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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 |
