All Gas and Gaiters is a British television ecclesiastical sitcom which aired on BBC1 from 1966 to 1971. It was written by Pauline Devaney and Edwin Apps, a husband-and-wife team who used the pseudonym of John Wraith when writing the pilot. All Gas and Gaiters was also broadcast on BBC Radio from 1971 to 1972.

• William Mervyn — The Rt Revd Dr Cuthbert Hever, DD, Bishop of St Ogg's
• Robertson Hare — The Ven Henry Blunt, the archdeacon
• Derek Nimmo — The Revd Mervyn Noote, the Bishop's chaplain
• John Barron — The Very Revd Lionel Pugh-Critchley, Dean of St Ogg's (pilot, series 1, 4 and 5)
• Ernest Clark — The Very Revd Lionel Pugh-Critchley, Dean of St Ogg's (series 2 and 3, 1968 special, )
• Ruth Kettlewell — Mrs Grace Pugh-Critchley, the Dean's wife (series 1-3, 1968 special)
• Joan Sanderson — Mrs Grace Pugh-Critchley, the Dean's wife (series 4-5)

All Gas and Gaiters, predominantly farcical in nature, is set in the close of the fictional St Ogg's Cathedral and concerns intrigues and rivalries among the clergy in the Church of England. The bishop is easygoing; his friend the archdeacon is elderly, tippling, and still appreciative of attractive women; and the bishop's chaplain is naïve and accident-prone. Their wish to live a quiet bachelor life was continually threatened by the overbearing dean, who tried to bring by-the-book rule to the cathedral, and the dean's strident wife.

The title is a pun, deriving from a comic expression ("all is gas and gaiters", meaning "all is well") uttered by an eccentric old gentleman clad in small-clothes and grey worsted stockings in Charles Dickens' 1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby, and later used by such writers as P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, and Powell and Pressburger (spoken in the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp). The phrase "all gas and gaiters" has had different meanings.^[1] Sometimes it has been used to mean "a satisfactory state of affairs" and sometimes it has had the meaning of "nonsense". The relevance of this phrase to Anglican clergy is that gaiters (worn over shoes) were part of the traditional dress of bishops and archdeacons.

The series initially aroused some controversy because of its portrayal of senior clergy as bungling incompetents, although some clergy enjoyed it. In the opening credits, St Albans Cathedral was shown as the fictional St Ogg's (but with the Crooked Spire of Church of St Mary and All Saints, Chesterfield added to the central tower). The background to the opening credits was actually the headmaster's garden of St. Albans School. The name "St. Ogg's" may have been taken from a fictional village in George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss.^[2]

The series proved to be the first of a number of comedies starring Derek Nimmo in similar bumbling clerical roles — (Oh, Brother!, Oh, Father! and Hell's Bells) — but is regarded as the best, partly because of a strong supporting cast (particularly the experienced farceur Robertson Hare as the archdeacon) and partly because it included some elements of gentle satire.^[3]

The pilot and first two series were videotaped in black-and-white. The third series was videotaped in colour, but was originally broadcast in monochrome. The fourth and fifth series were made and shown in colour.

A radio version of All Gas and Gaiters was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from 5 January 1971 to 4 December 1972 for 33 episodes.^[17] The radio show used the same cast as the television series with the exception of Derek Nimmo, who left after the first series and was succeeded by Jonathan Cecil.^[18] Although seven radio episodes were thought to have been wiped, these were later found and all are available through radio enthusiasts. Some episodes were rebroadcast on BBC 7 in October and November 2006, and again a year later and in early 2009. They continued to be broadcast on the station, now renamed BBC Radio 4 Extra, in August 2011 and again in early 2017 and 2022.

Only 11 episodes still exist in the archive, the others were wiped as was the standard policy of the BBC in this era.^[19] Film recordings exist for the pilot and two episodes from series 1, and two of the colour episodes from series 5 are preserved as black and white 16mm film recordings only. Only six colour episodes are preserved in their original colour videotape format.^[20]

Eight scripts of the lost episodes were published in 2015: "Only Three Can Play", "The Dean Goes Primitive", "The Bishop Goes To Town", "The Bishop Learns the Facts", "The Bishop is Hospitable", "The Bishop Takes a Holiday", "The Affair at Cookham Lock" and "The Bishop Gives a Shove".^[21]

All 11 surviving episodes were originally released on VHS and DVD by DD Home Entertainment on 3 November 2003, originally accompanied by a detailed behind-the-scenes booklet, written by Andy Priestner in consultation with the show's writers, Edwin Apps and Pauline Devaney, but later released without.^[22] Simply Media later gained the rights to the distribution of the series, and it re-released on 24 August 2009.^[23]

In April 2016, the radio drama based on the story behind the making of the series, All Mouth and Trousers by Mark Burgess, was aired by BBC Radio 4. The production featured John Sessions as Frank Muir, Nicholas Boulton as Stuart Allen, Gareth Williams as William Mervyn, Trevor Littledale as Robertson Hare, Zeb Soanes as Derek Nimmo and David Collings as John Barron.^[24]