Television
Pussies galore
John Diamond
You're English, right?' said the cab driver on the way out of Milwaukee airport last week. 'Tell you what, though. That English stuffs the best TV I ever seen.' It's a speech I must have heard a dozen times and the litany of praise is always the same: Masterpiece Theatre (which is to say old BBC costume dramas re-packaged by the Mobil Corp and introduced by Alastair Cooke), Monty Python, Benny Hill. But not this time. 'Yeah, that Are You Being Served?, it's the funniest thing around.' Surely he couldn't mean that Are You Being Served? with its suburban references to gents natty suitings and liberty bodices?
That night I checked the local listings. Milwaukean TV was showing just three British programmes all week: John Mor- timer's Tebbit fantasy Titmuss Regained, To the Manor Born with Penelope Keith and, like the man said, Are You Being Served?. Of course they were all being transmitted on PBS, for however often we hear of the BBC's financial and cultural successes in the US, the fact is that I've never seen a British programme aired on anything other than the low-paying and almost completely unwatched Public Broadcasting System.
I even went so far as to watch an old Are You Being Served?, a show which I remem- ber fondly as a superior sort of comedy of the Donald McGill school but which turned out to be a shabby and dated collec- tion of barely held-together one-liners. The cabby said he particularly liked the show because of the regularity with which the grotesque character played by Molly Sug- den used the double entendre 'pussy', but I had to explain to him that the word doesn't have the same vernacular potency in Britain as it does in the US. 'So it's not that funny then, right?' he said disappointedly.
Certainly it's not as funny as almost any modern American sitcom I can think of. It's a long time since the great British Step- toes and Hancocks so obviously outshone their pappy American contemporaries. Now we have hardly a single home-grown sitcom worth watching and the Americans have half a dozen witty and well-crafted series. Some of the best — Cheers, Golden Girls, Roseanne — get to Britain; others, like Night Court and Married . . . with Chil- dren, only make it to the late-night regional schedules. Let this be a plea then for, at the very least, Married . with Children to get a prime-time network slot in Britain.
The show's protagonists (heroes is entirely the wrong word) are the Bundys. Al is an embittered shoe salesman, his wife Peg is a past-it, tarty, failed housewife and their two children are headed for the same fate. It is, at first sight, the stuff of a hundred unre- markable sitcoms through the ages from Terry and June onwards. The show's Neanderthal sentiments (real men hate women, faggots, work; women can't drive and know only how to spend their hus- bands' hard-earned money) are, equally, nothing new, and perhaps if the show were set in Lewisham or Selly Oak it would stop working. But it has the wittiest scripts which acknowledge real embitterments and frustrations rather than the habitually mawkish ones of TV-land, and it has not one iota of the redeeming sentimentality which would otherwise turn it into a modern-day Flintstones. I rather guess that our TV buyers have kept it off the screen out of a misjudged and misplaced belief that British viewers are in some way above that sort of thing. But then if they were, I'm sure the BBC wouldn't even now be screening a series based on the Are You Being Served? team 20 years on.
In fact in some ITV regions you can find Married . . . with Children buried away in the small hours. It's worth setting your video to catch it.
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