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On The Buses - Series 1 - Episodes 1 To 3
Background Information: On The Buses On The Buses was a British sitcom created by Ronald Wolfe & Ronald Chesney. The pair had already had successes with The Two Ronnies, The Rag Trade & Meet The Wife for the BBC. The BBC rejected this offering & so the pair turned to ITV. The show was accepted & although the critics disliked it, the show was a huge hit with the viewers. In the series Stan Butler works as a bus driver for the Luxton & District Bus Company. He lives at home with his bingo loving, widowed & overbearing mother, his frumpy sister Olive & his lazy brother in law Arthur. The bane of Stans life is Inspector Blakey Blake who is often checking up of them & threatening them with the sack for lateness & untidyness. His catchphrase is I ate you Butler!. On The Buses was a primetime ITV sitcom & 74 half-hour episodes were made. Also popular were the spin-off feature films made by Hammer. Holiday On The Buses was Britains top box-office film at the time, surpassing even the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever. DVD Extras: On the Buses has no extra features here. The original black & white versions have scrubbed up reasonably well, although defects such as fading sound & poor dubbing have proven beyond amendment.
Set around a London bus depot, On the Buses starred Reg Varney as Stan, an ageing bachelor & driver of the No.11 bus who still lives with his Mum , his plain sister Olive & disgruntled brother-in-law Arthur . At work, he fraternises with the laddish & lecherous Jack , with whom he pursues innumerable giggly, mini-skirted clippies & cheeks the beady-eyed & punctilious bus inspector, Blakey This first series was broadcast in black & white in 1969. Much of the comedy derives from gender role reversal, Stan & Arthur forced to do the household chores when Olive & Mum fall ill ; The Canteen, in which the busmen decide to run the canteen themselves; or The Darts Match, in which Stan & Jack are bested at darts by, imagine, a pair of dollybird clippies. Despite its immense popularity, On the Buses hasnt dated well. Like the buses themselves, the jokes dont arrive very often & when they do, theyre visible a long way off. The studio audience whoops cathartically at anything remotely alluding to sex, making you wonder at the repressed nature of British society in 1969. In later decades it would come to be treasured as somewhat creaky kitsch by audiences nostalgic for an age of politically incorrect innocence. Robert St Clair Grant, usually known as Bob Grant was an English actor, mainly known for playing in On The Buses. He was born in Hammersmith, London, the son of Albert George Grant & Florence Grant. He trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, working in his spare time as a frozen food salesman & also as a bus conductor. After doing National Service in the Royal Artillery, he made his stage debut in 1952 as Sydney in Worms Eye View at the Court Royal, Horsham. His first London appearance was in The Good Soldier Schweik at the Duke of Yorks Theatre in 1956 & he spent several years at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, East London before getting the lead role in the musical Blitz! at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End for two years. He had by now started to make film appearances, including Sparrows Can’t Sing, the screen version of a play he had earlier acted in at Stratford & the Beatles film Help!.
Editors Choice: On The Buses, Vol 4, View DVDology
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