Croft visited Perry in his flat in Westminster, Perry visited Croft in his house in Notting Hill; ideas were exchanged, possible plots roughed out, a few comic lines devised, and then each man withdrew to work on the script alone. The collaboration seemed to work, their methods seemed to mesh: Croft was cool, calm and clear-headed, Perry was warm, lively and enthusiastic; Croft could sit back and visualise entire scenes, Perry could leap up and perform particular routines; Croft was a master of ensemble comedy, Perry a connoisseur of comic turns; Croft had a sharp eye for the telling detail, Perry had a keen ear for the serviceable phrase; neither man was too proud to learn from the other, both men were determined to succeed. They had, they soon realised, much more in common than at first they had thought. Both men had fallen in love with the world of entertainment at a very early age (Croft’s parents, Reginald Sharland and Ann Croft, had been stars of the British theatre during the 1920s and 1930s, and the baby David had slept in a prop basket backstage; Perry, thanks to his mother, had visited most of the cinemas, theatres and music-halls in and around London before his childhood was complete). Both had attended a distinguished public school (Croft Rugby, Perry St Paul’s), and both had departed prematurely (Croft because the money ran out, Perry because he ‘was tired of being thrashed’).51 Both had seen the Home Guard in action at first-hand (Croft as an air-raid warden, Perry as an enthusiastic volunteer) and had gone on to join the Royal Artillery (Croft served in North Africa, India and Singapore, becoming a major at twenty-three, and was on the verge of being made a lieutenant-colonel when he ended the war on General Montgomery’s staff in the War Office; Perry served in the Far East, where he rose to the rank of sergeant and became the life and soul of the concert party). Both had been singers (Croft a tenor, Perry a baritone) and actors (Croft starting out as the butcher’s boy in the 1938 movie Goodbye, Mr Chips, Perry in the 1952 Anna Neagle vehicle The Glorious Days); both had worked in holiday camps (Croft as a producer, Perry as a Redcoat); and both had married women from within showbusiness. Both enjoyed fine wines, classic movies and great comedy, and both had the same motto: ‘Never take no for an answer.’52
They wrote quickly but carefully. A good pilot script, they appreciated, was an introduction, not an imposition; it needed to appear familiar without appearing false, to intrigue without seeming to intrude, to inform without straining to educate. In the space of half an hour, the pilot episode would have to set the right tone, establish the essential situation, adumbrate the key characters, touch on some special central tension, nod at its probable causes, wink at its possible consequences, and, last but by no means least, entertain a curious but uncommitted audience sufficiently to make it want to come back for more. It was not a task for either the faint-hearted or the foolhardy, and countless talented writers before Croft and Perry had tried to come to terms with it and failed. Nevertheless, through a combination of courage and prudence, the two men came up with a creation that seemed as if it might, with a little luck, serve each of their multiple needs.
The first episode of Dad’s Army, they had decided, would mirror the real-life sequence of events that began on Tuesday, 14 May 1940, with Anthony Eden’s announcement of plans for the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers, and continued with the frantic rush to enrol and the scramble to establish some kind of broadly recognisable hierarchy. With only the minimum exercise of artistic licence – the timing of Eden’s announcement was brought forward to a brighter, more television-friendly hour – this structure allowed each character to be introduced to the audience simply as a matter of course. George Mainwaring, Arthur Wilson and Frank Pike (the ‘pompous man – passive man – young boy’ comic triangle replacing Perry’s earlier arrangement) would hear the radio broadcast inside the Walmington-on-Sea branch of Swallow53 Bank; Mainwaring would assert his authority (‘Times of peril always bring great men to the fore … ’), and then, later that day, the action would shift to the inside of the church hall, and the arrival of the first few volunteers – Frazer, the fierce-looking Scotsman; Godfrey, the genial old gent; Walker, the cheeky spiv; Jones, the eager veteran; and Bracewell, the sweet-natured, wing-collared, bow-tied toff – as well as the rude intervention of a brash, bumptious ARP warden and an officious little fire chief. It was an eminently productive pilot script: lean and energetic (the only character who is allowed to sit down, and then only briefly, is Mainwaring: first to read out an important message from the War Office, and later to write down the names of the new recruits); informative (a remarkable number of historically-accurate facts, relating to the LDV’s chaotic formation, are woven neatly into the narrative); socially suggestive (with a bank manager exploiting his position, a chief clerk exploiting his good looks, a butcher exploiting the demand for rationed meat and a ‘wholesale supplier’ exploiting the demand for everything else); and, unlike many opening episodes, encouragingly funny.
The right idea really had come to fruition. On 4 October 1967, Michael Mills not only confirmed that the pilot script had been accepted, but also announced that he was ready to commission an initial series of six programmes (‘with an option for a further six’).54 On 25 November, Croft and Perry signed the contract and committed themselves to Dad’s Army.55 They were ready: ready for their finest half-hour. Now all that was needed was a cast.
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
MAINWARING Fine body of men, sergeant, aren’t they?
WILSON Yes. Awfully nice.
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 – bu
t 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 Broa
dway 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.
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