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
