Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy

CHAPTER III You Will Be Watching …

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD1

DAD’S ARMY2

Anyone other than David Croft would surely have been in grave danger of hyper-hyphenating: already installed as producer-director-co-writer of Dad’s Army, he now added to his multiple responsibilities by assuming control of casting as well. ‘There was never going to be any doubt about that,’ he explained. ‘Right back in the earliest days of my career, when I was offered a casting person, I’d said, “No way – that’s my business!”, and I’ve always stuck to that. If you don’t know who you want in a show, you shouldn’t be doing the job, quite frankly. Certainly, as far as the established characters are concerned, you should know exactly who you want – even if you can’t get them.’3

Croft, in fact, was not just good at casting a show; he had a genius for it. Just like the classic Ealing movie comedies of the 1940s and 1950s – whose distinctive tone and texture owed as much to those actors (such as Miles Malleson, Hugh Griffith, Jack Warner, Gladys Henson, Clive Morton, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) who regularly animated the background as they did to those (such as Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood and Cecil Parker) who frequently filled in the foreground – Croft’s situation-comedies were all about believable little worlds rather than brilliantly big stars. Throughout the first half of the 1960s he had cherry-picked the choicest character actors in British television comedy until, in effect, he had assembled his own unofficial repertory company, his own private Ealing. All of the following actors were used by Croft in one or more episodes of both Hugh and I and Beggar My Neighbour and would go on to feature in one or more episodes of Dad’s Army: Arnold Ridley, Bill Pertwee, James Beck, Edward Sinclair, Harold Bennett, Felix Bowness, Arthur English, Carmen Silvera, Robert Raglan, Queenie Watts, Robert Gillespie, Julian Orchard, Jeffrey Gardiner and Jimmy Perry. The familiarity bred contentment: the audience knew who was who, and the director knew who could do what. It was inevitable that the close-knit community of Walmington-on-Sea would be composed predominantly of Croft’s people.

Jimmy Perry, however, was disappointed to learn that he would not, on a regular basis, be joining them. Michael Mills had argued that the show’s creator and co-writer would have to make up his mind as to which side of the camera he most wanted to be, and David Croft had concurred: ‘Jimmy, I knew, had set his heart on playing the spiv – he’d actually written it with himself in mind – but I felt that, as one of the writers, he would be needed in the production box to see how things were going. I also felt, I suppose, that it wasn’t going to make for a particularly happy cast if one of the writers gave himself a role – the other actors would’ve been inclined to say that he’d written the best lines for himself.’4 Perry was by no means the first writer to find that his cunning plan had suddenly gone awry. Back in 1960, for example, the American writer Carl Reiner had created his very own starring vehicle (Head of the Family), basing the leading role of Rob Petrie expressly on himself, only to be informed by his producer that Dick Van Dyke was much more suited to playing himself than he was (and the show, as a consequence, was relaunched as The Dick Van Dyke Show).5 Perry’s sense of disappointment, nonetheless, was immense: ‘I always resented it. Always. I wrote Walker for myself. That’s how it had all started. And I wanted to be on both sides of the camera. But Michael Mills didn’t think it was a good idea and neither did David, and, in those days, I was in no position to argue. So that was that: very sad, but there you are – you can’t have everything.’6

The casting process, from the first casual discussion to the final collection of contracts, lasted several months, beginning in mid-October 1967 and ending in early March 1968. The genealogy of the characters (who were little more, so far, than garrulous strangers on paper but already intimate friends within the minds of Croft and Perry) contained the clues. Mainwaring, for example, was a composite of three people from Perry’s past: the manager of his local bank, the head of a Watford building society and Will Hay’s chronically incompetent, permanently harassed, on-screen persona (there had been a ‘Colonel Mannering’ – ‘known to the press as “the uncrowned king of Southern Arabia”’7 – in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but the name ‘Mainwaring’ was chosen for its comically ambiguous, class-sensitive pronunciation). Wilson was prompted by Perry’s aversion to the stereotypical sergeant figure:

I’d been a sergeant myself, you see, and one day, while I was serving in the Far East, this major had come up and said to me: ‘Sergeant Perry, why do you speak with a public school accent?’ And I’d replied: ‘Well, I suppose because I went to a public school.’ So he said, ‘Oh. But still: a sergeant speaking like that – it – it’s most strange!’ Well, the man was an idiot. There were more than a million men in the Royal Artillery alone, and they came from all walks of life. So this cliché that a sergeant should always look a certain way and sound a certain way – it’s just a cliché, and I wanted to get right away from that.8

Jones owed much to the elderly raconteur with whom Perry had served in the Home Guard, and a little to the bellicose sergeant at Colchester barracks who had taught him bayonet drill (‘Any doubt – get out the old cold steel, ’cause they don’t like it up ’em!’).9 Godfrey was a throwback to the Edwardian era, when discreet and deferential shop assistants would inquire politely if one was ‘being attended to’;10 Walker was drawn from memory – not only of real wartime wide boys, but also, inevitably, of the still-vivid ‘Slasher Green’, Sid Field’s kinder, gentler, comic parody; Frazer was formed from all of the old anecdotes about those Scots who had grown progressively – and aggressively – more ‘Scottish’ while in exile down south among the Sassenachs; and Pike was modelled on Perry’s own youthful experiences as a movie-mad, scarf-clad, impressionable raw recruit.

