Would Are You Being Served? have been a global success if its creators, David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, had done as they were told?

Interviews with the Croft and Lloyd, Mollie Sugden, Frank Thornton, John Inman, Wendy Richard and other members of the cast tell the extraordinary story of how Joanna Lumley and a job at Simpson's of Piccadilly inspired a programme which is still much-loved all around the world.

And in unravelling the tangled tale of Grace Brothers, we travel through a whole era of David Croft-inspired comedy, from Hugh and I and Dad's Army in the sixties to 'Allo 'Allo! and Oh, Doctor Beeching! in the nineties.

Butterflies writer Carla Lane admits, for the first time, that the 1970s sitcom was autobiographical.