Podcasts about are you being served

One department store. Two opinions. Endless awkward laughs.In this episode of TV Tortured, Jacob and Laura brave the polyester jungle of Are You Being Served?, the British sitcom that asks, “What if your coworkers were walking punchlines with questionable sexual tension?” Focusing on the episode “German Week,” they unravel the glorious mess of cultural misunderstandings, suggestive gags, and the passive-aggressive power plays between Mr. Peacock and Mrs. Slocum. Laura's fully onboard the Grace Brothers train (and possibly driving it), while Jacob wonders if it's time to derail. They debate whether retail ever looked this ridiculous, rate the theme song like it's Eurovision, and ultimately agree: this show is a chaotic gem that America could never quite copy. Tune in for nostalgia, nitpicks, and one very British deep dive.Checkout the new Hopecast website:https://thehopecastnetwork.com/Buy Merch here:https://www.bonfire.com/store/the-hopecast-network-swag/This show is brought to you by The Hopecast Networkhttps://www.instagram.com/hopecastnetwork/

April 10-17, 1999 This week Ken wades through a dog related false alarm emergency as he welcomes returning guest Erin Judge and first time guest Jenny Chalikian who have a brand new live record out called "Romantic Comedy: Live! at the Ripped Boddice" Ken, Erin and Jenny discuss Star Trek, Discovery, Xena, the greatness of Jeri Ryan, Star Trek Voyager, hating a Doug Henning future, being gay, gay icons, Hercules, watching TV with your very conservative family, shows shot in New Zealand, Hong Kong action, representation on TV, Dawson's Creek, growing up in Texas, Ken's history with Richard Roundtree, the is Xena butch or not debate, how Jeri Ryan's ex-husband's bad behavior gave us Obama, femme'd out TV stars, Evil Dead The Series, Cynthia Rothrock's greatness, kids who's sketch show was All That, SNL, SNICK, the power of 90s Comedy Central, Are You Being Served?, Alias, why Jennifer Garner always deserves better, Tom Green, Futurama, Family Guy, the post-Simpsons prime time animated world, how Heaven is America, Millenium, X-Files, Walker Texas Ranger, Chuck Norris' syndicated editorial newspaper column, The Awful Truth, Ally McBeal, how television teaches women you either have powerful careers OR a love life but not both, Highlander: The Series, Becker, whatever the hell JAG was, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, loving monsters and loving weeks but not always monsters of the week, how insane people generally are, Laura Kightlinger, Pulp Comics, Kathy Griffith, The Nanny, the Massachusetts factual inacuracies of Dawson's Creek, the double standard of teacher/student relationships dynamics, Delacatessan, Norm, Dr. Quinn, the bizarre-ness of the streaming business model, Irish Wish, Strangers with Candy, Spin City, Just Shoot Me, The Drew Carey Show, nostalgia for Scared Straight, Sabrina the Teenager Witch, Ben Savage working out his family issues via Boy Meets World, Two Guys, a Girl and a Pini's Pizza Place and wishing you could google who somebody is right in front of you because they are clearly famous but you have no idea who they are. 

YES, you can text us! Hector, Mike, Tony, Kyle and Nick join me to talk some TV!Mentioned (among others): Lockerbie, Saturday Night Live's 50th Anniversary, Scavengers Reign, Light Shop, The Agency, Siskel & Ebert, The Night Agent S2, High Potential, John Malecki Unscrewed, Kelsey Cook: Mark your Territory, Son of a Critch S4, Somebody Somewhere S3, Cross, North of North, Abbott Elementary, St. Pierre, C.B. Strike, Your Friend, Nate Bargatze, Wallace and Gromit, Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office, Rake, It's a Sin, By Any Means, Cradle to Grave, Are You Being Served?, The Antiques Roadshow, Blackadder, Lioness, Mayor of Kingstown, John Adams, Cobra Kai, Frasier (reboot), Severance S2, The Pitt, American Primeval, Letterkenny, the Mike Tyson fight on Netflix, Shrinking S2, Apple Cider Vinegar, Beachfront Bargain Hunt Renovation, Below Deck Sailing Yacht, Matlock, Reacher S3, etc. Enjoy!Twitter - Instagram - Website

Jeffrey Holland is probably best known for playing Spike in Hi-De-Hi!, also the stuffy footman James Twelvetrees in You Rang M'Lord? and as Mr. Parkin the Stationmaster in Oh, Dr. Beeching! His first TV role was in an episode of Dixon of Dock Green and his television work includes such shows as It Ain't Half Hot, Mum, Are You Being Served?, Dad's Army, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Russ Abbot's Madhouse. He was in “Talent” written and directed by Victoria Wood at The Menier Chocolate Factory in London and more recently he toured the UK in “Waiting for God” and was in “Brassed Off” at the Wolverhampton Grand. His one-man show, “…and this is my friend Mr Laurel”, a play about legendary film comedian Stan Laurel, has sold out all over the UK. Now Jeffrey has written a memoir, The First Rule of Comedy which is out now and available here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Rule-Comedy-Memories-Moments/dp/1803996390Jeffrey Holland is our guest in episode 464 of My Time Capsule and chats to Michael Fenton Stevens about the five things he'd like to put in a time capsule; four he'd like to preserve and one he'd like to bury and never have to think about again .Buy Jeffrey's memoir, The First Rule of Comedy, here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Rule-Comedy-Memories-Moments/dp/1803996390Follow Jeffrey Holland on X: @JeffHolland07Follow My Time Capsule on Instagram: @mytimecapsulepodcast & Twitter & Facebook: @MyTCpod .Follow Michael Fenton Stevens on Twitter: @fentonstevens & Instagram @mikefentonstevens .Produced and edited by John Fenton-Stevens for Cast Off Productions .Music by Pass The Peas Music .Artwork by matthewboxall.com .This podcast is proud to be associated with the charity Viva! Providing theatrical opportunities for hundreds of young people . Get bonus episodes and ad-free listening by becoming a team member with Acast+! Your support will help us to keep making My Time Capsule. Join our team now! https://plus.acast.com/s/mytimecapsule. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In deze aflevering van Sitcomcast neemt Mark ons mee naar het iconische Britse warenhuis van Grace Brothers in de hilarische sitcom Are You Being Served?. Deze klassieke serie, die liep van 1972 tot 1985, zit boordevol scherpe one-liners, dubbelzinnige humor en onvergetelijke personages.Ontdek hoe Mr. Humphries, Mrs. Slocombe (en haar pussy!) en Captain Peacock generaties aan het lachen hebben gemaakt met hun absurde winkelvloeravonturen. Mark deelt zijn favoriete scènes, bespreekt of deze serie een tijdloze klassieker blijft en legt uit hoe de Britse humor ook vandaag de dag nog inspireert.Ben jij bekend met Are You Being Served? of wordt dit je eerste kennismaking? Zet je koptelefoon op, neem een kop thee, en laat je meeslepen in deze nostalgische trip door de gangen van Britse comedy-geschiedenis.Volg ons op:Instagram https://www.instagram.com/desitcomcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100088431939984Of mail naar: desitcomcast@gmail.comHosts: Mark van Lier en Joost de KruijterProductie: Dejos Media https://dejosmedia.nl

Welcome to yet another week of Nerdery and Murdery. In this week's episode Zig goes into another British comedy with Are You Being Served. Meanwhile Geoffrey tells the tale of a very twisted young man with the story of Brian Cohee. Have a great Nerd and Murd week!For your 30 day free Audible Trial go to: Audibletrial.com/nerderyandmurderyFor 10% off with BetterHelp go to: betterhelp.com/nerderyandmurderySupport the show

