According to T. V. Cream, 1977's B. B. C. Sitcom 'No Appointment Necessary' starred Roy Kinnear as a 'befuddled barber'. That is untrue. His character 'Alf Butler' was a Cockney greengrocer who also owned a ladies' hairdressing salon called Hair A Go-Go.. He ran it under the name 'Monsieur Andre'. None of the seven episodes featured him holding so much as a pair of scissors. Far from being befuddled, he was devious. His salon staff consisted of hypercondriac 'Beryl' ( wonderful Avril Angers ), the dippy 'Sandra' ( sexy Claire Faulconbridge, who had co-starred with Kinnear in the I. T. V. Sketch show 'N. U. T. S.' ) and nerdy 'Mervyn' ( Denis Bond ). Josephine Tewson was 'Penelope Marshall', the salon's bossy manageress, with Robert Dorning as her senile father, the Colonel.
The humour arose from Alf attempting to juggle his business interests. A major influence on the show seems to have been 'Are You Being Served?'. For instance, in the first episode, Alf caught a buxom lady customer ( Bella Emberg ) squeezing a melon. He told her off. "How would you like it?", he said, gazing at her chest. In another, he put the firm's takings into a newly-installed safe only to then forget the combination.
The writers were Peter Robinson ( co-writer of the sitcom 'My Name Is Harry Worth' ) and Hugh Stuckey ( one of the writers of Tony Hancock's last series ). The producers were Douglas Argent and Harold Snoad. 'No Appointment Necessary' made no great impact on the world, and was quietly forgotten. I enjoyed it at the time, however, mainly because of Kinnear and the supporting cast. 'T. V. Cream' must have assumed that it because it only ran to one season, it could not have been any good. I have a two-word response: 'Police Squad!
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