It's sad to note the passing of Wendy Richard / Emerton (7/20/1943-2/26/2009), fondly remembered as Shirley Brahms in the British series Are You Being Served? from the 1970s and 1980s, and as Pauline Fowler / Beale in EastEnders from 1985 to 2006. I identified with Mr. Lucas (Trevor Bannister) in the former series in liking Miss Brahms and so it was probably no accident that I dated a similarly placed English woman briefly in the early 1990s, in London. Learned a lot of good lingo, among other things.
At the core of Are You Being Served? (comedic) and EastEnders (dramatic) is an awareness of class that would make most Americans cringe, even today with the current economic meltdown. With the exception of some excellent American shows from the 1970s -- Sanford and Son, All in the Family come to mind -- both not coincidentally inspired by British series (Steptoe and Son, Till Death Do Us Part), Americans prefer to dream of miraculous rags to riches endings, an effortless lucky rising from shithouse to penthouse.
One of the running class conscious jokes in Are You Being Served? is about where each employee lives. Captain Stephen Peacock (Frank Thornton, now 88) often lightly mocks Miss Brahms and her "semi-detached," which in parts of the USA would be called a duplex, triplex or quadplex, all kinds I've lived in at one time or another. Even a semi-detached was considered higher up the class scale than terraced housing, at least in the 1970s. But then again, despite all mod cons (i.e. all modern conveniences) Captain Peacock displays some ugly gnomes outside his own domicile.
In American cities, all sorts of people might live in a rowhouse, depending on neighborhood and certainly true in a fairly affordable city like Philadelphia; then you've got your brownstones and in Toronto, a strange variation called the linked house (linked underground, but not above). In Detroit, I've lived in a quadplex, a duplex, and something like a little bungalow (in Harper Woods, when I was married and definitely not enjoying a semi-detached lifestyle, haha) only with a basement. Frankly, with a Bohemian state of mind I can probably live in and adapt to just about any kind of housing situation and in fact, less is usually a simpler arrangement than more.
Today's Rune: Partnership.
4 comments:
This sucks, she was so good on that show. Mr.Humphries was always my favorite though.
I am so tired of living classless with neighbors a mere fifteen feet away...give me land and I will give you the clutter.
Eric, you have given me pause as to the many places I've called home. The family appropriate subdivison house, the multi family (commune) apartment house. The flat over a hardware, the beach house, the city house, and the oceanside condo. I've always wanted to live in a loft in a walking city, maybe Paris?? Or a boat. A very LARGE boat!!
Lana really enjoys the British humor series. I've never wathed them very much myself, though.
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