Most South Australian's of a certain age, remember John Martin's Department Stores with great fondness. And now, 26 years after the doors closed, Paul Flavel has brought Johnnies back to life with a magnificent, hard cover book. He's our special guest, taking us down memory lane after five solid years of research and story gathering. There is no SA Drink of the Week this week. And in the Musical Pilgrimage, we hear an early song by Australian legend, Peter Combe, which was written for the John Martin's Christmas Pageant. Join us for this milestone episode as we blend history, music, and community conversation, marking eleven years of showcasing the passions that shape South Australia. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We're here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It's an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we'll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store - The Adelaide Show Shop. We'd greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here's our index of all episode in one concisepage Running Sheet: Pleasing You Was Important At John Martin's 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week No SA Drink Of The Week this week. 00:02:45 Paul Flavel, Author, John Martin's The Story Of South Australia's Beloved Department Store In this episode, Steve Davis sat down with author Paul Flavel to delve into the rich history of John Martin's, South Australia's beloved department store that graced the retail landscape for over 130 years until its closure in 1998. Paul's new book, John Martin's: The Story of South Australia's Beloved Department Store, is the first comprehensive documentation of this iconic institution, lovingly dedicated to his grandmother—a personal link that fuels his passion for the store's legacy. We explore dramatic moments in John Martin's history, starting with the devastating fire on Easter Sunday in 1901, when a display of wax figurines representing the Rock of Ages caught fire, spreading rapidly through the store. Despite such challenges, including enduring the Great Depression and two World Wars, John Martin's remained a cornerstone of the South Australian community. Paul shares how John Martin's stirs vivid memories in the subconscious of South Australians. For many, it was a place of first jobs straight out of school, the magic of the annual Christmas Pageant—a wonderful institution that brought joy to families—and staff picnics that fostered a sense of loyalty and connection among employees. These traditions remind us of a time when working for a company meant being part of a community. We reminisce about the charming "lift ladies" and other quirky characters that made shopping at John Martin's a unique experience. The conversation includes some funny stories, and even some romantic tales reminiscent of Are You Being Served?, like Steve's unrequited romance with the stationery girl, and anecdotes about his colleagues like Debbie, Sharon, and the West Lakes' stores version of Mr Peacock. We also touch on the iconic "Miss JM" and miniskirs, along with the store's brush with fame during The Beatles' visit. The conversation turns reflective as we examine whether, as consumers, we played a part in the store's demise. The introduction of bank credit cards in Australia gave shoppers more freedom, reducing reliance on department store credit systems—once a significant part of John Martin's business model. The rise of national retailers like Myer, and discount stores such as Kmart and Target, intensified competition, challenging John Martin's ability to compete. We discuss how these factors, along with the sale and rebranding of various store locations, signaled the end of an era. Finally, we contemplate whether a store like John Martin's could succeed in today's retail environment. Paul shares insights from his extensive research and reflects on how consumer behavior and the retail landscape have evolved. Is there still a place for the loyalty and community that John Martin's fostered, or have we moved beyond that model? Join us for a nostalgic journey through the history of John Martin's, filled with personal stories, historical insights, and reflections on the store's enduring legacy in South Australia. 00:57:45 Musical Pilgrimage In the Musical Pilgrimage, we feature To You Merry Christmas by Peter Combe. In 1989, Peter wrote a song for a John Martin's Christmas Pageant competition, called ‘To You Merry Christmas'. Although he didn't win the competition that year,  he did later release the song as part of a Christmas album which reached the ARIA top charts and it went gold within five weeks of its release in 1990. Ironically, it outlived John Martin's. In 2022, Peter was one of the celebrity performers at the Christmas Carols event and rode in the "National Pharmacies" Christmas Pageant as part of the promotion. National Pharmacies is the current title sponsor of the event, which is managed by Events South Australia. Peter has a new album waiting in the wings, A Frog in My Cheese Sandwich, and we're told that if we wash our face in orange juice and clean our teeth with bubble gum, he'll be happy to join us for a full episode.Support the show: https://theadelaideshow.com.au/listen-or-download-the-podcast/adelaide-in-crowd/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join Jim and Steve as they review the first episode of this listener-requested show, 'Allo, 'Allo! Do you like witty and tight writing with multiple story lines paying off at the end of a well-crafted episode? No? More of a let's hope the audience doesn't noticed how bad the writing is? Oh no, I've written myself into a corner here. Anyway, this show has the same closing credits style as Are You Being Served? There, that should have sold you. Listen and find out and keep watching the shows! 

Jess Conrad has been ‘the vainest man in showbiz' self styled since the 1950's, having been a pop star, a film star, a star of the West End, a TV star and a cabaret star. Jess fell into film extra work, then acting work, being discovered by Jack Goode and having a number of hits in the early sixties, including one voted the sixth worst song of all time. He went on to play Jesus in Godspell and Joseph in Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat for many years, whilst also appearing in dozens of films like Reach For The Sky, The Queen's Guard and the Sex Pistol's film, The Great Rock n Roll Swindle. Jess has appeared in TV shows like Dixon of Dock Green,The Human Jungle, Softly Softly, Space 1999, Are You Being Served and Last of the Summer Wine .Jess Conrad is guest number 365 on My Time Capsule and chats to Michael Fenton Stevens about the five things he'd like to put in a time capsule; four he'd like to preserve and one he'd like to bury and never have to think about again .Jess Conrad's autobiography “From Blitz to Glitz” is available here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blitz-Glitz-Autobiography-Jess-Conrad/dp/1837914567 .Follow My Time Capsule on Twitter, Instagram & Facebook: @MyTCpod .Follow Michael Fenton Stevens on Twitter: @fentonstevens & Instagram @mikefentonstevens .Produced and edited by John Fenton-Stevens for Cast Off Productions .Music by Pass The Peas Music .Artwork by matthewboxall.com .This podcast is proud to be associated with the charity Viva! Providing theatrical opportunities for hundreds of young people. Get bonus episodes and ad-free listening by becoming a team member with Acast+! Your support will help us to keep making My Time Capsule. Join our team now! https://plus.acast.com/s/mytimecapsule. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Stalls of Barchester was first broadcast on BBC 1 at 11:00 pm on December 24, 1971. It is based on the story "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" from the 1911 collection More Ghost Stories by M. R. James, it was adapted, produced, and directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, who directed every BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas between 1971 and 1977. Can you name them all, Jon?The Stalls of Barchester (1971)A Warning to the Curious (1972)Lost Hearts (1973)The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974)The Ash Tree (1975)The Signalman (1976)Stigma (1977)The cast of The Stalls of Barchester includes several actors now better known for their roles in situation comedies or lighter dramas:Clive (Richard Bucket) Swift as Dr. Black (a character who does not appear in the original story). As we have mentioned before, he has had two appearances in Doctor Who of which he was not particularly pleased, so we will only mention them again. Of his appearance in the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas special, Swift declared, "It wasn't until we'd been filming for two weeks that I realized that Mr. Copper is an alien!" And having been asked about his appearance in Revelation of the Daleks (1985), he said, "It was the most bizarre entertainment I have ever been part of."Will Leighton as the cathedral librarian. He also appeared in the previously discussed film, An American Werewolf in London, as one of the Tramps that get killed by David.Robert Hardy as Dr. Haynes. Hardy's birth name was Timothy Sidney Robert Hardy, his nickname being 'Tim'. He has played British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in six separate films, and has also twice played Winston Churchill's World War II ally and friend, American President Franklin D. Roosevelt.Thelma Barlow as Letitia Haynes. Famous for her part of Mavis Riley in Coronation Street, her first episode was transmitted in 1971, but her character only appeared regularly from 1973, when she joined the staff of "The Kabin". She remained in the series for 26 years, appearing in nearly 2,000 episodes.Harold Bennett as Archdeacon Pulteney. Not Pountney as Ross kept hearing. Best known as the lecherous, octogenarian 'Young Mr. Grace' in the long-running comedy series Are You Being Served?, Bennett had a career as an architect and only became an actor when he retired.Erik Chitty as the priest. Seen in Doctor Who: The Deadly Assassin as Engin the Time Lord Coordinator of the MatrixDavid Pugh as John and Ambrose Coghill as museum curatorThe adaptation was filmed on location at Norwich Cathedral and the surrounding cathedral close. Unusual for a BBC television drama of the 1970s, both interior and exteriors in The Stalls of Barchester were originated on 16 mm film, as opposed to the standard studio videotape for interiors. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/general-witchfinders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and  Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --

Wrestling sensation Wing Commander Nash @CommanderNash1 once again joins @UTTRob and @DanGriffin21 as they continue their journey through the firsts and lasts of wrestling. This week, we are reviewing an episode of 1970's sitcom Are You Being Served featuring one of the biggest names in the history of British wrestling Mr TV Jackie Pallo. The show features x, y and z. Follow the show at @UTTPODCAST and our bonus series following the career of Tank Abbott at @UttTank.

Are you FREE for a BONUS episode?! We are! Drag has always featured prominently within the “Are You Being Served?” universe and not just with Mr. Humphries. We hear from some #Unanimous superfans and receive an invite from Mr. Todd from Sydney onto his fab podcast “A Podcast With No Name”. We also hear from friend-of-the-pod Toni Homeperm again and her thoughts about drag culture. We're surprised in-studio by the incomparable Candy Samples as she shares about her life raising over $400,000 USD in donations for AIDS charities over the years, the birth of her drag and we discuss tips on how to support your local drag queens in the face of the stupidity of far-right American politicians who want to ban them.  Bonus: Candy Samples released her newest studio album called “Bittersweet” on iTunes and Spotify now! Sneak sample at the end of the episode: her hit “Greenbean Casserole”. Buy your copy here: https://music.apple.com/ca/artist/candy-samples/325313698 And as always, you've ALL done VERY WELL. xo

In our 100th episode of Sitcom Showdown, Steve nominates a classic episode of Are You Being Served from 1976. Captain Peacock is in a spot of bother after some suspicious overnight behavior with a store colleague makes him late to work. Mrs Peacock is on the rampage and Messrs Humphries and Lucas are enjoying the show. Meanwhile, Mrs Slocombe is interviewing for a buyers job in Mr Rumbold's office! Come and join us for a good old chat about AYBS and help us celebrate 100 eps! Sitcom Showdown on Twitter:  @SitcomShowdown

