Dad's Army Page 8

  Even though the air-raid warden was not, at that stage, conceived of as a regular character, Croft knew that Pertwee could be relied on not only to turn in the kind of spirited performance he required to test the role’s comic potential, but also to inject some welcome energy and good humour into a company of tough and occasionally testy old professionals. ‘I booked Bill because he was good, of course, but I also booked him in order to keep everyone else happy and sweet. He was always very bubbly, very well liked by everyone, and he’s marvellous fun.’54

  The casting, at last, was complete, and Croft regarded the ensemble that he had assembled with a considerable amount of satisfaction: ‘The cast that you started out thinking about is never the same as the one you finish up with, but I was pretty pleased with the line-up we’d managed to get. There was a great deal of quality there.’55 He looked ahead at all the potential clashes of egos, all the possible conflicts of ambition, all the inevitable accidents (happy and otherwise), all the long drawn-out set-ups and last-minute revisions, all the budgetary worries, all the problems with props and people and performances, and he could not wait to get started. He was ready to make a television programme.

  THE COMEDY

  There’s nothing funny on paper. All you are playing with is a bagful of potential. Even when the show’s written you haven’t got anything. Comedy is like a torch battery – there is no point in it until the circuit is complete and the bulb, which is the audience, lights up. It is how strongly the bulb lights up which determines how well you have done your job.

  FRANK MUIR1

  CHAPTER IV

  The Pilot

  You put your head on the block every time you televise comedy, for everybody in the audience is an expert in a way that they never are with drama.

  DUNCAN WOOD1

  It’s folly – sheer folly!/I never doubted you could do it!

  PRIVATE FRAZER2

  The atmosphere, according to Jimmy Perry, was ‘very tense’3 on the chilly morning at the end of March 1968 when the cast came together for the first time. In those days, before the construction of the BBC’s own rehearsal rooms in North Acton, programmes were prepared in a wide variety of unlikely-looking venues secreted among London’s least alluring nooks and crannies, and, in the case of Dad’s Army, the site for the initial read-through was a stale-smelling back room of The Feathers public house in Chiswick. Here, seated side-by-side around a large mud-coloured table, were the actors whose task it now was to bring the inhabitants of Walmington-on-Sea into life. ‘I looked at that motley crew,’ remembered Perry, ‘and I thought to myself: “This is either going to be my biggest success or my biggest failure – it all depends how they get on.”’4

  Some of them – such as Clive Dunn and John Le Mesurier – were old friends; others – such as Arthur Lowe and Arnold Ridley – were merely vague acquaintances; and a few – such as James Beck and Ian Lavender – were total strangers. David Croft took all of the nervy uncertainty in his stride – he was used to the awkwardness of these occasions – but Jimmy Perry could not help scrutinising every look, every nuance, every mild little moan and over-loud laugh for portents of good days or bad days to come. His spirits sagged when John Laurie turned to him and said in a voice of casual menace, ‘I hope this is going to work, laddie, but to my mind it’s a ridiculous idea!’, but later, during a coffee break, they were revived when Bill Pertwee came over and assured him that the show was ‘going to be a winner’.5 He remained, nonetheless, over-sensitive and apprehensive; this had been his big idea, his personal project, and now it was set to be tested.

  Preparations had certainly been thorough. David Croft was determined to make the programme seem as true to its period as was humanly possible. Any line that sounded too ‘modern’, such as ‘I couldn’t care less’, was swiftly removed from the script. The services of E. V. H. Emmett, the voice of the old Gaumont-British newsreels from the 1930s and 1940s, were secured to supply some suitably evocative scene-setting narration. Two talented and meticulous set designers, Alan Hunter-Craig and Paul Joel, were brought in to create a range of believably 1940s-style surroundings, and, after researching the era at the Imperial War Museum, they either found or fabricated the right kinds of food – Spam, snoek, dried egg, fat bacon pieces, rabbit, potatoes, cabbages and carrots – brands – Camp coffee, Typhoo tea, Bird’s custard, Brown’s ‘Harrison Glory’ peas, Porter’s ‘Victory’ self-raising flour, Orlox beef suet, Horlicks tablets, SAXA salt, Sunlight soap, Craven ‘A’ cigarettes – furniture – elderly desks, ‘utility’-style shelves, sideboards, cabinets – portraits – of the King and Queen, and Churchill (‘Let Us Go Forward Together’) – and posters – bearing such advice as ‘Keep it under your hat’, ‘Hitler will send no warning’ and ‘Keep it dark’ – to ensure that every home, hall, bank and butcher’s shop in Walmington-on-Sea would reach the screen reflecting a richly authentic wartime look. Sandra Exelby, an accomplished BBC make-up specialist, developed a variety of period hairstyles and wigs, while George Ward, the costume designer, searched far and wide for genuine LDV and Home Guard brassards, badges, boots, uniforms, respirators and weapons, ordering what other outfits were needed from Berman’s, a London costumier (and he made a point of having Captain Mainwaring’s uniform made from out of a slightly superior quality material in order to reflect the higher salary he would, as a bank manager, have received). Someone even managed to find an old pair of round-rimmed spectacles for Arthur Lowe to wear.

  ‘It had to look right,’ Croft confirmed, ‘and, of course, people had to be able to really believe in the characters.’6 Both he and Perry had worked hard to provide each major character with a plausible past – Jack Jones, for example, had been given a long and elaborate military career (which went all the way from Khartoum, through the Sudan, on to the North-West Frontier, back under General Kitchener for the battle of Omdurman, the Frontier again, then on to the Boer War and the Great War in France) to lend more than a little credence to his regular rambling anecdotes. Each actor was encouraged to draw on any memories which might help them to add the odd distinguishing detail (John Laurie remembered his time as a Home Guard in Paddington – ‘totally uncomical, an excess of dullness’ – and found an easy affinity with Frazer’s strained tolerance of ‘a lot of useless blather’).7

  The theme song was Jimmy Perry’s idea. ‘I wouldn’t call myself a composer,’ he explained, ‘I’d call myself a pastiche artist. My aim is to write something that makes you know, as soon as the show starts, exactly what it’s going to be about. For Dad’s Army, I wanted to come up with something that took you straight back to the period and summed up the attitudes of the British people.’8 His lyrics, when they came, could not have seemed more apposite:

  Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler

  If you think we’re on the run?

  We are the boys who will stop your little game.

  We are the boys who will make you think again.

  ’Cause who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler

  If you think old England’s done?

  Mister Brown goes off to town

  On the eight twenty-one

  But he comes home each evening

  And he’s ready with his gun.

  So who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler

  If you think old England’s done?9

  Everything about these words – their polite defiance, their frail ebullience, their easy grace – belied their belated origin. ‘I was very proud of it,’ Perry admitted.10 He composed the music in collaboration with Derek Taverner, whom he had known since their time together in a Combined Services Entertainment unit in Delhi, and then resolved to persuade Bud Flanagan, one of his childhood idols, to perform the finished song. Flanagan (along with his erstwhile partner, Chesney Allen) was still associated firmly and fondly in the public’s mind with such popular wartime recordings as ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ and ‘We’re Gonna Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line’, and his warm and reedy voice was the
ideal instrument to age artificially this new ‘old’ composition. Fortunately, although the 72-year-old music-hall veteran was not in the habit of recording songs that he had not previously performed, he agreed, for a fee of 100 guineas, to supply the vocal. On the afternoon of 26 February 1968, he arrived at the Riverside Recording Studio in Hammersmith and, to an accompaniment from the Band of the Coldstream Guards, he proceeded to sing: ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler … ’ Jimmy Perry, standing at the back of the production booth, was visibly thrilled: ‘It sent a sort of shiver up my spine. What a moment! To think that dear old Bud Flanagan, whom I’d sat and watched as a kid up in the gallery at the Palladium, was right there now, singing a song that I’d written. Marvellous!’11 After eight takes – Flanagan had stumbled a few times over one or two of the unfamiliar lines – the song had been captured to everyone’s satisfaction. It was a sound from a bygone era (the final sound, in a way, because Flanagan would die a few months later), and it set the tone for all that was to follow.

  Location filming took place between 1 and 6 April. Harold Snoad, David Croft’s production assistant, had selected the old East Anglian market town of Thetford as the regular base. It was a shrewd choice: inside the town itself, the neat rows of grey-brick and flinty houses implied just the right degree of close-knit intimacy. The surrounding area boasted a rich range of vivid natural sights – pine forests stretching out to the north and west, wide open fields, long meandering streams – and man-made contexts – the Army’s Military Training Area was only six miles away at Stanford – in which to frame the fictional world of Walmington-on-Sea. Arthur Lowe travelled down to Thetford by train, Clive Dunn and John Le Mesurier together by car and the remainder of the cast and crew by coach. ‘Everyone knew exactly what they were doing,’ Ian Lavender recalled, ‘except me’:

  I didn’t know anything about location shooting. I lived near Olympia in those days, and the journey to TV Centre wasn’t very long, so I just wandered over in the belief that I was going to spend a few hours in Thetford and then come home on the coach. When I got to TV Centre, however, I noticed that everybody had brought their suitcases with them, so I had to invest several shillings for a taxi ride back to pack some clothes! It had never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be coming home at nights – that was how green I was.12

  Every external scene for the whole of the first series had to be filmed during that single (unseasonably chilly) week in Norfolk, and, as Lavender remembered, the pace was unrelenting:

  It was all a bit of a blur. The only thing I remember of the filming, quite honestly, was when I accidentally came up with Pike’s voice. Most of the filming was mute – because it was going to be mixed in with stock newsreel footage – but one scene, featuring these circus horses going round and round, was done with sound. And all I said was, ‘Have you got the rifles, Mr Mainwaring?’ And this voice came out: ‘Have you got the rifles, Mr Mainwaring?’ Pure shock, I think. And so I more or less stuck with that voice for the next nine years.13

  The most surreal moment, said Clive Dunn, occurred when the cast was racing through a few light-hearted scene-setting motions: ‘As we filmed our bits of comedy showing the Home Guard changing road signs to fool the German invaders, a staff car loaded with German NATO officers passed by …, smiling and unaware that we were about to launch into a long comedy series about the Second World War.’14

  The evenings were reserved for socialising. ‘There was a good atmosphere right from the very first day,’ Ian Lavender recalled:

  I’d been terrified at the start – terrified – but they were all so welcoming. I think I’d already been put through my ‘initiation process’ back in that pub at Chiswick by Arthur. He’d shown me how to smoke a cigarette ‘Arabian style’. He had his own private supply of these cork-tipped Craven ‘A’ cigarettes, and he’d got me to hold one of them like he did, suck it – phew! – and I’d fallen off my stool. That was my first memory of Arthur, socially – making me fall off a bar stool. And then in the hotel at Thetford they were lovely. They’d sort of say things like, ‘Come on, this is your bit as well’, you know, ‘Don’t be afraid of … ’ It wasn’t a matter of taking me under their wing and protecting me, but neither was it a matter of leaving me to sink or swim. They were just very, very, welcoming.15

  After Thetford came the rehearsals: at 10.30 on the morning of Monday, 8 April, the cast, Croft and Perry reassembled at St Nicholas Church Hall in Bennett Street, Chiswick, to begin work on the pilot episode, which by this time had been given the title ‘The Man and the Hour’. Some of the actors seemed well-advanced in their characterisations – Arthur Lowe, for example, was quietly confident that both his look (a compressed Clement Attlee) and manner (proud, pompous and pushy) would work rather well, and Ian Lavender (whose prematurely greying hair would be disguised on screen by a combination of colour spray and Brylcream) had decided to give Pike a long Aston Villa scarf (hastily replaced, in the opening credits sequence, by a blue towel because the wardrobe van had left Thetford early), a mildly quavering vocal manner and a childishly inquisitive expression – but one or two, it seemed, were still in need of some advice. Bill Pertwee kept being urged by David Croft to make Hodges even louder and more obnoxious, delivering each line in the music-hall style of ‘on top of a shout’, and Jimmy Perry was and would remain astonished by John Le Mesurier’s unorthodox methods of assimilation:

  Talk about casual! The previous week, on the first day of filming at Thetford, John was sitting there very nonchalantly in the lounge of the hotel, and he’d said to me: ‘Oh, James: how do you want me to play this part?’ Well, that was a laugh for a start! As far as I knew, John Le Mesurier only had one performance. Anyway, I said to him: ‘Look, John, it’s all yours on a plate – just do it as you feel.’ So he said, ‘Yes, oh, all right, old boy’, and then he lit a cigarette and said, ‘Who are you going to bet on in the 2.30 today?’ Make no mistake, he was very, very, good, but, really, that man just swanned through life.16

  Gradually, however, Le Mesurier warmed to the role by warming the role up, moving away from the kind of stiff and stuffy figures he was so used to sleepwalking into existence, and resolving instead to model Arthur Wilson on none other than John Le Mesurier: ‘I thought, why not just be myself, use an extension of my own personality and behave rather as I had done in the Army? So, I always left a button or two undone, and had the sleeve of my battledress blouse slightly turned up. I spoke softly, issued commands as if they were invitations (the sort not likely to be accepted) and generally assumed a benign air of helplessness.’17 James Beck, meanwhile, was busy striving to make Joe Walker (who had inherited Slasher Green’s rakish trilby, pencil-thin moustache, padded shoulders and two-tone shoes) seem not only real but also appealing: ‘Trouble is,’ he later explained, ‘spivs weren’t really very nice people to know. So I felt that if Walker was to be a true comedy character, he had to have some redeeming quality. Then I remembered a spiv from Barnsley I’d known in the Army, and liked. He had this great thing. He would cheat the world at large, but he’d never cheat his pals. And that’s the jewel in Walker’s crown too. He always looks after his mates.’18 Countless small but significant things were falling slowly into place.

  As with any rehearsal period, however, problems were created as well as solved. The character of Bracewell, for example, came to seem less and less relevant the longer the rehearsal went on. ‘It had absolutely nothing to do with [the actor] John Ringham,’ explained David Croft. ‘He was excellent. It was the character. Jimmy and I both came to the same conclusion, which was that Bracewell was too similar in personality to Godfrey, so we decided to drop him after the first episode.’19 Another character – the chief fire officer (played by Gordon Peters) – did not even reach the screen: ‘[W]e had written a hilarious scene,’ Croft recalled,

  where the chief fire officer had decided to hold a fire exercise in the church hall. He proceeded to fill it with fire hoses at the same time that Captain Mainwaring was trying to
hold a parade. It worked like a dream, but at the end of one of the last runs of the rehearsal I was approached by a grave-faced Eve Lucas, my production secretary, who said, ‘It’s very funny, but do you realise that you’re seven minutes too long?’ Something had to go and, sadly, the fire practice scene went in its entirety; and so too did Gordon Peters.’20

  It was during this period that the cast and crew received a very important visitor: Huw Wheldon, BBC Television’s current Controller of Programmes and its next Managing Director. Wheldon was still very much a programme-maker at heart, and nothing gave him greater pleasure than seeing genuine talent succeed, but a few months before – as he himself would later freely admit – he had been ‘one of a small group of programme executives who became distinguished for recognising that a script by David Croft and Jimmy Perry called Dad’s Army would not work’.21 Out of respect for David Croft, Wheldon had gone along with the decision to commission a series of six episodes, and he had reacted positively to the news that the leading roles had been given to Lowe and Le Mesurier: ‘This pleased me,’ he acknowledged, ‘but it did not change my mind. I knew it would fail.’22 Then, a few months later, he heard that rehearsals had begun, and, as had long been his habit, he decided to drop in on the proceedings unannounced in order to see how the programme was developing:

  They were doing a five-minute sequence and I could not make head nor tail of it. I could not follow the action. Suddenly I realised that I had done the casting wrongly in my own mind. I had taken it for granted that John Le Mesurier, elegant, intelligent, sardonic and rather weary, was the officer; and that Arthur Lowe, brisk, belligerent and bustling, was the sergeant. But [it was actually] the other way round. Lowe was Captain Mainwaring and Le Mesurier was Sergeant Wilson. I was delighted. It was the first note of unpredictability in a series that has been fresh and unpredictable and creative ever since.