Dad's Army

by Graham McCann

  I should have known better. David Croft was a good producer. He and Jimmy Perry were and are brilliant writers; and good writing and good production are key factors in these matters.23

  The show had found another ally – and, in the weeks to come, it would need every one of them.

  The pilot episode was recorded (in black and white) on the evening of Monday, 15 April, in the relatively capacious Studio 4, Television Centre, before an audience of approximately 320 people. It seemed to go fairly well (as did the subsequent five episodes, which were rehearsed and recorded in sequence over the course of the following few weeks). Only John Le Mesurier, among the cast, appeared doubtful about how well the programme was progressing, but then the Eeyorish Le Mesurier (‘I worry about every new series, every new play. I worry whether people will tire of my face, even whether the car will start … ’)24 tended to appear doubtful about most things. ‘I remember seeing him one day in the bar at Television Centre,’ recalled his friend Barry Took:

  He was sitting there, having a drink, wearing this wartime outfit. I said to him, ‘What are you up to?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s a new series we’re doing for the BBC. About the Home Guard. It’s a disaster, my dear boy, I really can’t tell you, oh, it’s absolutely appalling, it can’t possibly work, no, no, my dear boy, it’s an absolute disaster!’ And I looked at him and thought, ‘I bet it isn’t!’ But that was Le Mez, that was his attitude – always thinking that the worst could happen.25

  It was not long, however, before other people associated with the programme began feeling less than sanguine about its prospects. Early in May, Paul Fox, the Controller of BBC1, viewed a tape of the pilot episode, and had misgivings about what he saw:

  The thing – the one thing – that I objected to was the title sequence. In that original version, the opening credits featured actual shots of refugees fleeing the German army in France and Belgium, and the closing credits also featured authentic war scenes. And I have to say I didn’t like that. At all. The reason I didn’t like it – you have to realise that I’d been brought up in factual television, in news and sport and then in current affairs – was that I was very much against this mixing of fact and fiction; film of actuality belongs to factual programmes and should not be used mischievously in comedy programmes. And I couldn’t understand why David and Michael [Mills] were so keen on including the sequence in Dad’s Army, because, to me, it seemed unnecessary, unfair, unrealistic and, well, silly, and as this was a comedy programme, and as there were plenty of people still around who’d been in the services and lived through that time, I did feel that one had to step just slightly carefully. I know it was only 15 or so seconds, and it was, let’s face it, a piddling matter, but in the end it became an issue of principle, really.26

  Fox was only doing his job – one of his responsibilities, as channel controller, was to anticipate the mood of the viewing public (as well, inevitably, as that of the press and various pressure groups), and judge which risks were (and which were not) worth running – but that was not quite how either David Croft or Michael Mills, in the heat of the moment, interpreted his intervention. ‘We were bloody annoyed,’ the normally equable Croft complained. ‘They were wonderful captions. They depicted all the massed forces of the Wehrmacht, and the tanks and all the rest of it, contrasted with the individually marching members of the Home Guard. That, to me, was what the show was all about, and, by objecting to it, Paul Fox, in our view, was just demonstrating that he had the opposite of the Midas touch as far as comedy was concerned.’27

  A meeting – attended by Croft, Mills, Tom Sloan and Bill Cotton – was hastily arranged and held in Paul Fox’s office. Everyone present, it seemed, had a different theory as to how the ‘piddling matter’ had been turned so quickly into ‘an issue of principle’. Bill Cotton believed that the catalyst had been Fox’s aversion, in those days, to all things German: ‘Paul had served in the war – in the Parachute Regiment – and he was Jewish, and he had a “reaction” against Germans. I mean, I once bought a German car, and Paul had said, “What are you driving that car for? It’s German!” But he really was very, very, disturbed about the idea of those credits. He took the line that, “If you think the war was funny, there are a lot of people around who don’t.”’28 Michael Mills, on the other hand, suspected that Fox’s background in Talks and News and Current Affairs under the redoubtable Grace Wyndham Goldie had made him unsympathetic both to the needs and ambitions of the Light Entertainment department in general and of Comedy in particular. Fox himself, in turn, sensed that Mills was using the disagreement as an excuse to undermine the authority of a controller who had only been promoted to the position a few months previously:

  It was a test, I think. I mean, I’d only just arrived, I’d barely bedded down, and Michael was quite keen to test the new controller. Let’s not kid ourselves: Michael had that sort of rebellious nature – he loved a fight – and I’m sure he thought to himself, ‘I know that these credits are a good idea. I’m Head of Comedy. Why is this silly bugger on the 6th floor trying to stop me from doing it?’ So there was a bit of that. And it was a pretty heated meeting. Don’t forget I was on my own: here were four guys from Light Entertainment, making a case for keeping these credits, and there was I, keen to prevent the programme from setting a bad example. And in the end, somebody had to win.29