Hello campers, we're looking for a David Croft sitcom, so if you're free listen very carefully to Cracking TV. Luke pitches commissioner John Dad's Army, Hi-de-Hi, Are You Being Served, and 'Allo 'Allo - but John is already minded to commission You Rang M'Lord. Will Luke win the commission and a week at Maplins, or will he be a stupid boy and have to spend two weeks at Maplins?Cracking TV is produced and presented by Luke Sluman and John Furlong. Our rather marvellous theme tune was written and performed by Simon McInerney. Additional sound effects from zapsplat.com. Follow us @crackingtv. Luke & John Cracking TV is an IHOG Factual Entertainment Production. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"Are You Being Served?" is a British sitcom that first premiered in 1972. The show is about the misadventures between the staff of the women's and men's clothing sections who are now forced to share a floor at a large department store. Inspired by one of the show's co-creators experiences working at a clothing store, this show was originally created as part of the Comedy Playhouse series. After the episode was already filmed the BBC actually chose to not broadcast the program. The pilot  eventually got an opportunity to be aired as a filler during the 1972 Summer Olympics when the coverage of the games was interrupted by the Munich massacre on 8 September 1972. The show was well received and actually lead to a full series being produced. This eventually turned into a 10 series run with a movie, spin offs, specials, and international adaptations. Over 50 years later does the pilot episode still hold up or is it better to leave some things in the past? Find out as we take a deep dive into the original episode of Are You Being Served? www.S1E1POD.com Starring: Mollie Sugden, Trevor Bannister, Frank Thornton, John Inman, Wendy Richard, Arthur Brough, & Nicholas Smith Instagram and Twitter: @S1E1POD

Our FINAL podcast: After 86 podcast episodes, Mr. Jeff and Mr. Brandon say goodbye to the podcast they've crafted over the past two and a half years. What started out to be a COVID-hobby became a fantastic vehicle to bring "Are You Being Served?" fans together, share some laughs, and give the space to really take a look at why we all love this silly, wonderful comedy program. The hosts share some (shocking?) secrets about the podcast (DO we actually record in Northern Mississippi?!) and then we offer to pass the podcast torch to YOU. We explain how we started as complete podcast novices as we learned our way into producing this podcast, 87 episodes later. We can't wait for you to start your own podcast about one of the fabulous British comedies and continue bringing britcom fans together online. It's been a pleasure speaking to the #Unanimous for all these many months and we might have a pop-up episode in the future (perhaps an as-yet-unfinished book about one of the AYBS cast might be published in future?). Our Facebook and Twitter accounts will continue but our podcast has probably stopped. Even though the podcast might have gone up into "the Boardroom in the sky", we're still around and we can't wait to learn about your future podcasts! And as always, you've ALL done VERY WELL. xo

So begins our trilogy of episodes on British setting supplement Isle of the Mighty, with a look at the first three chapters on England. It may seem a bit strange to dedicate so much recording time to this episode, but at just under 200 pages of text that is dense (both in terms of content and in terms of layout), we need the space. Even with the setting so richly described, the authors had to leave a lot out by necessity—so we talk about some of that in detail with special guest host, Andrew Goodman. This episode has been edited and massaged and compressed in order to get it to the point where it wouldn't be our longest episode... and we managed to get it a few seconds shorter than the corebook episode. Victory! (But we still have Scotland and Wales to do, so...) linky business Herewith our social media links for the podcast: Discord: https://discord.gg/SAryjXGm5jEmail: podcast@changelingthepodcast.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100082973960699Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/changelingthepodcastTwitter: https://twitter.com/changelingcast And a couple places to find Andrew online: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/a.goodman.illustrates/Roots of Legend on the Storytellers' Vault: https://www.storytellersvault.com/product/354523?affiliate_id=3063731 ... a brief list of media Near the end of the episode, we briefly go through a bunch of media items that might help you get an "English feel" to your game. The original plan was to link to videos and publishers' pages and whatnot, but the hour is late and our listeners' Google fu is strong, so here's the list of names, and we'll trust you to search them out successfully without our help: Films: Gosford Park, Howards End (and other Merchant Ivory films), Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Secret Garden... TV:The Animals of Farthing Wood, Are You Being Served?, Blackadder, Downton Abbey, (some of) Dr. Who, EastEnders, Keeping Up Appearances, Midsomer Murders, Monty Python's Flying Circus, panel shows like QI and Would I Lie To You?, The Crown, Waiting for God... Novels: The Dark is Rising, The Hobbit, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Watership Down...Music: The Beatles, Fairport Convention, The Fishermen's Friends, Jethro Tull, The Sex Pistols, Steeleye Span, The Cure... These are just the ones that we happened to mention directly, barely scratching the surface of the surface of the vast amount of media out there. Go have a look, and see what inspirations strike you for your Very English Chronicle...! ... a pair of pinups Well, maybe just one pin-up. They spared no expense on this beefcakey image of folkloric figure Wayland the Smith to open Chapter 3: On the other hand, while it was nice of them to provide a map of Great Britain and the fae kingdoms thereon, they seem to have spared a bit of expense generating it. Aside from the slightly vague borders and the fact that the map highlights several places which aren't even talked about in the book, this is best paired with another map that doesn't have quite so many misspellings. ("Glasglow", indeed...) ... your hosts Josh Hillerup (any pronoun) dares not dream, for fear of dwelling on the dark and arcane knowledge of Other London and Other Hull... Pooka G (any pronoun/they) ny vynn kewsel Sowsnek! "You English really don't have a sense of humor, do you?" "We do if something's funny, sir." —Gosford Park

In this very special bonus episode of The Laurel & Hardy Podcast, Patrick chats with star of TV and stage Jeffrey Holland. Jeffrey is someone who can rightly be referred to as a member of UK TV royalty. His acting career on both stage and screen over the years has been prolific, appearing in such TV classics as Dad's Army, Are You Being Served? It Ain't Half Hot Mum, but he became a household name for his roles in the celebrated sit-coms, Hi-De-Hi, You Rang M'Lord and Oh, Doctor Beeching. Since 2013, Jeffrey has been touring with his one-man stage show entitled, '...and this is my friend, Mr Laurel', a play in which he plays Stan reminiscing about his life and career. Jeffrey also talks about his earliest memories of Laurel and Hardy and ultimately faces the Atoll Question. To learn more about Jeffrey Holland, click here: https://www.jeffreyholland.co.uk/ To book tickets to see Jeffrey in '...and this is my friend, Mr Laurel', at The Lighthouse in Poole, Dorset, click here: https://www.lighthousepoole.co.uk/whats-on/2022/and-this-is-my-friend-mr-laurel/ For more information about The Laurel & Hardy Podcast, click here https://laurel-and-hardy-blog.com/ Stay in touch with all the latest Podcast news, including updates on my forthcoming book, Laurel & Hardy: Silents by subscribing to the free newsletter here: https://laurel-and-hardy-blog.com/contact/ To subscribe to the all-new Laurel & Hardy Magazine, click here: https://www.laurelandhardymag.com/ Join in the discussion and become an official Blog-Head by joining the Blog-Heads Facebook Group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2920310948018755 To purchase CDs of the Beau Hunks Orchestra's music contained in these podcasts, click here: https://amzn.to/2CgeCbK To purchase a copy of Randy Skretvedt's incredible book, Laurel & Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies, click here: https://amzn.to/3Dpl1P3 To find the best Laurel and Hardy books and DVDs and Blu-Rays, visit The Laurel & Hardy Blog's Amazon storefront, click here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/laurelandhardyblog *Please note that I am an Amazon affiliate, and any purchases made using the above links will help support this podcast whilst not costing you a penny more.

Our introductory 'cast for all things Are You Being Served? kicks off with a discussion on the road to the pilot episode for cast and crew.

Welcome to the WoW Classic podcast where it's not my opinion that counts - but yours! Listen in each episode as Josh sits down for lengthy chats with passionate gamers, devs and listeners. Today, we regrettably put the content aside as we go in hard on the big issue of the week, being server access and server performance. As thousands of players worldwide sit in queues waiting to play the game, we discuss what's happening, why, Blizzard's response and some potential solutions. After that, the show stays on theme, and dives into a chat about the psychology behind player server movements, herd mentalities and why we play the way we do. Are You Being Served? w/ Arcos, Bawlsosteel, Moobert, Spork, Trauma, and Ziim - 2:30Running With The Herd w/ Snaxe - 2:01:55Support Josh & Countdown today over at Patreon, including bonus 'Countdown After Dark' podcast content: https://www.patreon.com/joshcorbett Or if subscriptions aren't your thing, support Josh & Countdown by shouting him a one time beer here: https://ko-fi.com/countdowntoclassicCheck out Josh on Twitch for gameplay and live podcast recordings here: https://www.twitch.tv/joshcorbettJoin the Countdown To Classic discord here: https://discord.gg/83thqw2fBwCheck out Josh's hilarious movie podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sinner-files/id1290218344 or on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/469qUDnQHBkCogdjZyFUjb?si=jNgDTiEnSvKBbZuNz2xcxw

Actor Jeffrey Holland is best known for his role as Spike Dixon, the third rate camp comic in the popular BBC sitcom Hi-De-Hi! but he is of particular interest to this podcast as he took on the rather daunting task of performing Peter Sellers' characters in the much-acclaimed 2001 show Goon Again, alongside Andrew Secombe, Jon Glover and Christopher Timothy and produced by friend of the show Dirk Maggs. Tyler and Jeffrey discuss that show and what the Goons mean to him, as well as running through his career in general - as well as Hi-De-Hi! they talk about You Rang M'Lord (and why it's so popular in Hungary), Are You Being Served, It Ain't Half Hot Mum and Dad's Army. Jeffrey was a delight and very generous with his time - hope you enjoy the show.

