On the Buses

On the Buses is a British television sitcom that was broadcast on ITV from 1969 to 1973. It was created by Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolfe, who wrote most of the episodes. It spawned three spin-off feature films and a stage version. Despite the writers' previous successes with The Rag Trade and Meet the Wife with the BBC, the corporation rejected On the Buses, not seeing much comedy potential in a bus depot as a setting. The comedy partnership turned to Frank Muir, head of entertainment at London Weekend Television (LWT), who loved the idea; the show was accepted, and despite a poor critical reception became a hit with viewers.
The series is centred on the working-class life of Stan Butler and Jack Harper, who are the crew of the Number 11 bus at the Luxton and District Motor Traction Company. The action mostly takes place at the Butler home and at the bus depot. Network On Air describes the show as having a "bawdy, comic postcard humour and resolutely working-class outlook", and notes the series became "one of the most popular British comedy series of its era, if not all time."
A total of 74 episodes of On the Buses were broadcast over seven series. Three spin-off films were also released.
All episodes and films of On The Buses were set in the fictional town of Luxton.
At the beginning of the seventh series Arthur, who is not seen, has left Olive and they are divorced. Olive again gets a job as a clippie on the buses as they are short of money. Stan takes a job in the north of England in a car factory in the "Goodbye Stan" episode, and the inspector takes Stan's old room as a lodger.
In addition, two five-minute Christmas specials were made by LWT as part of an All Star Comedy Carnival in 1969 and 1972, ITV's answer to the BBC's Christmas Night with the Stars programme. The 1969 edition has been lost, but the 1972 edition – featuring a goose that the cast are chasing for Christmas dinner – exists in the Thames Television archive, which is now owned by FremantleMedia.
Reg Varney undertook a PCV driving test in order to be filmed driving the bus for the exterior scenes.
The earlier series were recorded at London Weekend Television's original studios in Wembley (later Fountain Studios). In late 1972, LWT relocated to new studios on the South Bank of the River Thames; here the outside doors to the main and secondary studios were too small to accommodate the double-decker buses used in the series. Therefore, single decker buses were used and a plywood mock-up of an upper deck was lowered from a lighting rig.
Filmed external shots were part of the series. LWT arranged with the now defunct Eastern National Omnibus Company to use its buses at Wood Green bus garage in North London. They were shown as belonging to Luxton and District. Luxton is supposed to be in Essex, and actual Essex towns including Southend-on-Sea, Basildon, Braintree and Tilbury are all mentioned. One of the bus route termini was "Cemetery Gates", for which LWT used the entrance to Lavender Hill Cemetery. A different Lavender Hill in Battersea also features in the last episode of the last series, featuring the town hall (now the Battersea Arts Centre).
The fourth series was affected by the ITV Colour Strike, with seven of the 13 episodes being made in black and white.
Characters from On The Buses appeared in two other series. A spin-off, Don't Drink the Water (1974–75), ran for 13 episodes, featuring Blake retiring to Spain with his sister Dorothy (Pat Coombs - who also played one of the female bus drivers in the first On The Buses film). Anna Karen reprised her role as Olive in LWT's revival of The Rag Trade, which ran for two series in 1977–78.
The theme music for the series, entitled "Happy Harry", was written by Tony Russell.
The red Town & District buses were Bristol KSWs with Eastern Coach Works bodies. These were former Eastern National. Stan's and Jack's "regular" bus appeared to be VNO 857.
The green Luxton & District buses were Bristol Lodekkas with bodywork by Eastern Coach Works of Lowestoft. In reality these were Eastern National buses (in some episodes buses could be seen with Eastern National on the side), although as mentioned earlier, the later interior depot shots were in fact 'dummy' buses. Some 'dummy' buses were real single-deck buses with a wooden frame on top, such as in the Series 3 episode "Radio Control", when the bus has crashed into the bridge. The most commonly used bus in the series was AVW 399F. In later episodes the ENB symbol appears next to Luxton & District.
Stan's usual buses, AVW 399F and AEV 811F, are both still extant; one is in Lille, France, the other in Los Angeles, California.
In the first episode of series 6, former London Transport bus Leyland Titan PD2 RTL1557 (OLD 666) is featured and burnt out.
The original series was repeated on Granada Plus in 1996 and until the channel closed in 2004, and was later repeated on UK Gold and then from 2004 onward on ITV3, where it was still seen as of November 2023. Fox Classics on the Australian Fox cable network and New Zealand's Jones channel on Sky regularly show the series. As of August 2018, the series is broadcast by Dutch 'oldies' cable channel ONS.
Visual Entertainment released On the Buses: The Ultimate Collection, an 11-disc box set featuring the complete series on DVD on 12 September 2006.
Network released On the Buses: The Complete Series box set on DVD on 13 November 2006 for the first time, then again on 25 May 2008 in a new repackaged version. It has also released each series individually.
