The time Harvey Keitel was nearly in Are You Being Served

Harvey Keitel was nervous. It was a blazing hot summer in 1972, and he had got the role of a lifetime. The role that would break him worldwide. He looked good, his suit was sharp, he just needed to nail the line.

His cue echoes across the set

“Mr Humphries, are you free?”

He responds

“Yeah.”

It wasn’t quite there.

In the early seventies, great friends Martin Scorsese and David Croft were both working on the hottest projects in the entertainment industry. Scorsese was following up his debut Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with Mean Streets and Croft, along with partner Jeremy Lloyd, was working on their definitive sitcom Are You Being Served.

“I can’t remember if it was Marty or myself who had the idea to hold joint auditions,” recalled Croft during a 1984 Wogan interview.

“Either way, it seemed sensible, both Mean Streets and Are You Being Served were prestige projects. Everyone wanted a piece of them, so we got all the hot actors of the time – Keitel, DeNiro, Sugden – in one room and just watched them work.”

Both projects were initially cast as fans would recognise them, with one notable exception.

“Marty just loved John Inman for the role of Charlie in Mean Streets, and John had this fantastic chemistry with Bobby DeNiro. It was perfect. So we ended up with Harvey, which was terrific, I mean, Harvey was one of the hottest actors on the planet so to have him as our lead. We were lucky.”

The writing legend recalled how the early rehearsals of the comedy had a different feel to how we might remember it now.

“It was fascinating, Harvey gave Mr Humphries a fantastic sense of repressed Catholic guilt and explosive rage that gave Are You Being Served an atmosphere of angry menace that was really quite different to our original intention.”

However, an unfortunate incident with a tortoise meant everything would soon change.

“John had a pet tortoise called Quentin and before flying out to Hollywood to film, he put it in hibernation. Sadly the tortoise came out of hibernation after only two weeks and naturally, John didn’t want to leave Quentin on his own after an early exit from hibernation so he flew back to London.”

Lloyd and Croft agreed with Scorsese to send Harvey Keitel out to LA and John Inman would replace him in the Mr Humphries role so as to be with his tortoise.

“I often wonder what it would have been like if we’d stuck with Harvey,” laughed Croft.

“I just don’t know if ‘Yeah, I’m f**king free’ would have taken off quite as well as a catchphrase.