The talented and charming Joanne Heywood stopped by the recording studio while on a holiday tour of Northern Mississippi! We learn that Ms. Heywood's first professional acting role was the musical “High Society” (and we even get a bit of her singing on the episode). Which cast member kept giggling during Grace & Favour? AND which actor did all of their own stunts? What could the original AYBS series get away with in comedy that the later sequel couldn't? How does an actor handle an upstaging horse who wants the spotlight? John Inman's lovely codpiece! Was it intimidating to be a new actor on the cast with the very well-known AYBS leads? We learn about Ms. Heywood' 2 years on “First of the Summer Wine”. A connection from Grace & Favour to Gavin and Stacey! What was it like to be an audience member during the filming of the show? She stared in Coronation Street three times, EastEnders, and Emmerdale! We hear accents ranging from East London's “Albert Square” from EastEnders to Proper Northern Lass. What American TV show could be compared to Are You Being Served? The expensive custom nightie made by famous lingerie house Rigby and Peller. Theft in the wardrobe department! And what would have happened to Miss. Lovelock if the series had continued? You can find Joanne Heywood in a Christmas Panto this year. (And yes, Ms. Heywood is unanimous in this). A huge thank you to Joanne for spending time with our podcast. You can find Joanne Heywood on twitter @MsJoanneHeywood Treat yourself to some That Does Suit Madame merch at our Bargain Basement podcast shop at imfree.threadless.com for t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, and more! Leave the show a voicemail at the Peacock Hotline: (662)-PEACOCK (662-732-2625) and find us on Twitter @DoesSuitMadame and #AYBS #AreYouBeingServed #ImFree #Britcom #comedy #ThatDoesSuitMadame #GraceBros #podcast #LGBT #BlackLivesMatter #BBC #AreYouBeingServedAgain #GraceAndFavour #GraceAndFavor #MissLovelock #JoanneHeywood #actor

Welcome back to YOU HAVE BEEN WATCHING, a podcast about British sitcoms. Join your hosts Tony Black & Robert Turnbull as they look, in the first of a two-part episode, at the best British sitcom themes of all time. Counting down from their 10-6 choices in a Top Ten list, they discuss the themes to series across the decades as diverse as HANCOCK'S HALF HOUR, THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, THE VICAR OF DIBLEY, ARE YOU BEING SERVED? and many more. Don't miss Part 2 as they discuss their 5-1 choices... Host / Editor Tony Black Co-Host Robert Turnbull Support the We Made This podcast network on Patreon: www.patreon.com/wemadethis Twitter: @yhbwatching We Made This on Twitter: @we_madethis wemadethisnetwork.com Title music: Jumping Cricket (c) Birdies via epidemicsound.com

Welcome back to YOU HAVE BEEN WATCHING, a podcast about British sitcoms.Join your hosts Tony Black & Robert Turnbull as they look, in the first of a two-part episode, at the best British sitcom themes of all time.Counting down from their 10-6 choices in a Top Ten list, they discuss the themes to series across the decades as diverse as HANCOCK'S HALF HOUR, THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, THE VICAR OF DIBLEY, ARE YOU BEING SERVED? and many more.Don't miss Part 2 as they discuss their 5-1 choices...Host / EditorTony BlackCo-HostRobert TurnbullSupport the We Made This podcast network on Patreon:www.patreon.com/wemadethisTwitter: @yhbwatchingWe Made This on Twitter: @we_madethiswemadethisnetwork.comTitle music: Jumping Cricket (c) Birdies via epidemicsound.com

Nummer 175! Er is een link tussen de wereldberoemde Britse comedy "Are You Being Served?" en Schiphol, waar het al maandenlang een puinzooi is, onder leiding van Dick Benschop. Captain Peacock zou niet blij zijn met de gang van zaken in dit luchtvaart-“warenhuis”. Menno Swart was te gast bij MAX Vakantieman over de enorme problemen van Doekoe Airways, oftewel de SLM. Philip Dröge heeft twee New Airlines voor ons gevonden. Piloten uit Oekraïne bedelen om F-16's op de Amerikaanse tv. Nieuwe rubriek: Wat schiet er? We halen herinneringen op aan Frits Bom, de eerste Vakantieman. Stork hit! Een 737 van Transavia heeft een aanvaring met 3 ooievaars. Lufthansa mag geen gratis frequent flyer cards meer uitdelen aan het Duitse parlement. Muziek: Are You Being Served? - Matt Berry. Alle nummers uit de podcast vind je op http://tmhcplaylist.nl Op luchtvaartplaat.nl staan 500+ vette vliegtuighits. Geef ons vijf sterren op Spotify en Apple Podcasts. Een positieve review waarderen wij zeer. Vragen en commentaar (of een riant sponsorvoorstel) stuur je naar info@tmhc.nl Michiel Koudstaal is onze voice-over. Voor al je inspreekwerk ga naar voxcast.nl

IN THE NEWS In honor of the start of a new Legion membership year, Jeff and Ashely share membership stories and invite the Alphas to share their own membership stories. THIS WEEK'S GUEST We're doubling down on our Ashlies this week with our guest, New Jersey-based actress, voice-over artist and stand-up comedian Ashley Gutermuth. Ashley is married to a career Air Force reservist, and she's rapidly building an online following with her unique take on spouse and military humor, and she's quickly carving out a name for herself with her inside-military jokes. RAPID FIRE June American Legion Impact Report highlights career events and legislative wins on Capitol Hill. Army backpedals on policy dropping High School diploma requirement WWII Medal of Honor recipient Herschel "Woody" Williams lies in honor at U.S. Capitol Special Guest: Ashley Gutermuth.

Congratulations to Her Majesty The Queen Elizabeth II on her Platinum Jubilee! The Channel 5 documentary “Are You Being Served? Secrets and Scandals” - we can't wait to see it. Which do you love more: the original AYBS or AYBS-Again/Grace & Favour? Our poll shows an even split! Joanne Heywood, who played Miss. Lovelock, is unanimous in her choice of “Are You Being Served Again” / “Grace & Favour”. Professor Jeff defines “skeuomorph” thanks to a Unanimous Superman's tip. A live #1 hit with George Michael and Elton John. What would happen if an AI listened to every AYBS episode and wrote a new script? @KeatonPatti on twitter did this with Hallmark Christmas movies and we read a hilarious example. Mr. Brandon uncontrollably giggles again. Our “Moment of Butch”. What exactly -is- Mrs. Slocombe's foundation? And she wants to know exactly where that pub is… Jukeboxes. Air quality in the UK and the disaster in the 1952 called “The Great Smog”. A walking billboard for Reebok running gear. Mr. Humphries finds that 4 inches is more than acceptable. What does “ship shape and Bristol fashion” mean? A surprising slavery connection to a West England port city. Fun with non-sequiturs. “He really gets on my wick” = Cockney rhyming slang. Why can Mr. Humphries handle the Goblin vacuum? The political stunt from Boris Johnson to revert the UK away from the metric system to the old fashioned Imperial measurement system. Pulling a date/pulling a customer. The Benny Hill-like scene with Captain Peacock and the lawn mower. Mr. Humphries and Mavis cry together over cutting onions. A random Paul Lynde impression! Check out graceandfavour.net! Teseling the dirty sheets! Wendy Richard almost breaks character and laughs at the kitchen table. Lots of call backs to the original AYBS series in this episode! Cleg-Hampton, played by Maggie Holland, is past it. Mr. Volpone, played by Gorgon Peters, was in the original AYBS episode, who is amazing at playing an off-balanced British Rail waiter. The 3 new roles in AYBSA/Grace & Favour really added a lot to the new series- a tribute to Joanne Heywood, Fleur Bennett, and Billy Burden! Are there any clips of John Inman around from his PBS promotional tour in from the 1990s? Treat yourself to some That Does Suit Madame merch at our Bargain Basement podcast shop at imfree.threadless.com for t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, and more! Leave the show a voicemail at the Peacock Hotline: (662)-PEACOCK (662-732-2625) and find us on Twitter @DoesSuitMadame and #AYBS #AreYouBeingServed #ImFree #Britcom #comedy #MrHumphries #ThatDoesSuitMadame #GraceBros #podcast #LGBT #BlackLivesMatter #BBC #AreYouBeingServedAgain #GraceAndFavour #GraceAndFavor

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on May 22nd 2022 Ground floor: street level, front door and parking lots, stairs and keyboard accessing, mailboxes and tat. Going up. First floor: studio, magic happening. Songs, chat, ads, plugs, microphones and chairs. Going up. Second floor: this week, Lisa and Andrew back, for fun-filled chattering about Are You Being Served? Going down PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show

