are you being served?

At the end of last year, we talked a little about how some sitcoms were shot far closer to transmission than I ever expected. But sometimes, such stories just seem a little too unbelievable. Take Are You Being Served? – or, specifically, Wikipedia’s episode guide for the show. If you scan your eyes down that list until you reach Series 5, you will come across something rather odd.

Apparently, every single episode of Series 5 was recorded the day before it aired. For example, “Mrs Slocombe Expects”, shown on the 25th February 1977, was recorded on the 24th February 1977. This continues right up until the last episode of Series 5, “It Pays to Advertise”; this was shown on the 8th April 1977, and was apparently recorded on the 7th April 1977.

Something smells fishy. Being recorded close to transmission is one thing. The entire series being shot the day before TX is quite another. So let’s take a sneaky look at the paperwork for that first episode of the series, “Mrs Slocombe Expects”.

Paperwork for episode Mrs Slocombe Expects - all relevant information transcribed in main body text

Through that haze of atrocious reproduction, we can just about read the recording date for the episode: 18th February 1977. Actually very close to transmission – exactly a week before, in fact – but certainly not the previous day.

And the same holds true for the rest of the series. “The Old Order Changes” was recorded on the 11th March for transmission on the 18th March, “Goodbye Mr. Grainger” was recorded on the 25th March for transmission on the 1st April, and “It Pays to Advertise” was recorded on the 1st April for transmission on the 8th April. And while I’m missing information on two of the episodes, it’s not too difficult to work out from all this that “A Change is as Good as a Rest” was almost certainly recorded on the 25th February for transmission on the 4th March, and “Founder’s Day” was recorded on the 4th March for transmission on the 11th March.

As to how somebody updated Wikipedia with this particular piece of incorrect information, who knows. It could perhaps be a simple confusion between “a day” and “a week”. But despite it triggering my Spidey-sense, this kind of misinformation is all too easily believable to some, because it’s so damn specific. There’s no actual need to quote the recording dates in the first place; if somebody has bothered to do so, it’s extremely easy to just assume that they are the real deal. Indeed, this “fact” about some episodes of the show being recorded the day before TX has been quoted to me at least twice before.

It ain’t true. And to be fair, given past experience, Wikipedia will probably be corrected by somebody within an hour of me posting this.¹

I’ve been asked before why I don’t fix things on Wikipedia myself. Without going into too many details, I struggle a little with Wikipedia’s guidelines on various things. Not to the point where I want to do some massive rant about them… but I’m not going to get involved myself. Sorry, Wikipedians, but my work is best done here. ↩

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are you being served?

Mrs. Slocombe, Mr. Humphries and Miss Brahms as backing singers

Something very odd happens in Episode 54 of Are You Being Served?, you know. Something which has never happened before.

Mind you, Series 8 of the show had already seen its fair share of upheaval. We wave goodbye to Mr. Goldberg, see in Mr. Grossman… then four episodes in, wave goodbye to Mr. Grossman and say hello to Mr. Klein, turning the Men’s department into a full-on ridiculous revolving door situation. We also say goodbye to Mr. Lucas, who admittedly had been lessening in importance for years, but was our original audience identification figure in the show’s early days. In his place comes the enormous waste of time and space which is Mr. Spooner.¹ Finally, Young Mr. Grace disappears – he briefly returns for the 1981 Christmas special, but that’s it – and hands over the reins to Old Mr. Grace, who somehow manages to be even more of a creepy fucker than his predecessor.

Elsewhere, there are signs that the show itself is getting restless. While Croft displayed a taste for expanding the scope of his other sitcoms – with perhaps a few rickety film sequences too many in Dad’s Army and the like – for the first seven series, Are You Being Served? stayed resolutely within the walls of the Grace Brothers department store.² Most of the action takes place on the shop floor of the Ladies and Gentlemen’s departments, the canteen, or an office. Occasionally they might sneak into the boardroom, and the show took the odd trip to other departments – most memorably in Series 5’s “A Change Is as Good as a Rest”, where they all go and work in the Toy Department for a week. But we never, ever go outside the building. Grace Brothers is all we ever see.

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I know there will be Mr. Spooner fans reading this. Sorry. *pulls that face Mr. Spooner pulls* ↩
Ignore the film. In every respect. ↩

are you being served?

A Brief Investigation into Recording Dates for Are You Being Served?

Beyond Grace Brothers