Description
Are You Being Served?
The Complete Package
All 10 Series PLUS 5 Christmas Specials. 12-DVD Box Set.
Includes over 3 and a half hours of exclusive bonus content.
12 discs. OPTIONAL SUBTITLES. Comedy. Colour and Black & White. Years: 1972-1985.
Running time approx 34 hours. Includes five Christmas Specials.
Stars include: Mollie Sugden, Trevor Bannister, Frank Thornton, John Inman, Wendy Richard, Arthur Brough, Arthur English, James Hayter, Alfie Bass and more.
Welcome to Grace Brothers, an ailing department store where the management are beginning to show signs of wear and the staff are clashing! All episodes from Series 1 – 10 including the pilot episode and 5 Christmas Specials. This set also features over 3½ hours of bonus content unique to this collection. Each episode also features interesting facts. Sit back and indulge in hours of endless innuendo, hilarity and mischief with the staff of Grace Brothers!
Created and written by David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, the show follows the misadventures and mishaps of the staff of the retail ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing departments in the flagship department store of a fictional chain called Grace Brothers in London.
With the staff up to their necks in shop floor scandal and shenanigans, prepare for magnificent displays of scheming, high jinks and dressing up as well as the usual impeccable, if unconventional, service from Mr Humphries, “I’m Free” and Mrs Slocombe with the outrageously dyed bouffant hair, who always referred to her pet cat as her pussy: “Animals are very psychic; the least sign of danger and my pussy’s hair stands on end”. Other staff members include the naïve Miss Brahms, a young, attractive, cockney sales assistant; haughty floorwalker Captain Peacock who fought in the North Africa Campaign of WWII but is accused of actually being a corporal in the Service Corps and never seeing combat; Mr James, the womanising junior salesman, a source of irritation to the female sales staff and “Young” Mr Grace, the very old, very rich, but stingy store owner, always surrounded by attractive young women.
Are You Being Served? features humour based on innuendo, misunderstanding, mistaken identity, farce, and occasional slapstick. There are outrageous costumes which the characters were sometimes required to wear for store promotions and gaudy store displays sometimes featuring malfunctioning robotic mannequins.
The series was also a hilarious parody of the British class system. This is enacted through conversations between maintenance men and sales personnel, or sales staff and management. The show may not be as “politically correct” as today’s comedies, but it remains a British classic, portraying workers making the best of their mundane lives through humour and fun.