She was in 3 series of Are You Being Served and is one of the few surviving members of the cast of the hit British sitcom which was popular all over the world.  Ashley has been speaking to Vivienne Johnson who played Young Mr Grace's nurse. Take a trip down memory lane as Vivienne remembers her time in the show which ran for 13 years. If you'd like to suggest an interview (or reunion) with a past star/stars of any soap, comedy, drama. children's series, quiz show or film, then please drop us a line via the contact us page on the Distinct Nostalgia website at www.distinctnostalgia.com or email info@madeinmanchester.tvNOTE: The Distinct Nostalgia theme is owned by MIM Productions and composed by Rebecca Applin and Chris Warner. Distinct Nostalgia is a Made in Manchester ProductionNick and June, After the Fact. A Handmaid's Tale Podcast Are you a fan of the hit HULU series, The Handmaid's Tale, who ships Nick and June? Are...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify HorseFrog ProductionsA podcast where two friends explore their favorite books, shows, and movies.Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show

Wilberforce Be With You! (May the 4th has been coopted by the podcast!) #Unanimousland What exactly -is- a ballcock? Mr. Ben from The Grace Bros Memorial Gym in London. When did the UK term “fit” start to be used? Professor Jeff assists. The incredible connection with Wendy Richard's East Enders co-star who starred with her in AYBS earlier! If you love Are You Being Served, you'll also love Benidorm and Kath & Kim. Could we do another podcast series based on another TV show?! A hot, hot take voicemail from Mr. Rob (we hope you're sitting down). “The Windors”, a hilarious and irreverent UK comedy which makes fun of the Royal Family (with one important exception). A top notch pussy joke according to Mr. Jeff's joke algorithm program. Putting butter on a cat's paws when one moves into a new home. Fake! Arrousing Mr. Humphries. Mrs. Slocombe really wants to gossip. Mavis can't find her knickers anywhere! Mrs. Slocombe's indecent proposal in the chicken coop with Mr. Molturd. Does it cross the line? Mr. Brandon can't pronounce “vulgarly”. Dotty = teetering (like teeter totter) = not of sound mind. Mavis doesn't get paid! The Kath & Kim house is no more! Mr. Jeff uses his vast Musical background yet again. A “bicycle”. There's a fox hunt on the grounds! Miss. Lovelock's character acts as a way to move the episode's plot along. The bucholic country horse trail scene with Peacock and Slocombe. Mollie Sugden really goes for it in the cart race scene. Humphries and Mavis light fires together in the boiler. The “G” word used for the Roma people. Poor Mavis! Was “the strap” meant to be a catch phrase? Tiddles is being chased by the hounds in a fox hunt! AYBSA/Grace and Favour is like a soap opera: each episode starts where the previous episode ended. The original series episodes were all independent of each other. Treat yourself to some That Does Suit Madame merch at our Bargain Basement podcast shop at imfree.threadless.com for t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, and more! Leave the show a voicemail at the Peacock Hotline: (662)-PEACOCK (662-732-2625) and find us on Twitter @DoesSuitMadame and #AYBS #AreYouBeingServed #ImFree #Britcom #comedy #MrHumphries #ThatDoesSuitMadame #GraceBros #podcast #LGBT #BlackLivesMatter #BBC #AreYouBeingServedAgain #GraceAndFavour #GraceAndFavor

Seventies sitcoms have their knockers but we have no objection to getting stuck in to the glory that is Are You Being Served

Collin talked with an SEO expert Hamster DanceHeaven's GateBrandon has been doing research…Are You Being Served…is still funny!Binge watching has its dangersWhy did so many people watch it??Coffee after dinner?“Cut the sweet” Sacrificial coastersAaron has HEAT!Weather talkBaseball seasonAaron is wrecking busesWinter OlympicsCricketA movie Brandon watched…https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dil_Bole_Hadippa

Collin talked with an SEO expert Hamster DanceHeaven's GateBrandon has been doing research…Are You Being Served…is still funny!Binge watching has its dangersWhy did so many people watch it??Coffee after dinner?“Cut the sweet” Sacrificial coastersAaron has HEAT!Weather talkBaseball seasonAaron is wrecking busesWinter OlympicsCricketA movie Brandon watched…https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dil_Bole_Hadippa

