IN MEMORIAM MOLLIE SUGDEN 1922 - 2009

In the 1990s, British actress Mollie Sugden suddenly found herself a cult favorite in America when the BBC started to license some of its old sitcoms to PBS. Channel 7 KUED showed these during the ten and eleven o’clock hours for years. This is how I first became a fan of Mollie Sugden.

Few actress have been funny on such a scale and for such a long stretch of time as Mollie Sugden. As a professional, she had no vanity, except to get laughs. Like Lucille Ball, she did anything the writers concocted and made it even more funny than they could have hoped.

For examples –

She portrayed a Hyacinth Bucket- like character in The Liverbirds at least two decades before Roy Clark came up with Keeping Up Appearances. Her comic stock in trade was big hats, pretensions to upper class respectability undercut by pies in faces and whoopie cushions

In Come Home Mrs. Noah she portrayed a 21st century house wife that got lost in space, literally. It gave her an opportunity to wear more funny clothing and float around in comic poses weightless.

In That’s My Boy, she examined the comic potential of mother-son-adoption humor.

Are You Being Served (produced in 1972 to 1985 by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft) still remains the BBC’s prime example of English humor as self cleaning pornography. It set standards for double entendres and double word meanings that few series have ever reached. In it she played “Mrs. Betty Slocombe,” the senior staff member of the Ladies Intimate Apparel department (undies, knickers, and bras) of a very old-style patrician London Department Store called Grace Brothers. Young Mr. Grace was so old that he needed round the clock nursing care. Mrs. Slocombe’s comic stock in trade included malapropism, hair home-dyed every possible neon color with maybe the exception of black, and a tendency toward sexual double entendres involving her house cat Tiddles.

At one point, the male sales personnel think she is pregnant, when in fact she is talking about the love life of her house cat, who is in fact with kittens:

BRAHMS: “You say you don’t know who the father is.”

SLOCOMBE : Well – yes and no. I suspect it was on my birthday. I came back from the pub after a few too many and I did not shut the door properly. I think he lives with that woman in the next house. .... He’s Burmese . . . . He spends all day crouched in her rhubarb peering in.”

Typical was this exchange over the phone with her neighbor when she had to work late, and she wanted him to feed her cat

“I want you to look through my letter slot, and if you see my pussy, drop a sardine on the mat.”
Three beats of a pause. “No I am not home.”

In the famous episode where the entire clothing staff took a weeks change and manned a toy department:

SLOCOMBE “They have nothing but mechanical dogs. Do they have any mechanical pussys?”

PEACOCK: “People, they find, prefer the real thing.”

She could make any number of lines rather sexy if not just sexual. In “Camping In,” she describes her first sighting during a World War II carpet bombing of her never-seen husband:

SLOCOMBE in dead serious reminiscent: “I first saw his face lit by an incendiary. He threw me on my face and said, Look out here comes a big one.”

In “German Week,” she examines a Deutsche klein bustenhalten big enough to slingshot two watermelons and notes dryly, “Well built those German girls.”

She could do comedy in lederhosen, a wedding gown that opened both forward and back, overpetticoated puffy formal dresses, evening gowns too tight to walk in, showgirl teddies, motorcyclist leather kit, moll wear, charwoman work gear complete with mop, overfrilly lingerie, one-piece sleeper with footsies, and Little Girl drag in two very memorable episodes.

When she reverted to age 5 after a head injury:

PEACOCK: “Who is the prime minister?”

LITTLE GIRL BETTY: {triumphantly, as if answer a kindergarten pop quiz} “Mr. Baldwin.”

SPOONER: “Thank God at least it isn’t Gladstone.”

In an episode where she briefly became management, she ordered a three-piece executive woman’s suit, generating this memorable exchange on the prospect of pin strips with Trevor Bannister’s wiseguy junior men sales=assistant character:

SLOCOMBE: “Stripes are so slimming, aren’t they?”

LUCAS: “Well, have you ever seen a fat zebra?”

She may have been the funniest female drunk in British Television, most memorably when she nearly married a Greek who left her at the alter and she went through a charade wedding quite intoxicated on brandy in order to get the wedding gift – a house -- from her expatriate uncle living in Texas. In “German Week,” after swilling an entire bottle of very spirited German wine, she says with all the dignity a drunk can muster, “You know this hat must be too tight. It makes me feel quite giddy.”

In the episode that featured Mr. Granger’s Retirement dinner, she guzzles four Vodka martinis before swilling Japanese tinned champaign. The legendary poofster men’s sales assistant Mr. Humphreys, notes “You know what they say about vodka. One drink’s great, two’s the most, Three you're under the table. Four you're under the host.”

SLOCOMBE: [flirting] “Oh what will you say next?”

HUMPHREYS: “Mr. Rumbold’s the host.”

Another of her comic catch phrases that swept England and PBS watching America – “and I am unanimous in this!” She also took her earring off to answer the telephone, which from the looks of it dated to sometime in the reconstruction of London.

Wendy Richard , who worked with Ms Sugden in Are You Being Served? and Are You Being Served Again! went on the official record as saying that Mollie Sugden had in Are You Being Served a comic look that could freeze an ox at 100 paces, which Richard used when she became Pauline in The East Enders. The directors always seemed to have a camera on her, to capture every look, because she could do comic looks even when she didn’t have lines.

In 1992, most of the Are You Being Served cast came together again for Grace and Favour (retitled Are You Being Served Again! for the PBS market) to manage a country manor bed-and- breakfast somewhere in what is left of rural Glouchester, England. Apparently she got a contract stipulation that she did not have to wear multi-colored wigs: thus, she got to show off her gray hair and her comic timing, which if anything, had gotten sharper with age.

In this series, she got to play off Billy Burrad who portrayed “Moulterd,” a crude north country farmer who she might have had a fling with in the 1940s as a Great Lolloping Land Girl evacuated from urban England to rural England during the German blitzkrieg. During the famous trial at which authorities accused her of stealing a cart, she tells him “Not that long ago” when on the witness block he makes it sound as if they went back to the days of Disraeli. She also got to explore the comic potential of a real cat, a fossilized cat { “I have a pussy of ancient antiquity and I hoped you have someone who could come round to appraise it.”}, chickens, and hogs.

Mollie died on 1 July 2009, age 86. Both Wendy Richard and Mollie Sugden died in the same year 2009, but fortunately both of their images live on in the videotapes of the shows in which they starred. She performed brilliant comedy. She remains a favorite and I am unanimous in it!