Are You Being Served 2016

[robbarton]

Watched this a few weeks ago and immediately my ears pricked up at the Amstrad jokes - scene begins about 13:15 with the Amstrad reference at about 14:00:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pNgnV7y__w

Any PCW aficionados care to verify that what is on the desk matches the description or is it just a generic old PC?

Given that this episode is set in 1988 is the £399 price tag joke accurate or is someone misremembering the CPC's launch price?

Just curious!

[MaV]

That's no PCW but an Amstrad PC1512. It could be a PC1640 as well; both models look almost the same and the camera is too far away in the scenes. Since the PC1640 was more expensive and the introductory price of the PC1512 was £499, it must be one of the latter machines.

And yes, they were dirt cheap in comparison to other PCs at that time.

[robbarton]

Oops, as a CPC man I never knew anything about the rest of the range beyond the Plus machines 

I'm impressed that the set dressers seem to have bothered to source an actual Amstrad machine rather than just hope everyone took the joke on face value.

[seanb]

Well seeing as how the apprentice is still going I don't think they'd want to mess up having a real amstrad on the show.

[MaV]

We'll probably never know how it came to be. But I can imagine someone of the crew having bought an Amstrad PC mentioned it and then someone had the idea of incorporating it into the scene.

Anyway, nice find!

[Bryce]

That's impressively close to the original "Are you being Served", even the actors look almost identical. However, John Inman could never be replaced by anyone.

Bryce.