Are You Being Served?

Initially I was confused as to why the characters were talking about Jimmy Connors and Simple Minds until it was stated that the series is set in 1988.

I thought it was a reboot with new actors playing the role of the familiar characters from Are You Being Served. Its final series was broadcast in 1985. In fact this is a more smuttier continuation from the original series. They even reference the holiday to Spain in 1977 and Mr Lucas.

This was a one off as part of the BBC's classic sitcom revival season although I expected this would be commissioned as a full series. Simply I laughed out loud a few times as well as chuckled regularly as the episode went on.

It is a little bit cruder than the original series which had its own share of innuendo laden humour. Mrs Slocombe went overboard with her pussy comments and there was the interaction between Miss Croft and Mr Rumbold which was straight from a Carry On film.

Of course the main interest is to see how well the new cast do with the roles. John Challis was good as Captain Peacock, Justin Edwards looked like a man with a bald wig as Mr Rumbold. Of course the hardest part goes to Jason Watkins who steps into his mother's shoes in this episode but also has to fill John Inman's.

I met John Inman several times in the Isle of Man when he used to tour with his saucy seaside summer season farces. So I am likely to be biased. Inman's Mr Humphries was more a mummy's boy maybe to reflect a time when homosexuality on television was not deemed to be as acceptable as it is today.

Watkin's Humphries is probably more outwardly camp than Inman's. Watkins also got the biggest audience cheer when he said 'I'm free.'

The one big change is Matthew Horne playing a genuinely young Mr Grace, a yuppie who plans to drag the department store into a modern era. This means trying to get rid off the older staff and bringing some new technology. He even gives Mr Rumbold an Amstrad computer.

I did notice one thing that bridged the gap between both versions of Are You Being Served. John Inman and Roy Barraclough both came from Preston.

It's been well marketed, and well advertised, but everyone I've spoken to about it have already written it off as a disaster, and seemed hopeful for it to flop.

I made an effort to watch it with an unbiased opinion, despite having just watched the first three series of the original show. I really enjoyed it, I found it funny, and the whole setup was one I could have believed the original cast doing. The performances were very different, and I would imagine could take time to get used to.

Come on BBC, we've been lacking a quality sitcom for so long, maybe that's the reasoning behind this run of prequels and remakes, but as a fan of the show, Please BBC give us a full run, and let it develop!!

It wasn't perfect, and I can imagine purists will hate it, but it deserves a chance. 7/10

A soulless parody that lacks everything that made the original good. The writing is terrible. I love the original and enjoyed AYBSA spinoff but this reboot is painful to watch.

I wanted to give this a chance as I have loved "are you being served?" ever since I first ran across it on PBS. However, the new actors have completely butchered the characters. I find them irritating, off putting, and bland. It's just not funny, the jokes feel forced. It's actually worse than the movie they made that I made the mistake of buying off of iTunes.

As a devoted fan to the original series, I had high hopes for the further adventures of the team of Grace Brothers. Having just finished watching this episode for a second time, holding out hope I had missed something the first time around, I found it to lack the charm and wit of the original. Granted this is the one episode with this new cast but I found this group of actors to have little to no chemistry together. The way these actors portrayed these classic characters was too far away from the originals. Any good actor should make a role they play theirs but the interpretations presented by these actors not only made me miss the original cast but also made thankful that the BBC passed on making further episodes. It wasn't just the acting that was horrible in this episode the writing was atrocious with forced humor that just didn't come naturally or play smoothly. With a stronger script a different cast maybe things would have turned out different for this remake/retelling of a beloved series.