Grace and Favour 30 Years On: Some Personal Reflections

It may be hard to believe but thirty years have passed since the retired staff of Grace Brothers moved into Millstone Manor and tried to run it as a hotel. First shown on the BBC on 10 Jan 1992, this spin-off to Are You Being Served? lasted a mere 12 episodes (two seasons) and hasn’t been repeated here in the UK since. Yet it still has a small but loyal following, particularly in the US where the episodes still get an airing now and then. So what happened? Why wasn’t there a third series?

According to the writers, the choice of title was a major factor. The series was far more successful in the US where it was renamed Are You Being Served? Again!, so making the obvious link to the original series, whereas Grace and Favour wouldn’t have meant anything to the casual viewer; you would have had to read the blurb in the Radio Times or seen a trailer.

There was also a change of management at the BBC and Grace and Favour didn’t fit well with what they wanted. Comedy was changing, and there was a new wave of alternative comedies that made shows like Grace and Favour, old-fashioned.

I know some viewers were disappointed with the new series, which was possibly another reason for the decline in viewing figures. They missed the department store with the increasingly ridiculous antics of the staff, and the staff’s relocation to a dilapidated manor in the country was all too much to take. The staff were older and with their previously well-defined roles now eroded, some of the magic seemed, at least to their most ardent fans, to have been lost.

But Grace and Favour was different and had a charm all of its own. The Manor and surrounding country ensured a colourful backdrop to the chaos created by the staff who had no experience of country living. It was also helped by the fact that storylines ran on from one episode to another, whereas the episodes in Are You Being Served? were self-contained.

There was, of course, another reason to watch it: the new characters. Here we have the snobbish secretary to Young Mr Grace (Joanne Heywood), Mr Moultered (Billy Burden), the local farmer who runs the farm that’s attached to the manor, and his delightfully naive but beautiful daughter, Mavis (Fleur Bennett), whose increasing infatuation with Mr Humphries is a constant source of intrigue. With this trio, the series is transformed from what could have been a bland exercise in milking the original to something far more entertaining.

We can, at least, be thankful that the show survived for two seasons. Nevertheless, I do wish there had been a third and it seems the writers were hoping for one. A new comedy series can take a while to build up an audience. As it stands, the last episode didn’t reach any conclusion as it had, say, in Hi-de-Hi, where Mr Maplin decided that the holiday camp was no longer the attraction that it once was and reluctantly decided to close its doors for the final time.

So what could we have seen in a third series? Perhaps more interaction between the staff and the guests? Some of the guests complaining about the food and being waited on by a dithering Mr Humphries? But then they would be encroaching on Fawlty Towers territory and some comparisons will become inevitable. There was still more to explore, though, such as the back story to Mr Moultered and Mrs Slocombe. What really happened in their brief encounter in Tiverton? And I would have liked to have seen Mavis getting out of the kitchen a bit more. Or the staff having a Christmas party and Captain Peacock making advances towards an inebriated Miss Lovelock. But most of all, I wonder if Mr Humphries would eventually succumb to Mavis’s charms. I gather this was in the minds of the writers and a wedding was on the cards (in a script?) but whether that would have been a fitting conclusion to the series is debatable. After all, Mr Humphries would no longer be free.

© 2022, John Fraser. All rights reserved.