Saved by the catchphrase but lost in time
Are You Being Served? BBC One
Just hearing the theme tune from Are You Being Served?, with its parping horns and ringing cash registers, was enough to evoke a Proustian rush back to the Seventies. Unsuspecting viewers might have felt compelled to don flares, sip Blue Nun and scoff scampi from a basket.
However, this revival of Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft’s department store sitcom got the BBC’s vintage comedy season off to a shaky start.
This return to retail relic Grace Brothers saw all the familiar characters back on the first floor for a reunion romp without much of a plot, but with more double entendres than a Carry On box set.
That the episode was written by Derren Litten, creator of ITV’s Benidorm, said it all. Hardly the most subtle of writers, Litten crammed in the innuendoes with a crowbar. Jokes phoned ahead to announce their impending arrival. It made Mrs Brown’s Boys look like PG Wodehouse.
Litten knowingly held back the show’s famous catchphrases to tease us. It was 12 minutes before candyfloss-haired Mrs Slocombe (played by a gurning, hammy Sherrie Hewson) made the first reference to her pussy and 17 minutes until Mr Humphries (Jason Watkins) trilled “I’m free”. Both were greeted with cheers, yet it wasn’t enough to save this turgid, interminable half-hour.
New character Mr Conway (a likeable performance by Kayode Ewumi) was there not only to add diversity but also to provide a postmodern chorus by giggling at gags and rolling his eyes at plot contrivances – as was geezerish Young Mr Grace ( Gavin & Stacey’s Mathew Horne doing a passable Del Boy Trotter impression).
Part of the problem with this production was that the period context was downright confused. The trimmings smacked of the original Seventies setting, so it was a surprise when one character clumsily mentioned that it was 1988. References to Simple Minds, Daley Thompson and Levi’s 501 jeans suggested something circa 1984. Meanwhile, Mr Grace expressed his determination to drag the department store into the Eighties.
But the Mr Humphries character, played by John Inman in the original, was the biggest misfire. Watkins is a fine actor (he won a Bafta last year for The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies), but here he was doing a toecurling tribute act, cartoonishly camp and straining too hard for laughs. It made one appreciate Inman’s iconic portrayal even more.
It wasn’t so much that the humour was un-PC or especially offensive. It was just tired and limp. There was a lazy reliance on lavatorial humour and casual misogyny: sniggering at Mrs Slocombe’s “intimate lady wipes”, leering at lingerie-clad mannequins, making cheap cracks at nagging wives or battleaxe mothers. There were mothball-worthy gags about bridge clubs, cats called Tiddles, spicy food and sewage.
It was presumably aiming for the broad appeal of Mrs Brown, but instead of primetime BBC One, this felt like lunchtime UK Gold. Stalwarts such as Only Fools and Horses’ John Challis, playing pompous floor-walker Captain Peacock, and Coronation Street’s Roy Barraclough, as doddery Mr Grainger, deserved better material to work with.
Which comedic corpse is next for exhumation? On the Buses, Love Thy Neighbour or It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum? No, let’s leave unreconstructed Seventies sitcoms where they belong: remembered fondly as emblematic of their era, forgiven for their foibles, not dusted down decades later to look like lumbering dinosaurs.
If BBC bigwigs need any guidance on this, well, I’m free.