out

3min
page 21

1950s school segregation

4min
page 11

Long live oldie Luddites

4min
pages 16-17

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

4min
page 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

4min
page 10

The Bomber Harris recipe

7min
pages 18-20
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