Are You Being Served?

You Have Been Watching... Are You Being Served?

The BBC is celebrating 60 years of British television sitcoms with a series of remakes, including Are You Being Served? We take a look back at its creators, the characters, and the brilliant comedy actors who played them.

David Croft would be 'turning in his grave' at remakes

Sitcom legend Melvyn Hayes has gone to war on the Dad's Army film and Are You Being Served? re-make, saying they would have creator David Croft "turning in his grave".

The star, who played Bombardier "Gloria" Beaumont in It Ain't Half Hot Mum - another of the writer's hits - demanded they "let old TV series lie".

Not so the British B-movie. Studios making big-screen comedies in the Seventies merrily filched ideas from the big Bakelite box in the corner. Few British comedy stars escaped the pull of the Odeon and with every adaptation came an unusual twist.

Tony Hancock became a Bohemian artist. Morecambe and Wise got mixed up in Soviet spy rings and banana republics. Alf Garnett took LSD. Less controversially, the cast of stars of Are You Being Served? went on holiday to Spain. Many of these films are regarded, quite rightly, as inferior to the programmes which spawned them.

Some of them are still pretty good, though. Porridge: the Movie does the original proud, while the film of Man About the House goes slightly mad towards the end, taking the cast to the Thames Television studios for strange encounters with Spike Milligan and, confusingly, the real life stars of fellow sitcom Love Thy Neighbour.