Are You Being Served? sharp-tongued, witty responses, along with his trademark catch-phrase "I'm free!", were enthusiastically embraced by many audience members, and the character evolved into a gay icon in popular culture. Despite this, Inman pointed out that Mr Humphries' true sexual orientation was never explicitly stated in the series, and David Croft said in an interview that the character was not homosexual, but "just a mother's boy". In an episode of the spin-off "Grace & Favour", the character is further described as neither a "woman's man" nor a "man's man" and as being "in limbo". The characters (Mr Humphries especially) sometimes broke the
Are You Being Served? Israel and in the United States, where it gained a loyal and enthusiastic following when PBS television stations began airing reruns of it in the mid-1980s, along with other British sitcoms. In 2004, it was ranked 20th in a television countdown of "Britain's Best Sitcom". It is regularly repeated worldwide (BBC Two, Drama and Gold in the UK; PBS BBC America in the United States; and BBC UKTV, Fox Classics and 9Gem in Australia). The idea for the show came from Lloyd's brief period in the early 1950s working at Simpsons of Piccadilly, a clothing store which traded for over