Secret Jews, closeted gays, and other Britcom icons |
My interests in Britcom reruns, Jewish matters, straight womanhood, and department stores tend to be pretty compartmentalized. Yet they all converge in Mrs. Slocombe, my favourite character on the innuendo-fest 1970s-and-onwards London department store sitcom Are You Being Served? Wait, was Mrs. Slocombe Jewish? I’m so glad you asked.
“Founders Day,” a 1977 episode, has the clothing salespeople of Grace Brothers planning and then hosting a nostalgic tribute to the store’s octogenarian founder. The Jewish theme is announced in a scene earlier on, where the staff are planning this event over a workday lunch. One of the salesmen, Mr. Humphries, isn’t eating the cafeteria food and has instead brought “egg and onion, latkes, salt beef, gefilte fish and bagels.” A colleague asks if he’s “changing [his] religion,” and Mr. Humphries gives this whole backstory about how his mother packed him this meal (Mr. Humphries is middle-aged but a mama’s boy) because she’d seen Burt Lancaster playing Moses on television and wants her son to be “manly” like that. This dialogue sets up more than just the episode’s Jewish angle, as we shall see.
Then comes the big event scene, held in the dreary boardroom. Inspired by long-running television show This Is Your Life, the staff take turns offering some kind birthday words about Mr. Grace. The anecdotes attest, between the lines, to his three key traits: undeservedly rich, stingy, and a lech.
Mrs. Slocombe, senior saleswoman in lady’s intimate apparel, is a woman of a certain age, her hair in a rotating-rainbow beehive that is, in this episode, the colour of lox. It has not yet been her turn. She sits in the front, so her expressive face is visible, as it goes from neutral-to-smiling enjoyment of the presentation to a look of awkward fear, her hand approaching her mouth, her eyes then turning down with an embarrassed look of get me out of here, as Mr. Lucas, the salesman serving as presenter, utters the name Rachel Yiddle. Mr. Lucas adds, “I see surprise and bewilderment chase across your face,” directed, presumably, at Mr. Grace, though the “surprise and bewilderment” are more general. Behind her, her colleagues express, with their faces, first confusion (for they have no colleague named Rachel Yiddle), then some chuckling when they piece together who this refers to. Not that they much use first names on the show, but Mrs. Slocombe’s is always given as Betty.
But the moment quickly passes, with Mr. Lucas explaining that “Miss Rachel Yiddle” became “Mrs. Slocombe,” which somehow brings Mrs. Slocombe back to her present self. She stands proudly, beaming, and gets up to exchange a kiss on the cheek with Mr. Grace. Mr. Lucas later refers to her, cheekily, as Rachel Yiddle, and she shoots him the same look she does when he makes one of his regular cracks about her being old, fat, and unappealing to men. Rachel-Yiddle-ness is clearly, in both of their understandings, and in the implied one of the audience (the laugh track’s a clue), an undesirable quality along similar lines.
The “Rachel Yiddle” interlude might have been a one-episode curiosity. After all, Mrs. Slocombe goes back to being Mrs. Slocombe in the........