Are You Being Served - the best Britcom ever?

After having not seen it for years (since it was removed from our PBS station), I recently decided to do a full-on "Are You Being Served" marathon. And by 'full-on', I mean watching the movie after Season 5, watching the two Australian seasons* between Seasons 7 and 8 when they actually aired, and watching "Are You Being Served Again".

I realized how much of this stuff I'd never seen before - our PBS station skipped the Christmas episodes, and both spinoff shows were completely new to me. (I was surprised at how quickly I fell in love with "AYBS Again/Grace and Favour" - and can understand why fans hate that it was cancelled so fast.)

So my question is, isn't AYBS just the best Britcom ever? Easily the most quotable, so many endearing characters, and the uncanny ability to still be entertaining even when the plots started to grow stale.

(* To my absolute frustration, I couldn't watch ALL of the Aussie episodes - one of them, "Mrs. Crawford, Senior Person," doesn't seem to be in circulation. Aaaaarrrgh!)

 

No.

 

There's so many just brilliant British comedies and I'd still give the top two slots to Monty Python's Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers, but there's no denying the greatness of Are You Being Served. The characters are iconic, the performances are memorable, and the collision of laugh-out-loud silliness with how-the-hell-did-they-get-away-with-that bawdiness is explosive. We used to have a VHS tape with about six eps on it taped off of a PBS marathon and if we couldn't decide what to watch, we'd pop it in. It was always perfect. I haven't looked at prices in several years, but it always frustrated me that the series was so expensive on DVD. Oh well, someday I'll own it all.

Grace And Favour is entertaining, but it's always disappointed me in comparison to the original. Almost everything about that series just reeks of a rather cheap sentimentality that was absent from the original. It always made me think that it existed because the original audience wanted desperately to see those characters again but were a bit long in the tooth for the old bawdy 70's humor. Don't misunderstand, I'm glad it exists, but it doesn't hold a candle to the original.

Sadly, Nicholas Smith (Mr. Rumbold) is the only original cast member remaining.

P.S. - the movie version is strangely disappointing, and I have always thought that the main reason is the lack of a laugh track!

 

Naaa, Fawlty Towers.

And Monty Python was the best half-hour show they ever did (not technically a sitcom, more of a sketch show).

 

PBS ran so many excellent British sitcoms and comedy in the 80's and 90's and now you can only get them on dvd. I found this link it's got all the ones I watched plus more I never have seen. http://www.comedy.co.uk/guide/tv/top/

 

Coincidentally, I finished watching the series last month. The show was a mainstay of late night TV watching for me when it ran on PBS in the mid-9os. I'd come home from my second shift job and watch two episodes each night, though they never seemed to make it through the entire series. A while back I finally picked up the series set and started working my way though it. I love the first seven series, right up to the departure of Mr. Lucas.

The last few seasons are really a chore to get through and I think the show really worked best when they had a regular stream of oddball customers coming into the store. I can pretty much chart the decline of the series based on who the rotating cast member was. I wasn't too happy when Mr. Grainger left, though I warmed somewhat to Mr. Tebbs and liked Mr. Goldberg. I hated Mr. Grossman. Mr. Klein was OK.

Mr. Spooner never measured up to Mr. Lucas. The character was just too stupid and couldn't stand up to the rest of the staff like Lucas could. He became more tolerable towards the end.

Don't even get me started on the replacement of Young Mr. Grace by Old Mr. Grace. What were they thinking?!

The last season bounced back a little bit; Old Mr. Grace was gone, there was no senior staff member, and there were occasional episodes where they actually got out of the store.

I'll probably tackle Grace and Favour next - I haven't seen it in years. I need to locate the Australian version. Saw the movie once and hated it.

Overall, I think series like Father Ted, Keeping up Appearances, Black Adder, Black Books, Fawlty Towers, and The Young Ones are superior, simply because they knew when to quit. Absolutely Fabulous is another one that is guilty of going on far too long.

 

It's a very funny show, but not as funny as Keeping Up Appearances or, my favourite, The Last of the Summer Wine.

 

Father Ted or Black Books or It Crowd or....etc NO Are you being served is not even the top 10!

 

"The Bouquet residence, lady of the house speaking!"
"My name is Bouquet, B-U-C-K-E-T."
"Oh! Bucket!"
"It's pronounced 'Bouquet'..."

 

Another vote for farty towels, erm fatty owls.

My wife loves Keeping Up Appearances. Father Ted another fave.

 

Dad's Army

And, more recently, Alan Patridge or even something like Friday Night Dinner.

All better than AYBS, I think.

 

Not even close.
Steptoe, Hancock, Fawlty, Rising Damp, Reggie Perrin, Dad's Army and Father Ted and there's probably more after that.

 

No not even in the top 40.

 

I think it is one of the best comedies ever.

 

I preferred On The Buses. Even after Reg Varney and Olive's husband left the show they kept making series after series.

 

Grew up watching AYBS on PBS. I loved it.
But how 'bout Mr. Bean?

 

I love this show. I worked in a sort of retail store run by Texas State government for a dozen years and I can so relate to much of this show.

 

The Last Of The Summer Wine went on for so long I find it almost intimidating. I'll ALWAYS be coming in in the middle of the story, such as it was! Great show though - the men you pictured here are the cast I remember.

I've probably watched Keeping Up Appearances in its entirety at least three times, but frankly I find it annoying.

 

I admit it's a character flaw, but I like Mr. Bean - the Animated Series. I find the original Mr. Bean series to be something akin to torture.

 

Oh, and I like to quote AYBS while watching The Paradise. I think those two shows should have had a mashup, had they been in production while the cast of AYBS were still alive.

 

Hahaha no way man.

 

I really enjoy "Are You Being Served?", but "The Vicar Of Dibley" is my favorite Britcom. It doesn't have the volume of episodes as AYBS?, but that's part of it's appeal to me.

 

I have Vicar of Dibley on my watch list once I run out of Brit-coms in my current queue. For some reason, I never really got into Mr. Bean. I remember it being everywhere in the late-80s. Wasn't it on MTV or something, or am I crazy?

My shelf currently has series 1 of Dad's Army and Chef! (which I just can't get into).

 

I love Chef! I once suggested it to a co-worker who was a cooking enthusiast and I was very perplexed that he didn't like it. I thought that the titular character's rant about adding salt to a gourmet dish would have won him over.

 

Rock Follies is my nominee. Naw, it's not Fawlty Towers or Reggie Perrin, but it had it's moments.

"Rock Follies followed the exploits of a three-piece girl band, The Little Ladies. The band comprised streetwise Cockney, Dee (played by Julie Covington), well-brought-up deb, Q (Rula Lenska), and bored middle-class housewife, Anna (Charlotte Cornwall)."