Take a Letter, Mr. Jones

Take a Letter, Mr. Jones was a short-lived British sitcom from Southern Television starring John Inman and Rula Lenskawhich aired in 1981.



Contents
[hide]  *1 Plot  ==Plot[ edit] == It starred John Inman as Graham Jones, able secretary to executive Joan Warner (Rula Lenska). Episodes primarily focused on the office and home of Mrs. Warner, a divorced woman in her 30's trying to balance her career and family in (still-sexist) 1980s England; Margaret Thatcher may have been in 10 Downing Street, but Mrs. Warner was still suffering in a man's world. Mr. Jones and Mrs. Warner worked for the fictional multinational corporation called 8-Star
 * 2 Episode list
 * 3 Context and afterlife
 * 4 References
 * 5 External links

While Take A Letter, Mr. Jones worked to dispel stereotypes about female executives, it seemed to pander to others:

==Episode list[ edit] == ==Context and afterlife[ edit] == John Inman starred in Take A Letter, Mr. Jones between seasons of the BBC comedy Are You Being Served?. Take A Letter, Mr. Jones was never a ratings success (only running one season), but in recent years it has been resurrected by many American PBS stations, where Are You Being Served? is also a hit.
 * Mr. Jones could not escape the oddity of being a "male secretary" to a female boss - at least not without insinuation that there was sexual interest between him (a 40-something bachelor) and Mrs. Warner. To the programme's credit (although not very realistically), no one who found it odd that Mr. Jones was a male secretary questioned his sexuality.
 * Female secretaries at 8-Star used sex to get along with their male bosses: when one mentions that she laddered her tights in the boss' office and suggests that the company should offer a clothing allowance, Mr. Jones quips that "It might just be cheaper to get him to cut his fingernails".
 * Much comedy is culled from Mrs. Warner's "mad Italian" maid Maria, an overweight, over-excitable, Italian woman whose English is below par (played by British actress Miriam Margolyes, OBE). Along with being maid, Maria helped care for Mrs. Warner's 6-year old daughter Lucy (Claudine Bowyer).

A US VHS set of the series was released by Questar in 1995

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:17.9200000762939px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:14.3999996185303px;">A UK DVD of the series was released on 16 March 2009. A repeat of the series was shown on Film24<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-7" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-size:11.1999998092651px;">[7]  in 2010.