From music hall to Red Dwarf, pantomime to Absolutely Fabulous, we look at the history of British comedy, the names, shows, and historical events that made it what it is today. Like what you hear?  Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month!   Or buy the book or some merch.  Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram. Music: Kevin MacLeod, Steve Oxen, David Fesliyan.  . Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Links to all the research resources are on the website. Podchaser: Moxie got me through 2,500 miles. I listened to every episode regardless of audio quality from the vault. I got my fix of facts with a personality that kept me entertained the entire time. I shared it with everyone I knew that would appreciate the facts, wit and hilariously subtle segues. Profile avatar 2 months ago byBoredatwork23 Book: David Nowlin 5.0 out of 5 stars Be prepared to be amazed at what you needed know, but did not. Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2021 Great book. Read it cover to cover, but am planning to reread it again and again. It is so full of such wonderful pieces of information that I use to interject conversations whenever I can. Thank you Moxie for such a wonderful gift, and the book is great too Gift and merch “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created.  This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”  Thus begins Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe, sequel to his culture touchstone The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  That's the book that gave us the answer to life, the universe and everything, though not the question.  Welcome to episode number 42, which I have decided to devote to [drumroll] the history of British comedy.  That means we're going to try to cram hundreds of years, thousands of performers, and a dozen mediums into a half-hour show.  But don't panic.  My name's Moxie and this is your brain on facts.    British comedy history is measured in centuries, from chase scenes and beatings into Shakespeare's comedies to the misadventures of Mr. Bean.  Even as times, tastes, and technologies changes, some themes are eternal.  Innuendo, for example, has been a staple in the literature as far back as Beowulf and Chaucer, and is prevalent in many British folk songs.  King Charles II was such a fan of innuendo that he encouraged it to the point that Restoration comedy became not only its own genre, but an explicit one at that.  The repressive Victorian period gave us burlesque, though not in the same form as the shows you can see today - more vaudeville than striptease.  Absurdism and the surreal had always been an undercurrent, which firmly took root in the 1950's, leading Red Dwarf, The Mighty Boosh, and Count Duckula.  Though the British Empire successfully conquered ¼ of the globe, but its individual people struggled and suffered.  Plagues, wars, poverty, class oppression, and filthy cities gave rise to, and a need for, black humor, in which topics and events that are usually treated seriously are treated in a humorous or satirical manner.  The class system, especially class tensions between characters, with pompous or dim-witted members of the upper/middle classes or embarrassingly blatant social climbers, has always provided ample material, which we can see in modern shows like Absolutely Fabulous, Keeping Up Appearances, and Blackadder.  The British also value finding humor in everyday life, which we see in shows like Father Ted, The IT Crowd, and Spaced, which also incorporates a fair amount of absurdity.   But there's nothing the Brits do better than satire and nobody does it better than the Brits.  “The British, being cynical and sarcastic by nature do have a natural flair for satire,” says BBCAmerica.com writer Fraser McAlpine.  “There's a history of holding up a mirror to society and accentuating its least attractive qualities that goes back hundreds of years...Sometimes the satire is biting and cold, sometimes it's warm and encouraging, but if you want someone who can say a thing that isn't true, but also somehow IS true in a really profound way. You need look no further.”  There are three principal forms of satire.  Menippean satire uses fantasy realms that reflect back on modern society.  Everything from Alice in Wonderland to the works of Terry Pratchett fit here, as would Dr. Who.  Horatian satire skewers cultural moments of silliness using parodic humor.  These are the kind of thing you tend to see most of in comedy TV shows, like The Office.  We're laughing at people being inept and harassed, but not evil.  Juvenalian satire skewers everything with abrasive, often bleak, wit.  If there's an element of horror at the topic being discussed, that's a clue that it's Juvenalian.  John Oliver is a fair hand with Juvenalian satire.  Most political cartoon and black humor fall under this heading.   Though comedy is as old as laughter, we're going to begin today's time travel with the music hall.  (FYI, the narrative today is going to overall linear, but there will be a fair amount of bouncing around.)  Music halls sprang up as an answer to proper theater, which was at the time heavily monitored and censored by the government.  It took place in humble venues like the backs of pubs and coffee houses.  By the 1830s taverns had rooms devoted to musical clubs. They presented Saturday evening Sing-songs and “Free and Easies”. These became so popular that entertainment was put on two or three times a week.  Music in the form of humorous songs was a key element because dialogue was forbidden.  Dialogue was for the theater and if you had speaking parts, you'd be subject to censorship.  The Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 empowered the Lord Chamberlain's Office to censor plays; this act would be in force until 1968. So, no speaking parts, less, though still some censorship.  Music halls also allowed drinking and smoking, which legitimate theaters didn't.  As the shows became more popular, they moved from the pubs into venues of their own.  Tavern owners, therefore, often annexed buildings adjoining their premises as music halls.  The usual show consisted of six to eight acts, possibly including a comedy skit (low comedy to appeal to the working class), a juggling act, a magic act, a mime, acrobats, a dancing act, a singing act, and perhaps a one-act play.  In the states, this format was essentially vaudeville.  The music hall era was a heyday for female performers, with headliners like Gracie Fields, Lillie Langtry, and Vesta Tilley.  The advent of the talking motion picture in the late 1920s caused music halls to convert into cinemas to stay in business.  To keep comedians employed, a mixture of films and songs called cine-variety was introduced.     The other critically important tradition of that era was panto or pantomime, but not the Marcel Marceau type of pantomime you might be picturing, but a type of theatrical musical comedy designed for family entertainment.  Modern pantomime includes songs, gags, slapstick comedy, dancing, and gender-crossing actors.  It combines topical humour with well-known stories like fables and folk tales.  It is a participatory form of theatre, in which the audience is expected to sing along with certain parts of the music and shout out phrases to the performers.  It's traditionally quite popular around Christmas and New Years.  In early 19th century England, pantomime acquired its present form and featured the first mainstream clown Joseph Grimaldi, while comedy routines also featured heavily in British music halls.  British comedians who honed their skills at pantomime and music hall sketches include Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel.  The influential English music hall comedian and theatre impresario Fred Karno developed a form of sketch comedy without dialogue in the 1890s, and Chaplin and Laurel were among the young comedians who worked for him as part of "Fred Karno's Army". VODACAST   Hopping back to famous ladies of music hall, one such was Lily Harley, though her greatest claim to fame is having given birth to Charles Spencer Chaplin.  When Lily inexplicably lost her voice in the middle of a show, the production manager pushed the five-year-old Charlie, whom he'd heard sing, onto the stage to replace her.  Charlie lit up the audience, wowing them with his natural comedic presence.   Sadly, Lily's voice never recovered, and she was unable to support her two sons, who were sent to a workhouse.  For those of us who don't know workhouses outside of one reference in A Christmas Carol, think an orphanage or jail with indentured servitude.  Young Charlie took whatever jobs he could find to survive as he fought his way back to the stage.  His acting debut was as a pageboy in a production of Sherlock Holmes.  From there he toured with a vaudeville outfit named Casey's Court Circus and in 1908 teamed up with the Fred Karno pantomime troupe, where Chaplin became one of its stars as the Drunk in the comedic sketch A Night in an English Music Hall.  With the Karno troupe, Chaplin got his first taste of the United States, where he caught the eye of a film producer who signed Chaplin to a contract for a $150 a week, equivalent to over three-grand today.   During his first year with the company, Chaplin made 14 films, including The Tramp, which established Chaplin's trademark character and his role as the unexpected hero.  By the age of 26, Chaplin, just three years removed from his vaudeville days, was a superstar.  He'd moved over to the Mutual Company, which paid him a whopping $670,000 a year to make now-classics like Easy Street.   Chaplin came to be known as a grueling perfectionist.  His love for experimentation often meant countless takes, and it was not uncommon for him to order the rebuilding of an entire set or begin filming with one leading actor, realize he'd made a mistake in his casting and start again with someone new.  But you can't argue with results.  During the 1920s Chaplin's career blossomed even more, with landmark films, like The Kid, and The Gold Rush, a movie Chaplin would later say he wanted to be remembered by.  We'll leave Chaplin's story while he's on top because his private life from here on out gets, in a word, sordid.   Though Chapin was English, his film were American.  British cinema arguably lagged decades behind, but they began to close the gap in the 1940's.  Films by Ealing Studios, particularly their comedies like Hue & Cry, Whisky Galore! and The Ladykillers began to push the boundaries of what could be done in cinema, dealing with previously taboo topics like crime in comedic ways.  Kitchen sink dramas followed soon after, portraying social realism, with the struggles of working class Britons on full display, living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore controversial social and political issues ranging from abortion to homelessness.  These contrasted sharply with the idea of cinema as escapism.  This was the era of such notable stars as actor/comedian/singer-songwriter Norman Wisdom.  Beginning with 1953's Trouble in the Store, for which he won a BAFTA (the British equivalent to an Oscar), his films were among Britain's biggest box-office successes of their day.  Wisdom gained celebrity status in lands as far apart as South America, Iran and many Eastern Bloc countries, particularly in Albania where his films were the only ones by Western actors permitted by dictator Enver Hoxha to be shown.  He also played one of the best characters in one of my favorite and most hard to find films, “The Night They Raided Minsky's.”   There are few institutions in British history that have had such a massive role in shaping the daily lives of British citizens as the British Broadcasting Corporation, which for decades meant the wireless radio.  “For many it is an ever-present companion: from breakfast-time to bedtime, from childhood through to old age, there it is telling us about ourselves and the wider world, amusing and entertaining us,” says Robin Aitkin, a former BBC reporter and journalist.  The BBC solidified its place in the public consciousness from its beginnings in 1922 to the end of the Second World War in 1945 is of special interest because these pivotal years helped redefine what it means to be British in modern society.  This was especially true during the high unemployment of the 1920's, when other forms of entertainment were unaffordable.  The BBC was formed from the merger of several major radio manufacturers in 1922, receiving a royal charter in 1927, and governmental protection from foreign competition made it essentially a monopoly.  Broadcasting was seen as a public service; a job at the BBC carried similar gravitas to a government job.  Classical music and educational programs were its bedrock, with radio plays added to bring theater to the wireless.  The BBC strove to be varied but balanced in its offerings, neutral but universal; some people found it elitist nonetheless.  Expansion in offerings came slowly, if at all, in the early years.     Trying to bring only the best of culture to the people meant that bawdy music hall acts had little to no place on the radio.  Obscenity was judged by laws passed as early as 1727.  British libel and slander laws are more strict than in the US, so making fun of public figures was taboo even in forms that would have been legal.  And blasphemy?  Lord, no.  In 1949, the BBC issued to comedy writers and producers the Variety Programmes Policy Guide For Writers and Producers, commonly known as "the Green Book."  Among things absolutely banned were jokes about lavatories, effeminacy in men, immorality of any kind, suggestive references to honeymoon couples, chambermaids, fig leaves, ladies' underwear, prostitution, and the vulgar use of words such as "basket".  (Not an actual basket, the Polari word “basket,” meaning the bulge in a gentleman's trousers.  More on that later.)  The guidelines also stipulated that "..such words as God, Good God, My God, Blast, Hell, Damn, Bloody, Gorblimey, Ruddy, etc etc should be deleted from scripts and innocuous expressions substituted."  Where the independently tun music halls gave people what they wanted, BBC radio gave people what it felt they needed.  But comedy writers are nothing if not clever and there is always a way to slip past the censors if you try.   In the very beginning of radio, comedies lampooned the poor, because only those with money had radios.  As radio ownership grew, the topics of shows broadened.  First half-hour comedy program in 1938, Band Wagon, included musical interludes, was effectively a sitcom and set the stage for much of what came after.  By then, nearly every household had a radio.   WWII had an enormous impact on British comedy and entertainment in general.  Unlike WWI, which was fought on the continent, WWII was right on top of them, with the Blitz, blackouts, rationing, et al.  All places of amusement, which by their nature meant lots of people would gather and could be a target for bombings, were closed.  But the government soon realized comedy had an important role to play in helping its people to keep calm and carry on.  Bonus fact: The iconic 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster was designed months before WWII began, but was never officially sanctioned for display.  It only achieved its prominent position in the public imagination after its rediscovery in 2001.  All the parody t-shirts still annoy me though.   Theater was allowed to continue, but television service was suspended.  This brought radio back to the forefront for communication and diversion.  The most popular show was It's That Man Again, which ran on BBC radio from ‘39-'49.  It's humor was a great unifier during the war, helping people to laugh at the things they were scared of.  People would often listen huddled around their radio during a blackout.  In its character archetypes, it offered a more comprehensive range of social representation than what had come before it, with characters ranging from east end charwomen to the upper class.  It was so universally popular that supposedly its catch-phrases, which is regarded as the first to really succeed with, were used to test suspected German spies.  If you didn't know who said what, they'd be shot.      During the war, Britain fought back against the Nazi propagandists' ferocious scaremongering with things like a song about the fact that Hitler may or may not have only one testicle, the other of which we were storing in a London theatre for safe keeping.  This attitude, combined with having had enough authority to last them a while, would extend to their own government at the start of the 1960's when Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller made fun of the prime minister in their stage show Beyond The Fringe, with the PM in the audience.  This would open the door for satirical news programs like 1962's That Was The Week That Was, grandfather to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.  There was also The Frost Report, whose staff of writers included five names many of know well and you know we're going to get into more detail on - Chapman, Jones, Idle, Palin, and Cleese.   The war would remain subject to comedy, either as the primary setting or a recurring plot point for decades to come in shows like Dad's Army, Allo Allo, and even Are You Being Served?, one of my personal favorites.   If you've ever seen me at my customer service day jobs, I pattern my behavior on Mrs. Slocombe, though I don't reference my pussy as often. [clip]  Experiences in the war led to the prominence of absurdism/surrealism, because nothing could match what they men had been through.  One of the most famous example was The Goon Show, with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Peter Sellers.  The scripts mixed ludicrous plots with surreal humour, puns, catchphrases and an array of bizarre sound effects. Some of the later episodes feature electronic effects devised by the fledgling BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who also created the theme to Dr Who.  The Goon Show and other such programs were popular with those who were students at the time, seeding their sense of humor into the next generation.  Spike Milligan in particular had wide-reaching cultural influence.  The Goon Show was cited as a major influence by The Beatles, the American comedy team The Firesign Theatre, as well as, among many others, Monty Python.   PATREON   Do you remember how I said in episode #39, Short-Lived, Long Remembered that Jackie Gleason's Honeymooner's was the first TV sitcom?  I was mistaken and I don't mind issuing a correction.  Pinwright's Progress, which ran for ten episodes starting in 1946, was the first half-hour television sitcom, telling the tale of a beleaguered shop-owner, his hated rival and his unhelpful staff.  By 1955, ⅓ of British households had a TV.  That year saw the launch of ITV, I for independent, because it was *not run by BBC with its war vets with good-school educations, but by showmen and entertainers.  Where the BBC did comedies for and about the middle-class, ITV brought full-blooded variety to TV.  The BBC was forced to loosen its tie a bit to keep up.  ITV also had commercials, which BBC shows never did -a concept that is quite foreign to the American brain- so writers had to learn to pace their shows differently to allow for the break.  One stand-out was Hancock's Half-hour, which began on radio and moved to TV.  Fom 54-61, it pushed sitcoms with a focus on character development, rather than silly set-ups, musical interludes, and funny voices of radio plays.  Two writers on the show, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, would leave to create Comedy Playhouse in 1961, ten half-hour plays.  One of these grew into the TV show Steptoe and Son (1962–74), about two rag and bone men, father and son, who live together in a squalid house in West London.  This was the basis for the American series Sanford and Son, as well as version in Sweden, Netherlands and Portugal.  For those not in the know, a rag and bone man collected salvageable rubbish from the streets, making it a bizarre name choice for a clothing company but oh well.    The tone and offerings changed considerably with the cultural revolution of the 1960's.  Rock music, the birth control pill, civil rights, everything was changing.  Round The Horne, which aired on BBC radio on Sunday afternoons was chock full of brazen innuendos and double-entendres.  Some of them were risque to the point of being ironically safe -- people who would have objected to them were not of the sensibility to catch the joke it the first place.  Their most remarkable characters were Julian and Sandy, two very obviously gay characters in a time when it was still illegal to be gay in Britain.  Julian and Sandy got away with the bawdiest of their jokes because they spoke Polari, a pidgin language made up a words from Romani, French, Italian, theater and circus slang and even words spelled backwards.  They might refer to someone's dirty dishes and the squares would have no idea that “dish” meant derriere.  Bonus fact: You probably use Polari words without even realizing it, if you describe a masculine person as “butch” or something kitchy as “camp,” even “drag” meaning clothes, particularly women's.    The Carry On Films, a franchise that put out nearly a movie a year for three decades and spun off a TV series, held up a cartoonish mirror to the depressed and repressed Britain of the 1950s and 1960s.  They blended the rapid-fire pace of music hall sketches with topicality and a liberating sense of directness.  Carry On also filled the gap left as music halls as an institution collapsed.   Monty Python's Flying Circus aired from 69-74 and enjoyed a unique watershed success not just for British comedy but also for television comedy around the world. Monty Python was unlike anything that had appeared on television, and in many ways it was both a symbol and a product of the social upheaval and youth-oriented counterculture of the late 1960s.  The show's humour could be simultaneously sarcastic, scatological, and intellectual.  The series was a creative collaboration between Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam, the sole American in a group of Oxford and Cambridge graduates.  The five Brits played most of the roles, with Gilliam primarily contributing eccentric animations.  Although sketch comedy shows were nothing new, television had never broadcast anything as untraditional and surreal, and its importance to television is difficult to overstate.  Their free-form sketches seldom adhered to any particular theme and disregarded the conventions of comedy that writers, performers and audiences had been accustomed to for generations.  Even the opening title sequence didn't follow the rules; it might run in the middle of the show or be omitted entirely.  Over the run of the series, a *few characters recurred, but most were written solely for one sketch.  The show spun-off a number of feature films, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and the Meaning of Life (1983) and even a Tony Award-winning musical comedy Spamalot, first produced in 2005, as well as books and albums like Instant Record Collection.  Decades after the show's initial run, the mere mention of some dead parrots, silly ways, Spam or the Spanish Inquisition is enough to prompt laughter from even casual fans.  All the members who continue on to successful careers, but let's follow John Cleese to his next best-known project.  I put my favorite sketch in Vodacast; see if you can guess it before you look.  And tell me yours, soc med.   Fawlty Towers has been described as the sitcom by which other sitcoms must be measured, voted number one in the BFI's 100 Greatest British Television Programmes in 2000. Its main character, Basil Fawlty, was inspired by a seethingly rude hotel proprietor John Cleese encountered while filming abroad with the Monty Python team.  Cleese actually tested the character on another show in 1971, Doctor At Large, a comedy about newly-graduated doctors, based on the books of Richard Gordon.  The setting for Fawlty Towers was a painfully ordinary hotel that Basil constantly struggling to inject a touch of class into.  His escapades included trying to hide a rat from a hygiene inspector, keeping a dead customer hidden, and pretending that his wife Sybil was ill during their anniversary party, when in fact she's walked out on him).  Basil was the perfect vehicle for Cleese's comic talents: mixing the biting verbal tirades against his wife and guests with the physical dexterity utilised to charge about between self-induced disasters.  Part of the success of the show is arguably the fact that it ran for a mere twelve episodes, so never ran out of steam.  It's been remade in other countries, but those version never really capture the success of the original.  That's one of the key differences between British and American TV series.  A British show might have 2 writers for a season of 6-10 episodes, whereas an American show will have a team of writers for a season of 13-25 episodes.  Quality over quantity, I suppose.  In part, this is a reflection of the difference between the size of the TV audience in the two countries, and the economics of television production; for decades sitcoms on US television that delivered the highest ratings, whereas; in Britain the highest ratings figures were normally for soap operas.   The tone shifted again as the 60's gave way to the 70's.  The anger of 60's revolution gave way to a more comfortable feeling in the 70's.  One of the stand-outs of the decade, which continued into the 80's, was The Two Ronnies.  A sketch show starring Ronnies Barker and Corbett, it moved away from the long-standing comic and straight-man format.  It was the BBC's flagship of light entertainment, the longest running show of its genre.  If we're talking modern comedy duos, we need to talk about Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.  Even in alternative comedy scenes, women had trouble gaining the same notoriety as their male peers.  A step in the right direction was 1987's French and Saunders, a sketch show that displayed the wilful amateurishness of much alternative comedy, but shunned both the violence and scatology or the strident politics that were staples of the big-name performers.  The duo's humour was distinctively female, but not feminist, and most of their jokes were at the expense of themselves or each other.  As audiences and budgets grew, the pair increasingly favoured elaborate spoofs of pop stars and blockbuster movies.  After the show French starred in The Vicar of Dibley and Saunders to the role she's probably best known for, Edina in Absolutely Fabulous.   And that's where we run out of ideas, at least for today.  Don't be surprised if this topic spawns a sequel.  I left out Punch and Judy, skipped right over literature, had to forgo luminaries like Morecambe and Wise, didn't get to the panel show format, and said nothing of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, which may actually be a crime, I'm not sure.  Well, it's like they say in the biz, always leave them wanting more.  Thanks for spending part of your day with em.     Sources: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/truth-behind-keep-calm-and-carry-on https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/feb/17/the-five-stages-of-british-gags-silliness-repression-anger-innuendo-fear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goon_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Wisdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancock%27s_Half_Hour https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/apr/17/gender.filmnews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_the_Horne http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1011109/index.html https://www.britannica.com/topic/Monty-Pythons-Flying-Circus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton_and_Simpson http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/fawltytowers/ http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2014/06/history-brits-better-satire https://www.britannica.com/art/music-hall-and-variety https://www.biography.com/people/charlie-chaplin-9244327 https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1107&context=ghj https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U77CXPANrCc&list=PL9e1sByp65ixpMQlW9hpMMdomwSwGK9-Y

