Jeremy Lloyd

John Jeremy Lloyd, OBE was an English writer, screenwriter, author, poet and actor, best known as coauthor and writer of several successful British sitcoms, including Are You Being Served and Allo Allo.

Lloyd was born in Danbury, Essex to a mother who had been a dancer, and a petroleum engineer father who served as an officer in the Royal Engineers at the beginning of World War II. As a child he was sent to live with his grandmother in Manchester and rarely saw his parents, who he claimed had seen him as a failure. His father withdrew him from a private preparatory school in 1943. He then worked as a junior assistant in the menswear department at Simpsons of Piccadilly and many of the characters depicted in Are You Being Served were drawn from his recollections of his time there. He was also a travelling paint salesman and he believed that his early jobs gave him a better education than a university could have provided.

Source: Wikipedia