Via Britbox, Mr. Humphries meeting a goat.
The department store Britcom “Are You Being Served?” ran for over a decade, 1972 to 1985. It saw the young, vaguely mod Miss Brahms age into a woman of about the chronological age of a Season 1 Mrs. Slocombe, though her character remains shopgirl. It saw various casting changes, but with a core group sticking it out the whole way through: the aforementioned ladies, plus Mr. Humphries, Captain Peacock, and Mr. Rumbold.
We have already delved into the so-so 2016 remake, which lasted just one episode. Now it is time to discuss the two whole seasons (1992 and 1993) of spinoff, from the original creators, and with the original main cast in their old roles. The fashions are, all of a sudden, something I recognize from my own lived experience, as well as from 1990s sitcoms: what I thought of as bat mitzvah dresses were, not surprisingly, formalwear for young women, a category that includes Miss Brahms. Mrs. Slocombe is a wardrobe clone of Fran’s mother on “The Nanny” (1993-1999).
The whole thing is a bit “Nanny”-ish, actually: the cartoonish 1990s exploration of British class divides (Mr. Sheffield and Niles the butler…), the fish-out-of-water working-class urbanites simultaneously living it up and serving their betters in a mansion, the bawdiness and innuendo. It is, in other words, a solid 1990s sitcom. It also makes zero sense, but is that a problem?
First item on the zero-sense-making front: the premise itself. The story is that the department store staff at Grace Brothers were left with no normal retirement funds when the store went out of business, but instead bequeathed a country manor house owned by Mr. Grace. The will stipulates that they’re not allowed to sell it, but they can live in it and use it to run a business.
(It must be mentioned that the late Mr. Grace’s lawyer, who sets all this in motion, is played by Michael Bilton aka Basil from “Waiting For God” aka an aristocrat Hyacinth mistakes for a gardener on “Keeping Up Appearances.”)
It goes entirely unexplained how all of these people are available, at a moment’s notice, to leave their lives in London behind and (Sybil Fawlty voice here) run a hotel. Don’t they have apartments with leases? Anything? Captain Peacock and Mr. Rumbold had both been married in the original, but there’s no mention of what happened with their wives. Where did these women go??
There is some sense-making continuity, in the form of Mrs. Slocombe’s much-discussed pussy. In the spinoff, said pussy is still used in innuendo catchphrases, but is also a character (“Tiddles”) in her own right, a fluffy gray cat who bears a certain resemblance to a fluffy gray poodle I know, who has watched said spinoff without consenting to do so. It’s only right for The Pussy to get screentime, given that the entire show is set on a farm with lots of animals: chickens, pigs, cows, and a goat.
This brings us to further not-making of sense. Yes, it’s the city-mouse country-mouse sitcom trope. But what is going on with this farm? And why even is there a farm attached to this manor house? Why, if they’re in a village in 1990s England, not North Sentinel Island, are their lives so remote? Why does this farm not have a car or truck, but rely on horse-drawn carriages? How can the people living in the house both need to go milk cows every time they have tea, and also have access to microwaveable tandoori chicken?
But disbelief gets suspended, and soon enough you’re just going along with the flow, accepting that the workplace dynamics of London department store Grace Brothers have replicated themselves in a country hotel. Mr. Rumbold returns as jovial, inept manager, because why not. It never felt like a real store; the deeper truth was in the staff’s interactions. So this holds up, even if the business model or whatever does not. They all still refer to one another by title and last name, this despite being so familiar with one another at this point that Miss Brahms and Mrs. Slocombe share a bedroom (but not a bed; more on bed-sharing in a moment.)
The two main spinoff additions to the cast are a farmer and his young (?) daughter, Morris and Mavis Moulterd (pronounced “mole turd” of course). They’re intensely rustic, and serve to offer romantic (?) plotlines for two of the old guard. Mr. Moulterd had known Mrs. Slocombe back when she was a land girl in Tiverton (note: I have just googled “land girl” and “Tiverton”) named Rachel Yiddle (there I did not need to google the significance). Whether he had known her in the biblical sense is a point of regular dispute. (He says yes, she shudders at the thought.) She does not want her former name known—insert digression on British antisemitism—and also wanted to give the impression that she’d been a young child during the war, and not a robust young woman, the latter of which would make her old, and she won’t be having that. (She is old. They all are!) Requited or not, Mrs. Slocombe was Mr. Moulterd’s first love.
Then there’s poor Mavis. How old is Mavis? 15? 35? She makes reference to her father giving her “the strap,” although how much this is meant to be a literal reference to corporal punishment, how much a bawdy moment aimed at summoning the image of more consensual forms of whipping, is, like everything else on the show, unclear. But wait for it, it’s about to get really murky…
Starting their first night at the manor house, Mavis sneaks into bed with Mr. Humphries. He’s too stunned to respond. Word soon gets out that this has happened, and is happening nightly, and for Mr. Humphries’s longtime colleagues, it makes no sense. While the original series only ever states this in innuendo, he is not so much gay as the encyclopedia entry on flamboyantly gay. He has aged into a kind of sexless bachelor, as have his hetero counterparts, so this is neither here nor there. Or is it?
In the original, Mr. Humphries was always referring to “camping” escapades with his “friends.” He would openly ogle good-looking (and not-so-good-looking) male customers, and an ep would sometimes end with him literally in the arms of a man. But in the spinoff, he’s flattered that people imagine he’s got a lady love, and sort of struts around butchly, with a pipe.
It’s made extremely clear that nothing intimate is happening between Mavis and Mr. Humphries. Less clear is why she has bunked up with him in the first place. Something about country life and bed-sharing to keep warm? A chaste sort of crush? Or, as other characters discuss, a naive country-girl innocence about the existence of men like that to begin with?
Is this a depressing AIDS-years re-closeting? A sign of the 1990s as a less progressive time on some issues than the 1970s and early 1980s? Or did I just fall asleep at key moments in the episodes?
Mavis has a jealous ex-boyfriend in the village, who often threatens (along with his male friends) to beat up Mr. Humphries. But this is always phrased in euphemism, something about “rough” boys grabbing at Mr. Humphries in a dark alleyway. At one point I think he actually looks at the camera and says something like, “decisions, decisions.”
So maybe it’s fine. It’s certainly no less fine than the delightful moment when Mrs. Slocombe, also on their first night at the manor house, looks under her bed, informing Tiddles the Pussy that she’s checking to see if “there’s a man” under it, and upon confirming there is not, saying something like, “better luck next time.”