This week we're talking BBC golden oldie "Are You Being Served." In case you wanna watch: Cold Comfort, Season 2 Ep. 2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CrMjQchZx4

In the September episode (just!), I explore all things Father Christmas to give you a real festive Ber month episode! I explore the history of the British Father Christmas figure, an episode of 70s sitcom Are You Being Served called The Father Christmas Affair, and The Kinks' rocking class attack track, Father Christmas.    The Kinks  - Father Christmas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPPCPqDINEk 

The conclusion of Peter's text-along to the William Hartnell Doctor Who epic 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth,' featuring a new Big Finish spinoff idea and Adam recaps an episode of Are You Being Served? This is the edited version with profanity bleeped and some adult themes edited out. The explicit version is available from Patreon. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/adam-richard-has-a-theory. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Adam is excited by the Doctor Who episode 'The End of Tomorrow' which stars William Hartnell, Mr Rumbold from Are You Being Served? and Jenny Balaclava as Debbie Downer. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/adam-richard-has-a-theory. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

231 Are You Being Served? While thinking about the proliferation of as-a-service models of business, thoughts of that 70s and 80s British comedy TV show came to mind. Are you being served? Proved feasible by Salesforce and then adopted by many including recently HPE as the strategy for the entire company, we are witnessing automation companies exploring the as-a-service business model. I wonder how far it will go.

