He Made Millions Laugh as Mr. Humphries—But Five Co-Stars Reportedly Couldn’t Stand Him!! !!
John Inman made millions laugh as Mr. Humphries on “Are You Being Served?” But behind the famous “I’m free!” catchphrase, five co-stars reportedly felt the sting of his rise.
Before his death, John Inman was said to have carried bitter memories of five co-stars from the show that made him famous. The strange part is that these were not people he barely knew. He worked beside them for years, rehearsed with them, shared dressing rooms with them, and smiled next to them in publicity photographs.
Then he walked onto the set of Are You Being Served? and made millions of viewers believe everything inside Grace Brothers was perfectly happy. It wasn’t always. Once Mr. Humphries became the character audiences were waiting for, the balance behind the cameras began to shift.
There were more laughs, more attention, bigger scenes and more publicity. Suddenly, people who had once looked like Inman’s equals were watching him become the face of the entire program.
One relationship allegedly turned competitive. Another reportedly grew colder as his fame exploded. One co-star had perhaps the clearest reason to resent what was happening, and the final two were tied to years of backstage tension viewers never saw.
Inman kept smiling, kept performing, and kept saying, “I’m free.” Behind that famous grin, though, some relationships were apparently getting harder to hide. So who were the five co-stars he struggled with most, and which name has the darkest reason for being on the list? It starts with the moment Inman stopped being part of the cast and became the star.
Are You Being Served? debuted in 1972, and nobody could have guessed what it would become. The premise sounded almost painfully ordinary: a British department store, a handful of sales assistants, a floorwalker, a manager and customers wandering through. The store was Grace Brothers, and nearly everyone behind its counters had a distinct comic identity.
Mollie Sugden played Mrs. Slocombe, loud, proud, easily offended and certain the department would collapse without her. Trevor Bannister played Mr. Lucas, young, cheeky and usually more interested in Miss Brahms than in whatever he was supposed to be selling. Wendy Richard was Miss Brahms, quick and dry, sharp enough to end an argument with a look.
Frank Thornton became Captain Peacock, a man whose every gesture suggested rank, discipline and dignity. Even in a department store, he behaved as though he were commanding a military unit. Nicholas Smith played Mr. Rumbold, management in theory, a man paid to control everyone who often looked as if everyone else were slowly destroying him.
And inside that ensemble stood John Inman. At first, he was not the obvious star. He played Mr. Wilberforce Clayborne Humphries, an assistant in Menswear and one character among many.
But Inman had something cameras love. He knew how to make a tiny reaction feel enormous. Born in Preston in 1935 and raised near Blackpool, he grew up around variety shows, revue, theater and pantomime.
He understood live audiences, and he understood the value of waiting. Not too long, just long enough. He knew when to move his eyes before turning his head, and when a line needed another second of silence. Sometimes he could take something that barely looked funny on paper and make a studio audience roar.
That ability changes careers. Writers notice, producers notice, and audiences notice first. At the start, Mr. Humphries said something and people laughed. Then he started getting bigger laughs, then his entrances started drawing reactions, and then viewers began anticipating him.
Eventually came the phrase that would follow him for the rest of his life. It was almost absurdly simple. Someone called for Mr. Humphries, Inman turned, held the pause and delivered it.
“I’m free.”
The studio erupted. Soon, audiences were waiting for it. And when viewers start waiting for one specific character, the hierarchy changes. Writers build toward that character, scenes lean in his direction, and other actors become part of the setup.
Inman had not arrived at Grace Brothers as the undisputed star. The audience made him one. The first performer strong enough to meet him at full comic volume was Mollie Sugden.
Mrs. Slocombe could dominate a scene before she said a word. The hair helped. It was blue one week, pink the next, and something more outrageous after that. Sugden played her as proud, explosive and permanently ready to be offended.
Inman worked differently. Where Sugden attacked a scene, he could wait. Where she raised her voice, he might lower his, and where she gave a massive reaction, he could answer with a single look. Together, it worked beautifully.
But both actors understood something important: a laugh has value. Experienced comedy performers know where the laugh sits in a scene. They know when someone needs another beat, and when a movement is distracting from a punchline. After enough years, they also know when the script is starting to favor somebody else.
As Mr. Humphries grew more popular, so did Inman’s publicity. The catchphrase escaped the program and people imitated him. Interviewers wanted him, and audiences sometimes reacted before his joke had even arrived.
Mrs. Slocombe remained one of the biggest characters on the show. But Sugden was now working beside someone whose fame was rising at extraordinary speed.
No backstage explosion was necessary. Professional competition can show up in much smaller ways. Who gets the final joke? Who gets the longer sequence? Whose reaction closes the scene? Who stands in the middle of the publicity photo, and who is mentioned first in the article? Tiny things grow bigger after years, and Inman and Sugden spent years together.