  In the end, Paul Fox won. ‘Tom Sloan caved in,’ claimed Croft. ‘Just when it looked as if Paul was prepared to agree to let me keep my captions, Tom said, “Well, on the other hand, of course, if you’re not happy, Paul, we won’t do it”, and he just sort of surrendered, having won the argument.’30 Bill Cotton was not surprised: ‘Paul is basically bullish – with a small “b”, if you know what I mean. I don’t mean it in a bad way, but in order to get his own way he would try to create an atmosphere in which people wouldn’t argue with him. You’d end up having to just laugh and get on with it.’31

  David Croft and Michael Mills got on with it, but neither man felt like laughing. Mills wrote a bitter note to Fox on 23 May, not only acknowledging that the offending shots would, as requested, be ‘replaced by something entirely innocuous’, but also registering his ‘profound disquiet’ over the decision:

  The whole object of this comedy series is to contrast the pathetic, comic, but valorous nature of the Home Guard, who believed at the time that this (the Nazi hordes) was what they were up against. It seems to me to be not only right but essential that this fact is brought home to the viewers – and it is, surely, our justification for doing a comedy programme on this subject.

  Looking, as I do, at the abrasive nature of some of the output of other departments in the BBC television service I cannot help wondering whether we, in the Comedy department, are controlled by different standards, i.e. clowns must stay clowns.

  In any case this decision cannot help but have a depressing effect upon me and upon some other people working in this department. The thought that other departments in television are allowed to advance their output into new areas, while we, apparently, are not, can only have a bad effect in the long run.32

  Fox replied four days later, rejecting the suggestion that the Comedy department was being held back from dealing with ‘abrasive’ subject matter – ‘From the department that produced Till Death’, noted Fox, ‘that’s pretty rich’33 (indeed, it would soon seem even richer, as both the strikingly free-form Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the notoriously saucy Up Pompeii! would reach the screen during the following year)34 – and questioning the extent to which Dad’s Army really was ‘breakthrough territory’.35 Fox advised Mills that ‘it would be more profitable to continue our discussion from two armchairs’,36 but Mills continued to brood over the matter while a crestfallen David Croft supervised the creation of a new set of titles: an animated opening sequence (designed by Colin Whitaker), featuring a union flag and a swastika facing up to each other from opposite sides of the Channel, and a closing sequence, featuring shots of the principal members of the ca
st guarding over the English countryside.

  Little, if any, lasting damage (aesthetic or dramatic) was done by the enforced changes, except, perhaps, to the amour propre of Mills and Croft37 – and one could, in fact, contend that the title sequence was more apt and effective without either the dubious use of images of real wartime suffering and the visual representation of an enemy who, after all, was never actually encountered. It is not difficult, however, to sympathise with Croft’s exasperation at the immediate disruption these revisions caused to his pilot episode:

  It was a mess. Someone – I can’t remember who, it could have been Tom [Sloan] – suggested that, in order to reassure viewers that the show wasn’t going to be sending up our finest hour, we should add a ‘prologue’, showing the characters in the present day [1968] supporting the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign. So now the first episode looked as if it started three times: first with the prologue, then with the credits, and then with the E. V. H. Emmett newsreel-style clippings. In other words – a real dog’s dinner. But at least it got the show on the air.38

  There was, however, still one more ordeal to endure before the show was finally able to go on air, and that was the preview. ‘Oh dear,’ sighed Jimmy Perry. ‘Oh dear!’39 The pilot episode was previewed on three consecutive evenings at Television Centre. David Croft recalled what happened:

  We showed it to about three different audiences of about 150 people, and they were stopped from talking to each other. It was a Swedish lady [Kathryn Ernst], I think, who ran the sessions, and she had distributed questionnaires for them to answer and tick off and so on. She wouldn’t let anyone discuss it until they had written all of their opinions down, and then it was thrown open to discussion. Well, they didn’t like it. They didn’t like it at all. People said things like: ‘Why do we still have to have these things about the war?’ and, ‘Don’t the authors know the war’s over?’ and, ‘We’ve seen quite enough of this!’ I think the best comment we got was, ‘I quite liked it,’ from one sleepy gentleman.40

  Jimmy Perry, who attended each session alongside his co-writer, could only suffer in silence. ‘You kept hearing the same thing,’ he said. ‘“Rubbish!”, “Don’t like it!”, you know, and this went on for three nights, and I was dying!’41 Eventually, the results were all collated and a report was sent directly to David Croft:

  I don’t know whether Tom Sloan saw it as well. