One fact everybody knows about the Comedy Playhouse broadcast of Are You Being Served? in September 1972 is that it was hastily parachuted into the BBC schedules after the massacre at the Munich Olympics created large programming gaps.
Speaking in the AYBS? edition of Comedy Connections (tx 23rd June 2003), co-writer Jeremy Lloyd confirms this, stating that “they then had a terrible disaster at the Olympic Games … where there was a terrible tragedy and they suddenly had blank screens and they needed something and somebody reached for the nearest show, basically. Which turned out to be Are You Being Served?”
But was that actually the case?
The massacre took place during the evening of the 5th and the early morning of the 6th of September. The Games were suspended for 24 hours before resuming, so by the 8th of September (when Are You Being Served? was broadcast) full coverage was back on.
Looking at the Radio Times listing on BBC Genome, there’s no mention of Are You Being Served? But daily newspapers (such as this example from the Mirror) show it occupying the 9.25 pm timeslot –
This matches very closely to the Radio Times listing (which was obviously produced before the terrorist incident) with the only change being the insertion of AYBS? In the RT, Today at the Olympic Games began at 9.25 pm.
It’s true that Today at the Olympic Games in the RT lasted an hour longer, but if the broadcast programme was curtailed (finishing around midnight instead of an hour later) there’s still no reason to have bulked out the schedule with AYBS? (as a midnight closedown would hardly have been unusual).
The Daily Mirror listing for the 9th is similar to the level of coverage provided by the BBC for the rest of the Olympics – they would start in the morning and continue until the early evening (say around 7.00 pm when regular programmes would take over). Any evening action not broadcast live would no doubt have been included in the lengthy highlights show later on.
According to Nicholas Smith (speaking in the Comedy Connections doco) AYBS? should have been broadcast in the Comedy Playhouse series which aired at the start of 1972, but the BBC so disliked the programme that they shelved it. So maybe the BBC decided to fling out AYBS? later in the year, hoping it would get lost in the Olympic hubbub. If that was the case, then it didn’t work as the show ended up 8th in that week’s television chart, with some 13 million viewers.
The last-minute scheduling of AYBS? remains a bit of a mystery, but the oft-repeated claim that it was required to fill a gap in the schedule caused by terrorism at the Munich Olympics seems to be nothing more than a myth.
Archive Television Musings 
A magazine such as Radio Times had a much longer lead time than a daily newspaper. So the decision to broadcast AYBS must have been made, say 24 hours before the event, which would have been enough time for the Daily Mirror to pick up the information (directly from the BBC).
A possible explanation is that the beeb instinctively felt that viewers were weary of coverage of the Olympics (and of the massacre), and so inserted some comedy in the hope of cheering people up. With all their resources, BBC executives did (and still do) have the freedom to make last minute decisions like this.
Comedy is a very tricky thing to get right, and the BBC used to broadcast pilot episodes just to gauge public reaction. I remember seeing the pilot of ‘Allo, ‘Allo suddenly pop up on a midweek evening, and I thought WTF is this? (completely over-the-top and distasteful). As you have said, it was 18 months before the BBC finally decided to go ahead with it.
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