Casting Mainwaring, Perry believed, would be easy. There was one actor in particular who, in his opinion, bore a striking family resemblance to Walmington-on-Sea’s uppity little fusspot: Arthur Lowe. What impressed Perry most about Lowe was his technical brilliance: his timing – like that of Jack Benny or Robb Wilton – was flawless; his mid-sentence double takes – like those of Bob Hope or Cary Grant – were exquisite; and his control of crosstalk – like that of Will Hay or Jimmy James – was seemingly effortless. ‘You just had to watch him,’ said Perry. ‘It takes an awful long time to learn how to do those things even moderately well, but he did them beautifully.’11 Lowe had been acting professionally for more than twenty years, starting off in Manchester rep before graduating to West End musicals (including Call Me Madam, Pal Joey and The Pyjama Game), plays (Witness for the Prosecution, A Dead Secret, Ring of Truth) and movies (including a brief role as a reporter in Kind Hearts and Coronets and a more significant part in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life). By the mid-sixties he was best known for his long-running role on television as the irascible and fastidious Leonard Swindley – first, from 1960, in Coronation Street (where he managed Gamma Garments boutique, unsuccessfully fought a local election as the founder and chairman of the Property Owners and Small Traders Party, and was jilted at the altar by the timid Emily Nugent), and then, from 1965, in a broader spin-off situation-comedy, Pardon the Expression (which saw him leave Weatherfield to become assistant manager at a northern branch of a department store called Dobson and Hawks). ‘I’d seen him in those two things,’ said Perry, ‘and somehow he’d clicked with me. He was such a funny little man.’12 By 1967, after appearing in yet another spin-off series called Turn Out the Lights, Lowe, having tired of being associated so closely with one long-running role, had left Mr Swindley behind and returned to the theatre. He was available, but, much to Perry’s surprise, the BBC did not appear to want him.

‘Arthur Lowe?’ exclaimed Michael Mills when the name first came up. ‘He doesn’t work for us!’13 This was not entirely true – he had, in the past, appeared in the odd episode of such programmes as Maigret and Z Cars – but it was true enough to make Mills (ever protective of the BBC’s distinctive identity) urge his producer to look elsewhere. David Croft had, in fact, already done so, and had settled on Thorley Walters – an actor whose most recent role on television had been that of Sir Joshua Hoot QC in BBC1’s A. P. Herbert’s Misleading Cases. Walters was no stranger to playing either stuffy or inept military characters – and in the Boulting Brothers’ satire Private’s Progress (1956) he had played Captain Bootle, who was both – although his movie career now centred on such Hammer horrors as Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966) and Frankenstein Created Woman (1967). Croft went ahead and offered him the role. Walters turned it down. ‘He thanked me very much for asking,’ recalled Croft, ‘but he said that he couldn’t think why I’d thought of him. But he would have been very good.’14 Perry, once again, suggested Arthur Lowe, but Croft, once again, already had someone else in mind: this time it was Jon Pertwee.

Pertwee was one of those actors who seemed almost too serviceable for their own good. Whenever a radio producer wanted someone to play a gibbering Norwegian, or a spluttering English aristocrat, or a windy Welshman, or just about any other comical accent, tic or turn, Pertwee invariably came top of the list (in The Navy Lark, for example, he supplied the voices for no fewer than six distinctive characters);15 whenever a television show or movie required a piece of Danny Kaye-style verbal dexterity or a quirky characterisation, Pertwee would, inevitably, find himself in demand. Croft had worked with him on an episode of Beggar My Neighbour,16 and had been very impressed: ‘He’d played this major – quite similar, really, to the part [of Mainwaring] as it was conceived at that time – and he’d been very funny. So I sent him the script and offered him the part.’17 This time, it seemed, Croft had succeeded in getting his man. On 13 November 1967, Michael Mills instructed the BBC bookings department to ‘negotiate a fee with [the agent] Richard Stone for the services of Jon Pertwee’, adding that ‘Pertwee is in America at the moment, and has seen [the] script and wished to do [the] show. I would like him to be aware of the fee that we are offering, so that we can make a firm casting.’18 What happened next remains unclear: it could have been the case that Pertwee, or his agent, judged the proposed fee (which would not, at best, have been many shillings more than £250 an episode)19 too low, or he might have decided, on reflection, that he did not wish to risk being typecast in a series that might just possibly run for several years, or he might simply have been enjoying himself too much in New York (where he was appearing in the Broadway production of There’s a Girl in My Soup) to seriously consider making an early return, but, whatever the real reason, the result was that he changed his mind and chose to drop out. Croft, once again, found himself back at square one.

