TV Cream

TV: D is for...

Duty Free

Beams mean Hines

“OOH AMY!” “Oh David!” “Oh Linda!” “Honestly David!” “Oh no – Robert!” “Yes, Amy!” “Linda, please!” “David – how could you!” “Robert: no!” “Ooooh Amy!”

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Lee James Turnock

    May 25, 2010 at 3:39 pm

    ITV repeated an episode of this last year and it was the stagiest, hammiest thing I’ve seen since the Young Ones was repeated in the mid-nineties.

  2. Glenn Aylett

    September 13, 2020 at 10:50 am

    Duty Free was one of those sitcoms like Are You Being Served that never left the studio set and had no location filming. It seemed to work quite well as it was a good send up of a four star hotel in Spain and had a good cast. Think of Benidorm with a much smaller cast aimed at a middle class audience and this was Duty Free. Also it was a regular in the ratings top five and, unlike Benidorm, quit while it was still ahead.

    • Andrew Barton

      October 11, 2021 at 9:58 pm

      With Benidorm, it looked like meddling behind the scenes in later years.

      Keeping Tim Healy over Siobhan Finneran, Steve Pemberton and Sheila Reid and bringing Danny Walters into it was Tiger Aspect clearly seeing how successful The 1975 were and trying to have Derren Litten grab the tweenage fanbase of that band into Benidorm, at the expense of the loyal Benidorm fans.

      Same reason why Denise Welch got a main role in another Tiger Aspect sitcom, Boy Meets Girl, to clearly grab the same audience. Unfortunately they were both disasters.

  3. THX 1139

    September 13, 2020 at 1:17 pm

    I bet Brian Rix was kicking himself that he didn’t have the idea of a door-slamming Spanish holiday adultery farce.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top