Beyond Home Entertainment released the entire series on DVD in seven series sets between 2 July 2007 and 8 April 2009. Between 2008 and 2009 Series 1 to Series 5 were repacked into standard DVD cases as original releases were in gatefold digipaks with a slip box. In 2010 they released The Complete Series 11-DVD box set. In 2010, the individual series were re-released through ITV Studios. Season 1 and Season 2 were released separately (previously released together) on 5 September 2012, and Seasons 4 and Season 5 on 6 February 2013; it is unknown whether remaining seasons will be issued. The complete Series was repackaged and re-released on 7 August 2013. On 21 November 2018, On The Buses: The Complete Collection was reissued and distributed by Shock Entertainment.
Despite the popularity of On the Buses with sections of the public, TV reviewers and historians have generally held the show in lower regard. In its section on situation comedies, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV describes On the Buses as ITV's "longest running and most self-consciously unfunny series". TV reviewer Victor Lewis-Smith later criticised the then head of London Weekend Television, Frank Muir, for green-lighting the programme, which Lewis-Smith called "the wretched On the Buses". The Daily Telegraph journalist Max Davidson, discussing 1970s British comedy, listed On the Buses as one of the "unfunny sitcoms of the time", while The Guardian's David Stubbs referred to On the Buses as "a byword for 70s sitcom mediocrity".
On The Buses is sometimes used as an example of the sort of sexism that was rife in society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, occurring after the freedoms of sexual liberation, but before the rise of feminism; in particular, the derision towards one of the main female characters (Olive Rudge) for being unattractive, and the fact that younger attractive bus staff would be regularly looking to have sex with the two main middle-aged male characters (Varney and Grant, who were aged 52 and 36 when the series first debuted in 1969. Some episodes of the show also featured a black character humorously referred to as Chalky, which would be construed as racist by modern standards.
The three spin-off films were produced by Hammer Film Productions. They are On the Buses (1971), Mutiny on the Buses (1972), and Holiday on the Buses (1973), the latter set in a holiday camp. On the Buses became Britain's top box office film of 1971.
The films were set in a different canon to the TV series. In the films, Arthur and Olive manage to have a child despite their mostly sexless marriage and Arthur's 'operation' – the exact nature of which was never explicitly revealed. Arthur's operation is mentioned in the first film, but later Olive gives birth to their baby son in the same film. The three films follow a loose story arc which shows their son (Little Arthur) growing up. Olive is pregnant with a second child at the end of the second film Mutiny on the Buses, but no mention was made of Olive's second child in the third film, Holiday on the Buses, which was set mainly in a holiday camp. In the films canon, the bus depot becomes that of The Town & District Bus Company instead of The Luxton & District Traction Company. The buses in the films are mostly red ones, with one green one (not including the Windsor Safari Park tour bus in Mutiny On The Buses).
The format of On the Buses was sold to America, where it was remade by NBC as Lotsa Luck, starring Dom DeLuise as Stanley Belmont with Kathleen Freeman as Iris Belmont, his mum, Wynn Irwin as Arthur Swann, Beverly Sanders as Olive Swann and Jack Knight as Bummy Pfitzer, his best friend. Episodes based on the original On The Buses scripts were adapted by such American writers as Carl Reiner, Bill Persky and Sam Denoff. Inspector Blake did not have a counterpart in the American version; and, in another significant change to the storyline, Stan worked at the lost property office at the bus depot rather than being a driver. After a pilot was made, the sitcom ran for one series of 22 episodes in 1973–74. It was not a success, and has never been screened in Britain.
In 1990 there were plans to revive the series as Back on the Buses, and the original cast appeared on Wogan to promote the new series. Reg Varney also discussed plans for the pilot episode on This Morning. However, although the pilot script was written, it was not made. The premise was to be that Stan Butler, having run his own business for some years and made some money, was now starting his own bus company in the newly deregulated market, and hiring Jack to work with him. As they attempt to get the company off the ground, they discover a rival company has set up in the town, owned by Blakey. The comedy would have come from the conflict between the two businesses, as Stan and Jack attempt to battle Blakey's bigger and more professional company.
Look-in, a UK children's magazine, serialised On the Buses in comic strips from August 1971 to May 1974. They were drawn by cartoonist Harry North and the TV series' often bawdy humour was diluted for a younger audience. A board game of On the Buses was released by Denys Fisher games in 1973. Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse did several sketches using the characters of On the Buses to lampoon the humour of the show.
Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton created a fake episode titled "Hold On Tight!" for their anthology series Inside No. 9 that was seemingly based on On the Buses.
The British recording artist Morrissey used the character Blakey as the theme of his October 1990 single Oh Phoney from the Kill Uncle sessions. The song was later included on his 1990 compilation album Bona Drag.