We really had to trim the fat on this recording in order to spare you all from endless conversations about “Inside Number 9”, “Are You Being Served” and “Blake's 7” so that you get almost a solid hour of mostly Doctor Who discussion. As always, listener's discretion is highly advised. TOPICS INCLUDE: Tony Selby is not dead, a few words on Jackie Lane (who is dead … as a Dodo), misremembering which boy band was in that BBC 50th Anniversary thing, watching Doctor Who on Pluto TV, the time JB forced his family to watch “Inferno” on a snow day, the Doctor as Big Brother, we're still pretty sure Jodie is leaving the show, “The Flash” is not as good as it used to be, the cover of the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine, trolling the shippers, diving into the world of online Doctor Who slash fiction, the recent Batman story that JB can't talk about on his PG-rated Batman podcast, Chris reviews Eccleston in Big Finish, Capaldi's curtain call, we're Americans so we're going to spend a few minutes talking about gun violence, Canadian Doctor Who Podcast Theater, obligatory Pertwee callback. Closing theme - “Dodo/Lurker” performed by Cryonaut.

EP 20 Are You Being Served, Baptism Dip? This episode was going to be called “Can We Just Cancel the Bible?” But I had too much fun with “Are You Being Served” style transitions… and I just went nuts and renamed the episode. But seriously… we check in on some right wing Christian Nationalists who think that we are out to “cancel” the Bible. But… they are the ones doing the social damage. I got a new pocket size book… Welcome a new segment, the JSE. Of course we pay a visit to the Baptist & Reflector. This is a fairly simple episode… I didn't even watch Greggy Poo last Sunday. I've been spending more time on TikTok lately… and I noticed that my handle was wrongly described in the notes here… I fixed it. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline - 24/7/365 - 1-800-273-8255 Secular Therapy Project - www.SecularTherapy.org Show art was provided by Megan Broughton, The_Girl_With_The_Paint_Brush Twitter - @DomDAtheist TikTok - @BurntChurchAtheist Email - DomDAtheist@gmail.com Patreon - Patreon.com/BurntChurchAtheist

In which we navigate by way of pay-for-play bribery, Elvis Costello's mum, the songs the Bonzos taught us, the man who helped cook the Beatles' books, the eternal trials of posh pop stars, and Farrah Fawcett-Majors and the story of the Midnight Plane To Houston. And play 'Pulp song or episode of Are You Being Served?'The Bee Gees record a message for Pete Paphides' ansaphone in 1997 ...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcKi3-pYutQ&lc=UgwqHWpFK3w9utgLeH54AaABAg&feature=em-commentsWant exclusive access to every future Word Podcast - and in full audio-visual glory! - alongside a whole host of additional exciting, enlightening and entertaining content and benefits? Of course you do! Make sure you're signed up to our fabulous Patreon for all this and more: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join us for a between-the-series bonus episode of The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour, where teleportational trauma and practical menswear meet in a head-on collision. The social awareness of naive dragons and over-promoted store clerks is analysed under test conditions, as Doctor Velvet and Blackout pore over the first episode of Chorlton And The Wheelies, as well as a Series 4 outing from Are You Being Served? How many times can a piece of music homage itself before creating a vortex? Which of our hosts would happily play a twelve hour game of hide-and-seek in an arena where a terrifying witch could pop out of thin air at any given moment? And what kind of school fails to give teenagers a fundamental grasp of double entendres? Click on, listen in, find out…   The Peggy Mount Calamity Hour is a free podcast from iPorle Media, which holds production copyright. Opinions and recollections expressed are not to be taken as fact. The title and credit music is by Doctor Velvet. Audio segments from television programmes are presented for review and informational purposes only under fair use, and no ownership of these is claimed or implied by this show. Email enquiries to peggymountpod@gmail.com

Can I get a CONTENT WARNING? You sure can, and you seriously need one if you're going to listen to this around little ears, unless you like having some really interesting conversations. Okay that done, let's move on. Now if you think you're ready for Em's Favourite Episode EVER, you ain't even close to being ready, trust us. This episode we talk about Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's new song W.A.P., which doesn't stand for Wonderful And Polite. It actually stands for Wet Ass...um...Mrs. Slocombe's cat, which will only make sense if you've stumbled on an episode of “Are You Being Served?” and if you haven't, lets just say Mrs. Slocombe never called her cat, a cat. We'll also cover off the late night tweeting from Victorian Health Minister, Jenny Mikakos on Saturday night. We suspect it was done after a few vinos, she was basically apologising for the state of play in Victoria, we felt her, let's face it, we've all been there. We talk about the current facial hair situation happening on the face of Brett Sutton, and also how Michael is back on the Daniel Andrews train, Em however is reserving her judgement right now. We also get a brief mention happening over vulva beauty masks. So there is a LOT of lady area talk, which is nothing new really, but again, a little content warning for anyone listening. But ardent fans of the Emsolation podcast will not be surprised, nor will they bat a no doubt superbly manicured eyebrow about it either. So check your surrounds, and once you're sure all the ears within listening range are prepped and prepared, enjoy another walk through the Emsolation forest, and that ISN'T a euphemism, but the Mrs. Slocombe reference most certainly is See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/Emsolation See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Three… Series 3 that is, Shitcom is back and we're kicking things off with series 3 episode 8 of Are You Being Served?: New Look The staff decide to give the department store a… new look. How is Mrs Slocombe's pussy? How many times did they say ‘knickers'? Just how did that pork pie get in that hole? Join us for more of the same plus an all new format for the game. Play along with our new feature, One Foot in The Game. This week the game is ‘Are You Carrying On Being Served?' www.greatbritishshitcom.com Twitter / Instagram / Facebook @britishshitcom / #shitcom

Welcome to Grace Brothers! In this episode, Dani and Sheldon discuss classic british sitcom Are You Being Served, sample a delicacy inspired by the show, and learn what a "Fudgel" is. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theanglofiles/support

Warning: This episode is for a more mature audience. It is Part 1 of our two part discussion on British Comedies. In this episode we discuss the boom of British humour starting in the 1960s to the 1980s. From ground breaking shows such as "Carry On", "The Two Ronnies", "Are You Being Served?" and of course "Monty Python's Flying Circus".  We then look at the progression of humour into the 70 and 80s with "Fawlty Towers", "The Young Ones", "Only Fools and Horses" and so much more. We also examine British "Naughty Words" and the differences between North American and British humour. Also on the show: - trivia (Thanks San Diego Sabers...YOINK!) - listener feedback!

This episode is the return of writer, producer, and friend of the podcast, Hayden Black. Hayden and Michael talk about UK accents, british TV, british culture, Sundays in the UK, Doctor Who, Count Dracula, Louis Jourdan, GenZed, animation, The Simpsons, South Park, Ripping Yarns, Monty Python, Last of the Summer Wine, Happy Valley, Gogglebox, Crashing, The Young Ones, Rik Mayall, Believe Nothing, Bottom, Filthy, Rich, and Catflap, ‘Allo ‘Allo, Are You Being Served?, radio series, League of Gentlemen, Alan Partridge, Big Train, Graham Linehan, The IT Crowd, Simon Pegg, The World's End, Extras, Fresh Meat, bleak American TV, Jessica Jones, Sense 8, Agent Carter, comics, podcasts, Serial, James Bond, Spectre, Lost, M. Night Shaymalan, Wayward Pines, Steven Moffat, and classic Doctor Who. Find us online at http://something2xp.net. Get your free audiobook download and 30 day free trial at http://audibletrial.com/something2xp #PleaseBeKind

The Ones Below is a dark and tense thriller, focussing on the relationship between two sets of first time expectant parents. After a tragic accident, a divide develops between them and a series of sinister clues lead to an unsettling discovery. Kate Muir, film critic for The Times, joins Kirsty Lang to discuss David Farr's big screen directorial debut.Afghan rapper and activist Sonita shares her experience of almost being sold into a forced marriage and director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami describes her award-winning documentary telling Sonita's story, screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival this evening and next week.The BBC's Arts Editor and former Media Director at the Tate, Will Gompertz, considers the impact of BP's decision to end its sponsorship of the gallery after 26 years.As the BBC announce a season celebrating sitcoms, Boyd Hilton takes a look at its latest comedy offering Stop/Start. The pilot episode airs tonight as part of the long running series Comedy Playhouse which gave birth to TV classics Steptoe & Son and Are You Being Served.Joey will gallop around the West End stage for the last time when War Horse ends, after 7 years, tomorrow night. The extraordinary puppetry has attracted a lot of attention, but crucial to the play's success has been the music. This draws on folk song, which melds with classical orchestration. Director Tom Morris, and song-maker John Tams explain their approach, and Tim van Eyken, who was the original Songman in the National Theatre's production, plays and sings live in the Front Row studio.