Mrs. Slocombe, This Is Your Life! Brit T.V. Magazine - Interview (Please note that this article comes from Brit T.V. magazine. I am in no way affiliated with Brit T.V. but I would ask that you go to their website and at least check it out, even if you do not end up subscribing to Brit T.V. magazine. After all, it is due to this awesome magazine that articles such as this one are available for your viewing. Many thanks to "Rachel Yiddell" for sending me this article, in .jpg format. The article has been copied faithfully, preserving any original grammatical errors and such.) Brit T.V. - http://www.erols.com/brittv/ * * * This short interview with the wonderful Mollie Sugden literally came along as we were finishing work on this issue. There was barely time to typeset the piece, let alone wrack our brains for some devilishly satirical preamble or clever title. The editor made one or two immature suggestions, but in the end we opted for a theme that even "Are You Being Served" borrowed on occasion................ Mrs. Slocombe, This Is Your Life! By Dan Abramson As Requested By British Television Readers: Helen Turner Barbara McAllister Kenneth A. Welt Nancy Yeager John Lutz Denise O'Wesney A bit of Slocombian bombast defines Mollie Sugden's conversational style. This is not to say that I'm under the impression that I am actually speaking to Mrs. Slocombe of ARE YOU BEING SERVED? But my half-hour or so of locution-on-the-phone with Sugden is enough to convince me that there are certain similarities between the actress and the character. Specifically, I refer to the emotional force which carried Sugden from a small town in Yorkshire to four decades of on-camera success with BBC Light Entertainments. Our Mollie may have achieved personal and career happiness beyond anything dreamed of by the fictional Slocombe, but the same no-nonsense attitude seems to reside just below the surface of both ladies. In real life, smart-alecky young sales clerks would probably think twice before "taking the Mickey" out of Ms. Sugden, unless they wanted "a good ear-bashin'." Mind you, Sugden is quite gracious to me throughout our chat. However, one gets the impression that she does not suffer fools gladly. I make a specific point of not acting foolish. Sugden has recently completed a series of reunion episodes for her sitcom, THE LIVER BIRDS, which premiered a few years before ARE YOU BEING SERVED? and ran simultaneously with it from 1972 to 1978. THE LIVER BIRDS (pronounced "LYE-VERR," Mollie tells me) was about two young working girls sharing a flat in Liverpool. Sugden, who played the Mum of one of those title-birds, describes her character as "another snobby-snooty woman who thinks she's better than she is." To some extent that also defines the Sugden role in THAT'S MY BOY, a sitcom which, chronologically, came after the seventies success of THE LIVER BIRDS and ARE YOU BEING SERVED?, but before the nineties revivals of those two series. No plans have been announced for any reprises of THAT'S MY BOY. But, with a perennial like Sugden in the lead, you never know. Yorkshire Lass "I always wanted to be an actress and, I do think, right from the age of five I wanted to be in comedy," recalls Sugden. "I had this funny little poem that I would recite and everybody laughed and I wanted them to continue to laugh." Asked to recite the poem now, Sugden declines, saying "I don't know whether you would understand it. It needs to be told in a broad Yorkshire accent." Specifically, her childhood base of operations was "Keighley, near Leeds." The proper pronunciation us K-e-e-s-l-e-y, "not K-e-e-l-e-y, which is what most people say and is most annoying." As for her youthful choice of the medium in which she hoped to star, Sugden replies that she was primarily entranced by the theatre. "You see, for quite a long time after I was five, there was no television." Regarding her first professional appearance: "Oh Crikey," she says. "I don't remem- ber." But she does have fond recollections of study at London's Guild Hall School of Music and Drama. "It was a good place for learning," says Sugden. "They weren't much help in finding a job, but I learned a lot there." Her native Yorkshire forcefulness carried Sugden through that next and most difficult stage of becoming a professional actress - actually getting someone to pay you for acting. "It's not easy to get started in theatre at any time," Sugden comments. And, in those days "no one would give you work unless you were a member of Equity." That experience helped her bring tragicomic realism to some of Mrs. Slocombe's more frustrating moments at Grace Bros. Department Store. But Sugden wound up spending "eight years in weekly repertory, doing a play a week." Part of that time she was under the aegis of actor/manager Harold G. Roberts. Later, Sugden toured with the Swansea Theatre Company. "We would put plays on in different towns," says Sugden. "It was ten or twelve weeks in one town and then move on. If you were lucky, you got to keep doing the same play." Tyne-Tees Telly Theatre work mixed with radio and then Sugden got her break in television doing a one- time, three-character