It was at this point that Perry saw his chance. Knowing that Arthur Lowe was currently appearing in a play called Baked Beans and Caviar at Windsor, he persuaded David Croft to go along with him to see it. ‘Unfortunately,’ Perry recalled, ‘Arthur was dreadful in it – it wasn’t his sort of thing at all – but David, to his great credit, backed me and agreed to consider him for Mainwaring.’20 Perry’s persistence was about to pay off, but not without one final scare – courtesy of none other than Arthur Lowe himself. Croft had arranged for the actor to meet him and Perry at Television Centre:

It didn’t get off to a good start. We’d whistled him up to the Centre so that we could talk over lunch in the canteen, and the first thing he said was: ‘I’m not sure, you know, about a situation-comedy. I hope it’s not going to be one of those silly programmes. The sort of show I hate is Hugh and I.’ So I had to tell him the fact that I’d done about eighty Hugh and Is! He quickly backed out of that one. After all, it was work, and he wasn’t over-employed at the time.21

Croft forgave the faux pas; he knew that Lowe, so long as he could shake off the ghost of Mr Swindley, had both the wit and the ability to make the role his own. It was, he concluded, a risk, but a risk well worth taking. A fee was agreed of £210 per programme, and a contract was sent out on 21 February 1968. Lowe signed it immediately. Captain Mainwaring, at long last, was cast.

Sergeant Wilson, Perry would later reveal, could have been played by the portly and bespectacled Robert Dorning: ‘I’d seen him with Arthur in Pardon the Expression – he’d played Arthur’s boss – and I’d thought to myself: “Wouldn’t they make a good couple to play the leads [in Dad’s Army]?” So I was very keen on getting them both, and Dorning could certainly have been good as Wilson, but then, of course, Michael Mills stuck his oar in … ’22 Mills – who was indeed an ex-Navy man – announced that he was absolutely convinced about who was the right man for the role. David Croft – who was never surprised to hear that Michael Mills was absolutely convinced about anything – invited him to share this information. ‘You must have John Le Mesurier!’ barked Mills. ‘He suffers so well!’23 Croft found, on reflection, that he rather liked this idea. Le Mesurier did suffer well. No post-war British movie seemed complete without his furrowed brow, frightened eyes, sunken cheeks and world-weary sigh. He had been the psychiatrist with the nervous twitch in Private’s Progress, the time-and-motion expert (also with a nervous twitch) in I’m All Right Jack (1959) and the City office manager (sans twitch) in The Rebel (1961), as well as innumerable other bewildered-looking barristers, bureaucrats, officers and doctors who together seemed to sum up a certain sense of home-grown ennui. He had reprised the role on television in both Hancock’s Half-Hour (1956–60) and Hancock (1961), and more recently he had shown a little of the warmer side to his nature as the retired Colonel Maynard – ‘a dear old stick’24 – in the situation-comedy George and the Dragon (1966–8). Croft sent him the pilot script of Dad’s Army. Le Mesurier, on reading it, thought it had the potential to become a ‘minor situation comedy’, but he was intrigued by the news that he was wanted for the role of the sergeant rather than the captain – ‘casting directors usually saw me as officer material’.25 He read the script again, and liked it a little more: Perry, he felt, ‘knew how to turn a funny line’, and Croft, he noted, was ‘a theatre man who had brought to television a reputation for cool, calm organisation’. ‘Promising,’ he thought to himself, ‘all promising.’26 He informed his agent, Freddie Joachim, that he only had one real reservation: the fee. Joachim, who regarded the medium of television as beneath his calibre of client, proceeded, without the slightest sign of enthusiasm, to haggle on Le Mesurier’s behalf.