Sugden had one enormous advantage: she could hold her own. If he pushed a scene, she could push back. If he stretched a reaction, she could fire another line at him. Sometimes their scenes looked like a fight over who could control the audience.
Mrs. Slocombe throws the line. Inman turns. Pause. Reaction. The audience laughs. Sugden hits him again, and there is another laugh. Neither disappears.
That tension may actually have made them better. Whatever irritation existed away from the cameras, the partnership worked once recording began. Years later, Sugden stood beside Inman again in Grace & Favour.
That matters. Their relationship may have contained competition and possibly some frustration, but it also contained respect. Sugden could do something many performers could not do beside John Inman: she remained completely visible.
The next woman on the list had a very different relationship with him. Wendy Richard played Miss Brahms, and her style could hardly have been more different from his. Inman was theatrical, while Richard was direct. He could stretch a reaction, and she could destroy an entire situation with one dry sentence.
He floated around the department, and she could puncture the nonsense with a look. Somehow the contrast worked. According to Inman, they “clicked” almost immediately.
That makes this relationship far more complicated than a simple story about dislike. Different personalities don’t automatically create enemies. Sometimes they create better scenes. Inman came from pantomime and revue, with broad movement, big timing and a strong connection to live audiences. Richard was more grounded and matter-of-fact. She did not need to decorate every sentence, and that gave him room.
Of course, years beside someone create difficult days. Actors get tired, someone misses a cue, and somebody wants another rehearsal. One person thinks the scene was better ten minutes ago. One wants a longer pause and another wants the pace faster. Somebody moves a chair, and now the blocking feels wrong.
These arguments can sound ridiculous outside television. Inside a studio they matter, because one second can kill a joke. Inman and Richard undoubtedly had ordinary working frustrations.
But he continued to speak warmly of her. After his death, Richard described him as one of the wittiest and most inventive performers she had worked with. That warmth had survived.
She had also watched every stage of his transformation. She saw Mr. Humphries begin as one member of the ensemble, watched “I’m free” become famous, and saw him collect more publicity as audiences started waiting for him. She also watched another actor’s position in the show change as Inman grew larger.
That actor was Trevor Bannister, and this is where professional tension becomes much easier to understand. In the early episodes, Bannister looked like exactly the kind of performer a sitcom might build around. His character, Mr. Lucas, was young, confident and cheeky. He flirted with Miss Brahms, annoyed Captain Peacock, and had a clear position near the center of the department.
Then audiences fell in love with Mr. Humphries. There was no single morning when Bannister walked into rehearsal and someone announced, “John is the star now.” It happened slowly. There was one larger laugh, one stronger entrance, one memorable line, and another scene where Inman got the biggest reaction. Then came another interview, another photograph, and another audience waiting for Mr. Humphries to speak.
Eventually, the balance was simply different. Inman’s part expanded and Bannister’s position changed. By the time Mr. Humphries became a national figure, Mr. Lucas was sharing the men’s wear department with a character who could dominate a scene just by answering a question.
That could not have been easy. Inman did not need to deliberately take anything from Bannister. The audience simply moved toward him, and television writers follow laughter. When one performer keeps creating enormous reactions, that performer gets more material. More material produces more reactions, and soon the cycle feeds itself.
But every rise takes up space, and Bannister had to see that. Sometimes professional frustration is not a screaming argument. It is opening a new script and seeing another character has the bigger scene. It is hearing the audience applaud a colleague before the joke begins. It is watching someone become the face of a program you helped establish.
Bannister left in 1980. His departure has generally been linked to outside work and scheduling rather than to any dramatic showdown with Inman, and there is no public evidence of one. But the contrast was hard to miss. Mr. Lucas left, and Mr. Humphries stayed. The young character who once looked central was gone, while the one nobody expected to become a phenomenon remained, his fame no longer contained inside Grace Brothers.
Then there was Frank Thornton, who handled Inman’s growing presence in the smartest possible way: he did less. Thornton understood restraint. Comedy makes actors greedy. You hear a laugh and want another, so you get louder, bigger and faster. Thornton grasped the opposite, that sometimes doing almost nothing makes the other performer twice as funny.
That was the brilliance of Captain Peacock. He represented control, rules, rank and order. Then Mr. Humphries appeared, and control became impossible. Inman might exaggerate a movement, and Thornton stared. Inman stretched a reaction, and Thornton tightened his expression.
Mr. Humphries floated through the room as though rules barely existed. Captain Peacock stood there looking as if civilization itself were under attack. The audience laughed. Thornton did not need to be bigger than Inman. He needed to be the wall Inman bounced against, and that straight-man timing was essential.
By the late 1970s, almost everyone in Grace Brothers occupied a different comic space. Mrs. Slocombe exploded, Miss Brahms answered back, and Mr. Rumbold panicked. Captain Peacock desperately preserved his dignity, and Mr. Humphries slipped through everything. That balance allowed Inman to grow without forcing every other performer to imitate him.
In all the years the two men worked together, no huge public feud came to define them. That is important. Strong performers still disagree. Maybe Inman wanted another pause, or maybe Thornton believed the scene needed speed. One wanted the physical joke larger and the other wanted restraint. On a bad rehearsal day, something that small can become surprisingly irritating.
But then the camera turns on. Thornton gives Inman the look, Inman reacts, and the audience laughs. Whatever happened backstage disappears.
Thornton stayed with the program and later returned for Grace & Favour. His long partnership with Inman suggests something more interesting than simple dislike: they needed each other. Thornton gave Inman resistance, and Inman gave Thornton chaos to resist.
The fifth co-star gave Inman another kind of authority to play against. Nicholas Smith played Mr. Rumbold, and somehow he looked worried before anything had actually happened. That was part of the joke. He was management without much real control. He called meetings, issued instructions and tried to keep the floor running, while everyone around him turned the smallest problem into chaos.
Inman used characters like Rumbold perfectly. Mr. Humphries could behave as though nothing unusual were happening while Rumbold looked seconds from collapse. Smith did not need to steal the scene. He needed to hold the structure together long enough for everyone else to wreck it.
After years of working together, actors know each other in ways audiences never notice. They know when someone needs one more rehearsal and which joke a colleague will defend. They know which movement cannot change because the whole scene is built around it. They know when somebody is exhausted or irritated, and when it is better to say nothing until after lunch.
Inman had strong instincts, and so did Smith, Sugden, Richard, Thornton and Bannister. But Inman’s instincts were increasingly being rewarded by the loudest thing in television comedy: the audience. Then came 1976.
Suddenly, his popularity was no longer measured only by applause. He was named BBC TV Personality of the Year. The laughs had turned into something else, status. And when one actor in an ensemble suddenly carries that level of status, everybody feels the difference.
By 1976, John Inman was no longer simply the funny menswear assistant from a popular sitcom. He was one of Britain’s most recognizable television comedians. The award carried his name, not Mr. Humphries’. His face appeared in interviews and publicity, and people repeated “I’m free” far from the television set. They knew the walk, the voice and the reactions.
Then came the 1977 feature film. Inman kept working in pantomime and appeared in other projects. His association with Mr. Humphries eventually became so powerful that he carried the character into the Australian version of the show. Most of the people around him could change, but Inman remained the link for viewers to the original. That is star power.
Fame changes relationships even when the famous person doesn’t intentionally change. Producers listen differently, journalists ask different questions, and photographers place people differently. Audiences react differently, too.
Yet Inman still needed Sugden’s timing, Richard’s sharpness, Thornton’s restraint and Smith’s nervous management of the chaos. Earlier, he had needed Bannister as well. Becoming the breakout star did not mean he could create Grace Brothers alone. It did, however, change his position inside it.
The original series finally ended in 1985. For a while, it looked as though Inman and those familiar faces had finished working together. Then seven years passed, and most of them walked back into his life.
When Grace & Favour arrived in 1992, Grace Brothers itself was gone. The characters were older, their lives had changed, and the new setting was a country house. But several familiar faces returned: Inman, Sugden, Richard, Thornton and Smith. Years had passed, yet put them in the same scene and the old rhythm came back.
Inman knew when Sugden was about to push a moment, and she knew his reactions. Richard could still slice through the nonsense. Thornton still knew exactly when not to move, and Smith could still look as though everybody had created another impossible problem. They did not need to discover the chemistry again. They had already spent years building it.
There was something slightly strange about seeing them back together. The old department-store hierarchy was gone, but the old performer hierarchy was still visible. Inman was still Inman. The audience still knew the walk and the voice, and still waited for the reaction.
For the others, it meant stepping back into a rhythm they had first learned almost 20 years earlier. That must have felt familiar and uncomfortable at the same time, because returning to an old cast brings back more than the jokes. It brings back the memories attached to them.
There was the rehearsal where somebody lost their temper, and the scene one person thought had been ruined. There was the night another actor got the enormous laugh, and the publicity battle that seemed so important at the time. Years later, those old arguments can look almost ridiculous. Everyone is older, the program has survived, and the audience still cares.
The people who once competed for position now understand that what they created together has outlived the competition. Time changes old frustrations. An argument over a scene 15 years earlier stops feeling enormous, and the publicity picture somebody hated becomes irrelevant. Actors remember other things, like who covered for them when a line vanished, who saved a scene, and who broke the tension after a terrible rehearsal.
