Rest in Peace, Mollie Sugden of “Are You Being Served?”

I like Brit TV. Blame those educational channels and Masterpiece Theater. Of course, they are mostly oldies, like Fawlty Towers, To the Manor Born, Last of the Summer Wine, Ab Fab, Are You Being Served? and Waiting for God and some of the new ones like The Royal, Kingdom and Doc Martin are at least a year or two or even three behind. It was either Thursdays or Saturday nights that I got to appreciate Brit TV, but now that they are being sold in DVDs, there’s less of a need to recycle them over and over.

One has to notice that these oldies but goldies were more a playful exercise of the British class system and not of the American. Add to that, blacks didn’t appear regularly on Brit TV until closer to this time, as immigrants (read: the formerly colonized) from the Caribbean and Africa became citizens and had children. And they wanted to see themselves. They wanted to be included. They had the riots–which weren’t so played up in our media–to prove it, too.

It’s still not good over there compared to here. I read somewhere that black men are 6-10 times more likely to be picked up or rousted on suspicion of anything criminal in Britain, so it is not a paradise of racial understanding. Many, especially in the middle part of the island, have a rather closed attitude about the darkness right on their doorstep, similar to how certain individuals in our Southern and border states and some Western states (and particular suburbs and neighborhoods) view black people here.

This was probably another reason why people hanker after these shows in the same way “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and “The Andy Griffith Show” were used to palliate Southerners during the Sixties. Looks more normal over there than over here. Everything’s okay our way. And they’re just like us, except for the cute accent. It’s also an afterglow, I think, from the British Invasion of the Sixties, which included cultural phenoms as well as fashion and music, “The Avengers” on ABC and “The Prisoner” on CBS.

I like these shows, if I want a laugh. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at some ’stupid’ white people who really know how to act. My late father liked the British; he had been assigned there after he was drafted into the Air Force. It was just after World War II, and they still hadn’t gone off rationing in the Fifties. No doubt, the genes told, even at a distance. And yes, my dad smoked a pipe and wore a vest with his business suits.

So in between all the ruckus about Michael Jackson, it’s hard to pick up that Karl Malden has died, and across the pond, that Mollie Sugden, who played the Grace Bros. saleswoman Mrs. Slocombe in Are You Being Served? which ran from 1972 to 1985, has also died. She was 86, and had been in failing health for some years. But she died peacefully in her sleep at Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford on July 1 of natural causes. Of the original cast of the popular series known on both sides of the Atlantic, only Trevor Bannister (Mr. Lucas), Frank Thornton (Captain Peacock), Nicholas Smith (Mr. Rumbold), and Mike Berry (Mr. Spooner) remain.

Sugden was well-known for playing “fearsome battleaxes,” and “overpowering and snooty women” on British TV. From the Telegraph.co.uk:

She quickly found her strength was in comedy and she was happiest in comedy dramas.

It was as the formidable Mrs Hutchinson in The Liver Birds that she started to show her true potential. It was a series that was so popular in the late 60s and early 70s that it was revived in the late 90s using the original cast.

She was the star of many other comedies, including Come Back Mrs Noah, That’s My Boy and My Husband And I, which she made with her husband.

Butit was as the bossy sales lady Betty Slocombe in Are You Being Served? that she was best known. The long-running television comedy was such a hit that a feature film was made based on the series.

She achieved celebrity status, particularly on television, and for a while enjoyed a change of direction in her career with her own slot on the consumer programme That’s Life.

Yet her tremendous success backfired in 1988 when ITV bosses decided not to use her in any more programmes.

One programme director at the time was quoted as saying: “If I see another situation comedy starring Mollie Sugden, I will die.”

Come Back Mrs. Noah was called the one of the worst sitcoms ever produced in Britain, but Sugden recovered from the debacle, when Are You Being Served? hit the United States, and both she and the late John Inman–as Mrs. Betty Slocombe and as Wilberforce Humphries respectively–became instant stars.

Even with hair that changed color–wild colors like purple, lime green and orange–with each segment, Mrs. Slocombe affected British middle-class morality. She tried to sound “upmarket” at times, but she managed to slaughter the English language. It was hinted at several times on the show that when much younger, she seduced Mr. Grace into giving her a better job as a saleswoman on the floor. Now middle-aged, she always managed to have a nip of gin with her best friend, Mrs. Axelby, and together they would look for new conquests at discos and roller rinks–and she would pester the younger men at Grace Bros., like Mr. Lucas and even Mr. Humphries. Sugden as Slocombe was also wickedly adept using the double entendre (for example, when she spoke about her pussy–pet cat Tiddles–that is). Her famous catchphrase was, “I am unamimous in that.” Mollie Sugden was invited to appear on the American stage in 1994, in a non-singing role in Donizetti’s opera, La Fille Du Regiment, and was invited to appear on PBS stations to help drum up contributions during Pledge Weeks. She also would appear as a kind of special guest in other British drama and comedy series, somewhat diminished but very much alive.

Her agent, Joan Reddin, said that Sugden never recovered from the death of her husband, William Moore, who was also an actor, and helped her through all the low times—of which there were many in their profession—and the high times. “They were very much in love. She started to go down when he died.” Mollie Sugden is survived by her twin sons, Robin and Simon, born in 1964, and who were at her side when she transitioned.

~ by blksista on July 4, 2009.