Are you being served in SW1?

10 April 2012

This article was first published in December 2000

The Golden Age of British television ran, roughly speaking, from the first episode of The Forsyte Saga to the last instalment of Brideshead Revisited.

One of the most significant flowerings of culture in this televisually abundant time was Are You Being Served? Ostensibly, this was a sitcom about life in a prototypical department store of the Seventies.

However, its real function, namely holding a mirror up to the crumbling yet stratified society of the time, was pretty plain to anyone schooled in Marxist deconstruction. It was a triumph, albeit massively politically incorrect: young Mr Grace, the elderly capitalist who ran the eponymous Grace Brothers, was always attended by scantily clad young women who seemed to have escaped from The Benny Hill Show.

John Inman gave a portrayal of stereotypical flamboyant homosexuality that would today probably have him hauled before the ITC. And the gales of canned laughter that I seem to remember accompanying references to Mrs Slocombe's pussy made Sharon Stone's knickerless moment in Basic Instinct seem like an act of impromptu subtlety.

Life at Grace Brothers seemed so attractive because it was a secure world: a paternalistic and essentially benevolent society with a place for everyone and everyone in their place. It was a world of staff outings and jobs for life, a place where Dress Down Friday would have been construed as some crass double entendre, and where new technology meant a fresh young dollybird in the typing pool.

It is a retail experience that is pretty nearly dead. I say pretty nearly because there is still Peter Jones. More than just a shop, Peter Jones is a way of life, a religion almost, where the canticle of 'never knowingly undersold' is repeated down the generations.

I tend not to shop at Peter Jones but I am glad it is there. And so I was disturbed to hear that the middle of the store was being refurbished. I wanted to enjoy one last lunch there, just in case the deliciously old-fashioned semi-self-service cafeteria arrangements of the fifth-floor restaurant were swept away in favour of some Harvey Nichols Fifth Floor-alike operation.

However, by no stretch of the imagination could you call the gastronomic offering at the top of Peter Jones a 21st-century London restaurant. One queues with shoppers who are by turns stoic and truculent about the overcrowding.

One selects such items as a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon, a mixed salad bowl, or, in my case, goat's cheese and roasted vegetables in a 'Parmesan case'. There is booze, but I settled for two bottles of diet cola. I was tempted by, but did not succumb to, the cheesecake. I paid and then tried to find a table.

I had attempted to find a table while my wife queued, but this is not the Peter Jones etiquette. I found this out the hard way. I spied an empty table with a view of Sloane Square and intended to hold on to it. I ignored the disapproving glare of two elderly, well-coiffed women who might have been posing for a Vogue fashion shoot half a century ago and been left to grow old without being allowed to move from their seats.

However, I was no match for the old dragon who informed me in tones normally reserved for shoplifters that I was not permitted to occupy a seat until I had purchased my food.

I then asked a Peter Jones employee if she might find me a table. With aplomb that put me in mind of the head of protocol at the Nicolai Ceaucescu School of Restaurant Management, she informed me that one would become available when I had purchased my food. A cross between a matron at a third-rate public school and Rosa Klebb, this woman is wasted on the customers of Peter Jones; she should be running a penal institution.

We eventually found a table and as lunch wore on I sensed a touch of the Dunkirk Spirit knitting the restaurant patrons together. As circumstances became more straitened, I began to appreciate the latent nobility of the British character, the let's-muck-in-and-pull-together-like-we-did-in-the-Blitz of it all. This rose-tinted Churchillian view was brought on by the fact that most customers seem to dress out of the small ads at the back of newspapers that themselves have been drawn from a gentler age.

If you are a man I recommend the following look: self-supporting cavalry-twill trousers containing a large proportion of manmade fibre; a checked brushed-cotton shirt; scrawny regimental tie and blazer that has become two sizes too small and shiny with age.

At one moment I looked up from my goats' cheese and roasted veg, perfectly adequate except for rather hardwearing pastry cases, to see a woman standing by my table who was several sizes too big for an extremely unpleasant pair of black trousers. However, rather than merely choosing to do the right thing by us, not to mention the trousers, and throw them away, she had wedged herself into them and hauled the zip as far as it would go, which was not a very long way.

It was not a conventionally attractive sight, but oddly British. After all, why throw away a perfectly good pair of trousers merely because they are hideous and several sizes too small, when you could put them on and wear them out to Peter Jones?