play called _Under_New_Management_. "It was frighteningly, terrify- ingly live," she remembers with a chuckle. "I played the wife of a man who had just bought a pub. And I was somewhat livid with him for buying it." The other two members of that cast, Paul Whitson-Jones and Wilfred Pickles, were well- known names in the early fifties. Which is to say that the Newcastle-based TV company, Tyne-Tees, was giving Sugden an excellent chance to get her foot in the television door. "I was doing a summer season for George and Alfred Black - a firm of impresarios - who had shares in Tyne-Tees," explains Sugden in remembrance of her big break. From Newcastle, Sugden's telly-career moved south by southwestto the BBC in London. "The Beeb was like one big family in those days," she recalls, "especially in Light Enter- tainments." One of the first new friends Sugden made at BBC Television House was Frank Thornton, who would later haunt her as Captain Peacock of Grace Bros. "I met Frank when we were both doing tiny bits - now and again, on THE BENNY HILL SHOW - and he later appeared with my husband, William Moore, in the West End in J.B. Priestley's _When_We_Are_Married_. But it was not until ARE YOU BEING SERVED? that we worked together for any length of time." Graceful Favour "I knew David Croft very well in Newcastle, when he was an assistant director," says Sugden of the man who co-created ARE YOU BEING SERVED? as well as DAD'S ARMY and 'ALLO 'ALLO. "After David got to the BBC, whenever a part suited, he employed me." Ergo, when Croft sent her the script for the first episode of ARE YOU BEING SERVED? and informed Sugden that there was a role in it written especially for her, "I said 'Oh, Goodie!'" Sugden then recalls asking which role in particular was hers, and Croft saying "you'll know it when you see it!" Sugden remembers that "when I first read the script, I thought it was going to be very good." The on-air career of ARE YOU BEING SERVED? has, in itself, been an interesting bit of media history. The pilot episode aired during the Munich Olympics, just as Arab terrorists were murdering Israeli athletes. "It was so awful, those Israelis getting shot," says Sugden, "and so, of course, our pilot got no publicity. "I thought, 'oh well, no publicity means no one watching,' but then David called and said it had been picked up." The first season of a half-dozen episodes then aired against an already-popular sitcom called MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE, which would later be butchered in America as a series called THREE'S COMPANY. The second season of ARE YOU BEING SERVED? was scheduled against the even- more popular prime time soap opera CORONATION STREET. It was only during the third season that ARE YOU BEING SERVED? achieved impressive audience numbers. "I must hand it to the BCC," Sugden states. "They nursed it along and everything worked out all right in the end." The Reason Why ARE YOU BEING SERVED? is still running in Britain, a quarter century after that pilot. "Oh-Hoo-HOO, do I look young in those early episodes!" laughs Sugden. "Sometimes I don't even recognize the cast. I think it must be some other people doing our show!" As for the AYBS? longevity, Sugden explains that there is a certain universality about the experience. "Everyone has been in a department store. Admittedly, not everyone has been in a department storelike Grace Bros., but everyone _has_ been in a department store. The characters are recognizable, especially the bossy ones. And we all got on very well togeth- er." As for what the public loves about Mrs. Slocombe, Ms. Sugden observes that "she always gets put down, but then always gets up and fights again." This offsets such other aspects of Slocombe as the fact that "she's always trying to be better that she is - we call that 'Putting On The Dog.' And she's rather desperate for a man, which is pathetic, really." Asked if she was aware that ARE YOU BEING SERVED? still has a sizable and devoted aud- ience in North America, Sugden replies that "yes, of course I knew that. I could tell from all the letters I receive." Such letters, says Sugden, "are wonderful - except for the fact that I have to sit down and write back to everybody. But I love it!" No doubt Mrs. Slocombe would have loved the adulation as well. Too bad the poor dear never got any. * * * Are You Being Served? _Regular_Cast_ Mr. Lucas (Trevor Bannister) Mr. Humphries (John Inman) Capt. Peacock (Frank Thornton) Mrs. Slocombe (Mollie Sugden) Miss Brahms (Wendy Richard) Mr. Grainger (Arthur Brough) Mr. Harmon (Arthur English) Mr. Rumbold (Nicholas Smith) Young Mr. Grace (Harold Bennett) Mr. Spooner (Mike Berry) Mr. Mash (Larry Martyn) Mr. Goldberg (Alfie Bass) Old Mr. Grace (Kenneth Waller) Mr. Tebbs (James Hayter) * * * Mollie Sugden c/o Joan Reddin Hazel Cottage Wheeler End Common Lane End Buckinghamshire HP14 3NL Great Britain _Television_ Are You Being Served? Are You Being Served? Again (Grace and Favour) Come Back Mrs. Noah My Husband and I Coronation Street Doctor in the House That's My Boy The Liver Birds Hugh and I Please, Sir! 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