Cheeky comedy classic that served viewers well
‘The main man you had to impress was John Inman. It was like getting royal approval’
and John dressed up in wonderful gangster outfits. Mollie did a fantastically good Mae West impression that day.”
DESPITE the show’s success, it wasn’t always fun to make. Numerous cast members have attested that, despite the on screen “gang” atmosphere of Grace Brothers, some of the actors did not get on and there were numerous stories of backstabbing behind the scenes.
“I remember when I got my first script, my lines still had ‘Mr Lucas’ written on them which were intended for Trevor Bannister – the actor I replaced,” recalls Mike.
“There was definitely some friction over some of the new characters that came into the show. So many of the actors during the early years of the show had died in real life that they had to be replaced.
“And some of them weren’t, in the eyes of Wendy Richard, Mollie Sugden and John Inman, quite up to it.
“There was an innocence to those original cast members and the way they delivered their lines.
“Towards the end, some of the sketches were probably a bit too smutty.” Are You Being Served? aired for the final time on April Fool’s Day 1985. In the final episode, number 69, Mike was demoted to lift operator. Increasingly tired scripts and the emergence of alternative comedy shows such as The Young Ones and French And Saunders were making Grace Brothers look like it belonged to another era.
“I don’t think it’s aged particularly well,” admits Mike. “The jokes were very much of their time. But it still gets repeated all the time. It’s a period piece for sure – but a very good one.”
Mike recorded a version of Come Outside with Wendy Richard, who had joined EastEnders as Pauline Fowler, just after Are You Being Served? finished. She had already had one hit with the song in 1962 with the singer Mike Sarne.
“It was supposed to be a big Christmas single but, sadly, Wendy couldn’t really sing in time or in tune at all.
“That meant we couldn’t perform it live and the single didn’t catch light,” he smiles.
“Wendy claimed EastEnders wouldn’t let her promote it but it all became a bit of a mess.”
Today the cult of Are You Being Served? thrives online. Fan websites are chock-full of cast info, original scripts and archive magazine and newspaper features about the show.
And while department stores in the mould of Grace Brothers may be vanishing from our high streets, for Mike, its winning formula has a lifespan that will outlast even his impressively long-running career.
“I wanted to keep something from the set towards the end of the run,” he reveals. “But the props were total tat. I looked at the dresses on the mannequins and at the back, they all had huge stretches of material cut out of them and bull-clipped together. The costume department told me they had to sabotage the dresses otherwise the extras would nick them.
“That said everything about how funny working on the show was – you definitely wouldn’t have wanted to buy anything from Grace Brothers. I shop online these days but for any serious quality I still tend to go to department stores such as John Lewis.
“Though I think I may well have avoided Grace Brothers had they ever existed in real life. In all honesty, I doubt they’d have been much real competition to the likes of Harvey Nichols or Harrods.”