15 March 2007

Goodbye Mr. Humphries


Sad and belated news (I’m a couple of weeks behind as usual), I’ve just found out that John Inman passed away March 8th. Are You Being Served was one of the staple shows I grew up watching (disclosure: I caught it in reruns of course since I did not actually exist when it was in its first run), it was a Friday or Saturday night PBS thing that our family did until us kids were all too cool to stay at home. We usually watched some combination of AYBS with Fawlty Towers (again reruns), Blackadder later in the 80s and often we were forced to sit through Rumpole of the Bailey. This all took place way, way, way back in the days where there was one TV in the whole house, we only had antenna channels and the final decision for what we watched rested with the pater familias.

Anyhow, here's a good clip of John Inman as Mr. Humphries taking over as the Bliss Girl in the store



Having spent the last few hours scouring clips of these shows I think I have a new understanding of how my sense of humour developed the way it did and I'm a little surprised I was exposed to these shows but not allowed to watch Married with Children for some reason! A plethora of sexual double entendres to corrupt a young mind -thanks mom and dad.

1 comment:

Dr J said...

Never could stand AYBS, its humour to my taste being much closer to pantomime than farce. ("If it's loud, it's funny!") But, God, that show was on forever: more than two decades, I think.

As for your parents, well, as Mr Larkin would say, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." ;-)

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