Coffee Morning

Coffee Morning

A long time ago, you may remember that we started on a complete rewatch of 'Are You Being Served?' with a video to accompany each episode.

This got interruped with the unexpected arrival of 'Doctor Who' on Twitch, as we tried to cover as much of it as possible and this actually did give our YouTube videos quite a noticeable boost.
But doing these involved getting out as many DVDs as we could find, so that we could wave the covers in front of the camera, giving the range as much publicity as we could.

We're also continuially working on blog posts and the podcast itself, which means that after a while things tend to get a little buried.

We were due to cover the second episode of Season Three of 'Are You Being Served' but somehow I'd failed to return the DVD box to its rightful place on the shelves and even after a search, we couldn;t quite put our finger on it.

But, as is often the way, when looking for some other stuff a couple of days ago, the lost episode, 'Coffee Morning', turned up and there was much rejoicing.

So, last night we were able to get back into the old routine and took our usual ridiculously over-detailed notes. Once I'd managed to find a notebook with some free space in it, of course.

'Coffee Morning' is a Mister Grainger one and that always is a bonus in my opinion. I won't go into too much detail here as we'd rather that you watched the video, but it concerns a dispute between management and union over the definition of when your break begins and ends.

Mister Grainger is cast in the role of sacrificial lamb here and Mister Mash, as shop steward, wins a rather hollow victory in the end. This sort of storyline is a real insight into the working environment in the 70s and has an air of 'Carry On At Your Convenience' about it at times.

I would not wish to comment too much on the possible opinions of Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft in these matters, but I would cynically suggest (from my own experience) that when companies get too obsessed over a minute here and a minute there, this is usually a symptom of bigger problems that they should perhaps sort out first.

On a different subject, also watch out for the bit at the start when Miss Brahms is measuring Mrs Slcoombe's waist and they come to the conclusion that it sounds bigger in metric as she apparently measures some 77 centipedes.

This is a unit of measurement that deserves to be used much more often, I think!

Our video about 'Coffee Morning' can be seen here.

(Written by Andrew Trowbridge)