On the Buses

- Season 7

(1973)

It's six months since Arthur walked out on her so Olive,armed with a list of grievances prepared by Mum and Stan,goes to court and is granted her divorce.With Mum going to stay with Aunt Maud Olive is very much the gooseberry as she accompanies Stan and his girl-friend Sandra to the pictures - to see a sexy film about a recently divorced woman - where Olive sits next to a groper. Stan gets Blakey to see Olive home whilst he goes to Sandra's for some rumpy-pumpy but Olive turns up to interrupt him as she has forgotten her house key.

With money tight as ever in the Butler home Stan asks Blakey to employ Olive on the buses and eventually he relents. Olive's last excursion into being a conductress was a disaster but now she is completely in charge,super-efficient to the point of annoying, particularly as she has learnt the rule book off by heart and takes Stan to task for his rule-bending.It can't last.

The family run into money problems when Olive and Mum spend 50 pounds in the same week Stan blows a week's wages in one night on his girlfriend.

A poster of a faceless driver appears at the depot. It is a plan to boost falling passenger figures and advertises a competition with a prize of a hundred pounds to be ... The perfect driver.Jack secretly enters Stan though the other finalists are hunky sportsmen and Stan's family take him to the chemist to buy him a rejuvenating face pack to give him a chance. Will he beat off the well-toned opposition to get his face - and - name on the poster? Of course he will.

The bus crews are encouraged to form their own staff football team,to take on the Basildon Bashers. Jack and Stan are not enthusiastic but there is a five pound bonus on offer. The depot only has one star player,young Bob,and Stan injures him in training,so he asks Blakey if he can field a substitute - Olive. Blakey feels that women and football do not mix - until he sees the Basildon Bashers. They are an all-female team and they contrive by fair means and foul to give Stan's team a good pasting.

It's a hundred years since the Luxton Bus Company came into being and fifty years since they got their first motor bus. To celebrate the good old days Blakey organizes an exhibition and,after showing Mum and Olive around some of the museum pieces, Stan falls asleep at the wheel of a bus from the turn of the century,imagining his present-day family and colleagues in previous incarnations. Olive is a militant suffragette,Mum a washerwoman and Blakey is still Blakey,except his nickname is the Kaiser.

Stan decides he can make more money if he heads North and gets work in a car factory but,rather than hand in his resignation, he gets Blakey to sack him so that he can get a week's wages. He celebrates his last night at home and is unable to eat the fry-up his Mum has cooked him so he sticks it in his uniform pocket,a fact that Blakey discovers when he comes around to collect the uniform. However,as he has been evicted from his own lodgings,he takes Stan's room and becomes the Butlers' new lodger.

Blakey has only been in the house a short while before he causes trouble because he has no hot water for shaving and his efforts to mend the immersion heater end in predictable disaster. When Jack manages to get a new boiler - acquired from the bus depot,of course - they attempt to install it,soaking themselves and flooding the house in the process.

Blakey's mother comes to stay and proves to be a thoroughly unpleasant and domineering woman who treats her Cyril as if he was a little boy and Mum and Olive as if they were her servants. Mum bears it for a while because she fears Blakey and his rent money will go if she stands up to the old dragon but the last straw comes at the social club's bingo night,when Jack calls the winning number - on Mrs. Blake's card but paid for by Mum. Blakey's Mum has won ninety-seven pounds, which she refuses to share,causing Mum to finally snap and let fly at her,with support from an ...

According to the tea-leaves - and the horoscopes - romance is in the air for both Olive and her Mum and it looks as if the partner of their dreams is none other than Blakey. An unlikely object of desire Blakey has to put up with two generations of Butler womenfolk fighting it out to be the perfect house-wife.

Blakey pairs Jack with trainee conductress, Jessie, who he hopes will drive Jack mad with her incessant talking. The austere,bespectacled Jessie is a feminist and she takes exception to the fact that female staff have to pay to use public toilets on the bus routes. Supported by Jack,she persuades Blakey to give the women an allowance so that they can literally spend a penny. Blakey decides to check up to make sure the money is being used properly and ends up getting arrested for spying on a ladies' toilet.

After an argument over the poor quality of her food,canteen cook Mrs. Webb walks out,leaving the depot without a replacement. Jack suggests Olive's Mum,and she gets the job, after an interview with the new manager,Gerald Simpson,an old flame of hers from her wartime days. Simpson and Blakey do not get on and Jack sees this as an opportunity to take liberties with the inspector,knowing that Simpson will support him against Blakey. Sadly for Jack, Mr. Simpson is about to retire and the perks are coming to an end.

There is to be a competition among the bus crews for the owner of the best-kept garden and Jack and Blakey both enter,once Blakey has rid the Butler back yard of all the old rubbish that has accumulated there. It develops into a grudge match with both men trying to sabotage each other's garden,culminating in Blakey's arrest for trying to chop Jack's tree down. In the event, of course,neither man wins the title.