Croft, in the meantime, was busy trying to persuade Clive Dunn to accept the role of Lance Corporal Jones. Jack Haig, an old favourite of Croft’s from his time at Tyne Tees in the 1950s, had been first choice, but, after discussing the offer with the ultra-cautious Tom Sloan (who appears to have given him the impression that the show was by no means assured of a long run),27 Haig had turned the part down in order to concentrate on a lucrative new vehicle for his popular children’s character, ‘Wacky Jacky’. Dunn, though a mere forty-eight years of age, was the obvious alternative: like Haig, who was nine years his senior, he knew how to portray elderly comic characters. An alumnus of the Players’ Theatre, which was a well-respected club in Villiers Street, London WC2, specialising in Victorian/Edwardian-style music hall, pantomime and melodrama, Dunn had appeared in everything from Windmill revues to children’s situation-comedies (such as The Adventures of Charlie Quick, broadcast by BBCTV in 1957), and had first made his name on television as Old Johnson, the aptly-named 83-year-old waiter and Boer War veteran in Granada’s Bootsie and Snudge (1960–3), the popular follow-up to The Army Game. Like Croft, he came from an established showbusiness family – his maternal grandfather, Frank Lynne, had been a moderately popular music-hall comedian, his uncle, Gordon Lynne, was also a comic and both his parents, Bobby Dunn and Connie Clive, had been professional entertainers – and the two men had known and liked each other for years (Dunn’s mother, in fact, had once had an affair with Croft’s father).28 Putting their friendship to one side, however, he had not jumped at the offer when Croft first made his approach: he had just started work on The World of Beachcomber, BBC2’s fine adaptation of J. B. Morton’s much-admired newspaper columns, and, as he would put it later, he ‘wasn’t particularly hungry’.29 As a former prisoner of war – he had spent four harrowing years in a German labour camp in Liezen, Austria – he would have been forgiven for regarding the subject matter with suspicion, but, in fact, he found it quite appealing. The reason for his reluctance had more to do with the high casualty rate of new situation-comedies: ‘The ups and downs of the profession had made me cautious.’30

He decided to phone a friend: John Le Mesurier. ‘I’ll do it if you do it,’31 said Dunn. ‘Yes,’ replied Le Mesurier, ‘but … ’, and suggested that they ‘hung out a little’ in the hope that the money might improve.32 Dunn agreed with ‘Le Mez’ (as he was known to his friends), and delayed making a decision. Croft, however, had already enlisted a standby: an inexperienced but very promising 28-year-old actor by the name of David Jason. ‘I didn’t know him very well,’ Croft explained, ‘but my wife represented him and I’d used him fairly recently in an episode of Beggar My Neighbour and he’d been marvellous.’33 Jason had just started work on the show that represented his first real breakthrough on television – the ITV/Rediffusion teatime sketch show Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967–9) – but, even so, was quite prepared to commit himself to a high-profile David Croft comedy. Late in February 1968, Croft, who was now growing impatient, spotted Dunn in the BBC canteen, and took the opportunity to ask him if he had reached a decision yet about joining the cast; an embarrassed Dunn stalled again, and then slipped quietly away ‘hoping that John would [soon] make up his mind and that David would not resent the delay’.34

Wheels began turning within wheels: Dunn’s agent, Michael Grade, was a close friend of Bill Cotton, and spoke to him on an informal basis in order to ensure that someone at the BBC realised that his client really was predisposed to join the show. David Croft, meanwhile, had begun taking steps to resolve the matter once and for all. The following day, David Jason recalled, proved full of surprises: ‘The order of events was as follows: I went to the BBC and read for the part at 11 a.m.; soon after, my agent received the message that I had the part; by 3 p.m., I was out of work! Over the lunch period Bill Cotton had persuaded Clive to take the part, and hadn’t informed the producer. The rest is history!’35

Dunn, it seems, had just heard via Freddie Joachim that Le Mesurier had finally decided to accept, and the news had sparked him into action.36 Once his billing had been secured – third, below Lowe and ‘Le Mez’ – and the assurance had been given that he would be handed the pick of the ‘Joey Joeys’ – the physical comedy – he proceeded to make a commitment. Both men received and signed their contracts on 29 February 1968 (although Le Mesurier’s fee was set at a sum £52 10s higher than Dunn’s – or Lowe’s),37 and the first tier of the cast was complete.

The remainder of the platoon proved somewhat easier to assemble. Croft cast Arnold Ridley as Private Godfrey. Up until this point, Ridley’s life had been chequered with bad luck: he had been invalided out of the Army on two separate occasions (first in 1917, following the Battle of the Somme, then after talking his way back into service, in 1940, following the evacuation from Dunkirk); his production company, Quality Films, went bust after just one, well-received release (Royal Eagle, 1936), and he had been forced to sell the rights to some of his most enduringly popular – and lucrative – plays (including The Ghost Train, 1925) in order to stave off bankruptcy. There had been spells in various soap operas – including Crossroads (as the Revd Guy Atkins) and Coronation Street (as Herbert Whittle, the would-be wooer of Minnie Caldwell), as well as an ongoing role in The Archers (as Doughy Hood) – and undemanding one-off appearances in such series as White Hunter (1958) and The Avengers (1961 – as, all too predictably, ‘Elderly Gent’), but, at the beginning of 1968, the septuagenarian actor was still performing primarily because he could not afford not to. ‘He was another one who’d worked for me before,’ Croft recalled: