This month (thanks to Ava Alexis’s Christmas presents) I have been mostly watching You Rang, M'Lord? – Croft and Perry’s final sitcom offering – this time in an unusual 50 minute format… a sitcom length that had only just become known after Only Fools and Horses expanded to it …and has seldom been repeated as an experiment….
Watching it 30 years on from its original broadcast I appreciated it much more than the first time out …perhaps because the storylines are ongoing and I was able to follow them watching the episodes sequentially. When it first went out I was …well, young and always out …so though I liked the show and the premise I never really got that into it… Perhaps it stands up better now because of the distance in time from the broadcast of the preceding Hi-De-Hi. John Cleese said that one of the problems with using the same cast twice is that the audience then have the same expectations. At least that’s how he explained Fierce Creatures being a flop. Watching this again it’s much easier to accept Su Pollard, Paul Shane and Jeffrey Holland as their new different characters. Although there are similarities between Ted Bovis and Alf Stokes they are more recognisable as different performances now to me … similarly Spike and James Twelvetrees. Although I did find the name Tewlvetrees a bit hard to get my head round… Well, it could have been worse… Sevenoaks? Maybe we’ve all got more sophisticated as audiences these days and are more willing to accept actors in different roles. I saw an old TV interview on Facebook the other day where a forgotten TV interviewer interrogated Harry H Corbett for about 5 minutes on being typecast like it was the only thing to say…
Anyway…
Particularly clever is that Alf Stokes although lambasting the upper classes for their unearned wealth is so greedy that he immediately undermines his own arguments. Shane does a great job of making a potentially very unlikable character sympathetic. His relationship with Mrs Blanche Lipton (Brenda Cowling) is particularly upsetting as he spins her ever more elaborate lies for pecuniary gain. Even going so far as to have her cooking cakes for orphans that don’t exist that he sells commercially. When his daughter Ivy (Su Pollard) forces him to put an end to this obnoxious deception he is so deluded as to tell her that she is spoiling her inheritance – actually believing there were enough Mrs Liptons in the world (with their “excellent cherry cake”s that it could be somehow scaled up.
The upstairs cast is fleshed out with Donald Hewlett and Michael Knowles reprising their double act in a different form from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum… all of them are strangled by wanting relationships across class lines. The ensemble cast is too huge to detail individually but particularly memorable is Henry Livingstone (Perry Benson) the boot boy orphan so far down the pecking order that he hasn’t got a birthday “because I’m an orphan”. Although he’d not quite the bottom… below even him is the visiting domestic help Mabel “that’ll be nice” Wheeler (Barbara New) who isn’t allowed to even eat with the servants but instead is doled out leftover scraps to take home.
There seem to be more roles for women in this sitcom with monocled lesbian "Cissy" Meldrum (Catherine Rabett) and her cattish snobby sister Poppy (Susie Brann) rounding out the Meldrum family upstairs… or do I mean Downstairs? ….her eventual lumbering of herself with nice-but-dim Jerry (John D. Collins – finally given a role with more to say than “Hello!” in Allo Allo) is particularly sad… while Teddy (Michael Knowles) Meldrum’s eventual marriage to Rose is quite an uplifting ending for a character initially introduced to us as a sexual predator … would it be allowed today?
At the end when the Meldrums loose a lot of money it’s amusing to finally see Mabel and Henry move up the ranks… whilst other characters and relationships are left more open-ended…
Anyway, it was fun to watch again. I particularly enjoyed that they got Stuart McGugan back from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum ,the invention of the Whoopee Cushion (which has a fictional genesis not too far from its real life history), bakelite, ahead of their time jokes about slavery, Captain Dolby, Teddy's analysis of Bertie Wooster, Guy Siner (as Noel Coward) and Donald Hewlett’s intonation when he pronounces on the fortunes of the “Union Jack Rubber Company” …”Yes, that’s just one of our lines…”
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