Inman had accumulated both kinds of memory, the good and the difficult. One person from the old menswear department was missing, though: Trevor Bannister. Years earlier, Bannister had looked like one of the program’s obvious young stars. Now Inman was still carrying the character that had unexpectedly overtaken him. That contrast says more than any invented backstage feud ever could.
Inman spent so many years attached to Mr. Humphries that audiences struggled to separate the actor from the character. People wanted the walk, the voice and the catchphrase. But his career had started long before Grace Brothers. Theater taught him discipline, revue sharpened his timing, and pantomime showed him how far a performance could be pushed without losing an audience.
Nothing about Mr. Humphries was as effortless as it looked. The movement was controlled, the pauses were deliberate and the reactions were carefully placed. Inman knew exactly how far he could stretch something before the audience stopped laughing.
That level of control probably explains why colleagues could find working beside him both rewarding and demanding. Once a performer has heard thousands of people respond to the same instinct, confidence turns to certainty very quickly. If Inman believed a pause needed to stay, he had years of applause telling him why. If another actor wanted the rhythm changed, the disagreement wasn’t only about taste. It was competing experience.
That is where long-running creative relationships get complicated. Nobody has to hate anybody. Two people can respect each other enormously and still drive each other mad, because both believe they know exactly how the scene should work. That sort of tension disappears from finished television. The viewer only sees the laugh.
Away from the cameras, Inman’s life was far quieter. In 2005, he entered a civil partnership with his long-term partner, Ron Lynch, after more than three decades together. By then, his health had become increasingly fragile. He died in London on March 8, 2007, at age 71.
After his death, those who had spent years beside him described the man they remembered. Richard spoke of his wit and inventiveness. Others recalled his professionalism, his timing and his extraordinary understanding of a live audience.
There had been pressure during the Grace Brothers years: competition, shifting status, bad rehearsal days, bruised pride and probably disagreements that never traveled beyond the studio walls. But there had also been years of shared laughter. That is what makes these five relationships so complicated. Each was shaped by the same unexpected event: John Inman became much bigger than anybody had predicted.
First came Mollie Sugden, who could meet Inman at full comic strength and refused to disappear. If there was rivalry, it came from two performers who both knew how to command a room, and the competition may even have improved their scenes.
Then there was Wendy Richard. Her style was completely different from his, yet Inman said they clicked right away, and she later remembered him warmly. Whatever irritation existed over the years sat beside obvious professional affection.
Then came Trevor Bannister. Of all five, he had the easiest reason to feel the consequences of Inman’s rise. Mr. Lucas began as an obvious young center of the program. Then viewers fell in love with Mr. Humphries, the scripts changed and the balance shifted. Bannister eventually left.
After him came Frank Thornton. Captain Peacock never needed to outdo Inman, because his rigid dignity made Inman funnier. One represented the rules, and the other seemed built to disturb every rule simply by entering the scene.
Finally, there was Nicholas Smith. Mr. Rumbold stood in the middle of the department trying to manage people who were almost impossible to manage, and Smith gave Inman another kind of comic authority to push against.
Five co-stars, five completely different relationships. There was competition with one, warmth mixed with ordinary working disagreements with another, and professional displacement with a third. With the remaining two, there were years of carefully balanced comic dependence. None of them publicly confirmed any hatred, and those closest to the show have consistently described a bond built on respect, however bumpy.
Inman’s rise changed the position of everyone around him. He entered Grace Brothers as one member of an ensemble. Then audiences began waiting for him, the scripts grew and the catchphrase became famous. The award arrived, then the film. Suddenly, the man behind the menswear counter was one of the faces of British television comedy.
Whatever happened during rehearsals, one thing never changed once recording began. Someone eventually called across the floor: Mr. Humphries, are you free? Inman turned and held the pause, just long enough. The audience already knew what was coming. Then came the smile.
“I’m free.”
And the laugh arrived. For those few seconds, every difficult rehearsal disappeared, along with every bruised ego, every argument over timing and every frustration over publicity. The scene worked. Sugden knew when to answer, Richard knew when to cut through him, Thornton knew when to stare, and Smith knew when to panic. In the earlier years, Bannister knew exactly how to bounce off him, too.
That was the strange little machine inside Grace Brothers, and increasingly John Inman stood at the center of it. Nobody had expected him to become the biggest attraction. He turned two ordinary words into one of British television’s most memorable catchphrases.
Whether those five people irritated him, challenged him, competed with him or knew him well enough to occasionally get under his skin, they became inseparable from the story of his greatest success. John Inman did not become unforgettable in an empty room. He became unforgettable standing beside them. And whatever happened behind the cameras when the audience started laughing, one thing became impossible to deny.
