8.4

Are you being served? Christmas Special

As usual, I’ll have to confess my ignorance and say I never watched any Are you being served? before this DVD of four Christmas specials. Now that I have, all I can say is I’ll try and hunt down DVDs of regular episodes. This is such a hilarious show. Think about it: set on the clothing floor of Grace Bros in London. The characters are almost everything in this show. They drive the comedy forward. 

The writing is fantastic. There are many puns and innuendos, some of which have waned with the times, and others which are too British for me to get. But that still leaves a whole lot of ace material that knocks you over every few minutes. 

What I like most is the way the characters are such piquant exaggerations of Britishness. There’s Mrs Slocombe (Mollie Sugden, who recently appeared in Little Britain) with her toffee-accent, coloured hair and endless mentions of her pussy; Captain Peacock (Frank Thornton), the arch-Establishmentarian who needs to be reminded Queen Victoria is dead; the forever-camp Mr Humphries (John Inman) plus others. The banter and taunting between them is a gem to watch. 

There Christmas episodes are from 1975, ’76, ’79 and ’81 and are well worth seeing. I don’t want to give too much away here because the effect would be spoilt. I thoroughly enjoyed myself watching these and it was a reminder of the rich comic history of British TV and the quest I’m on to always find more. I found myself laughing out loud from the surrealistic elements of some sketches, especially the one where they try and perform a stage-show of nursery rhyme characters—this is must-see TV! 

Felix Staica