Porridge served up again

VIEWERS of a certain age will have looked at last night’s TV schedules with a certain degree of suspicion: ARE YOU BEING SERVED? and PORRIDGE (BBC1)? Had they fallen through a gap in time to an era when the BBC still made genuinely funny comedies?

It was the start of the BBC’s Sitcom Season, a celebration of 60 years of making the nation chortle and it was either brave or foolhardy, depending on your point of view, to try to remake some of the greats.

The makers of the programmes tried two quite different tacks, one more successful than the other.

The first and better of the two was Are You Being Served? Perhaps to pre-empt any criticism the episode was entitled “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and the action had been updated to 1988, enough to distance it from the original but still far enough back in time for the modus operandi of the modern world to be irrelevant.

And what we got was a cast essentially doing impersonations of Mollie Sugden et al. Sherrie Hewson mugged frenetically as Mrs Slocombe, Jason Watkins minced around as Mr Humphries (“minced” being an entirely appropriate word then and probably all but illegal now), John Challis strutted his stuff as Captain Peacock and most importantly of all – and the subject of much heated debate beforehand – Mrs Slocombe’s pussy did get a couple of mentions. The only nod to a changing Britain was the introduction of a black character, Kayode Ewumi as Mr Conway, but in no time he was camping it up with the rest of them.

The plot was irrelevant. This was a half-hour to remind us of the glory days and by the time Mr Humphries cried, “I’m free!” he practically brought the house down. The humour was pure 1970s innuendo:

“Mr Lucas was always trying to stamp her receipts.” “I don’t get it.” “Neither did Mr Lucas.” But the odd and unexpected outcome of all this was that it was actually funny.

There was no swearing, none of the grimness of the likes of the ghastly Fleabag but, instead, a lot of puns and innuendo that actually made you smirk. Could modern comedy writers not learn something from this?

There was no swearing in Porridge either, although there was the famous “naff off”, a phrase invented for the original to reflect the fact lags did tend to use bad language but it couldn’t be voiced on TV (those were the days).

But the approach was different. Rather than trying to recreate the original (totally impossible) this Porridge took place in the modern day and Nigel Norman Fletcher (Kevin Bishop) was the old Fletch’s grandson. In the nick for cyber crime, he was called upon to use his nefarious talents to help out Richie Weeks (Ralph Ineson), the updated version of the sinister Grouty. But, as before, the plot was irrelevant.

There was a mild English prison guard and a shouty Scottish one; our hero was again called upon to share his cell, except that the dynamic was reversed. As the new Fletch was a young man, his cellmate Lotterby (Dave Hill) was much older – and indeed had known Nigel’s grandad, who had been set up in a pub by Godber after his release, he told us, and never offended again. Nice touch.

All credit to everyone involved, but they just could not recreate the chemistry between Ronnie Barker and Richard Beckinsale. There’s a reason that show has gone down as one of the all-time greats.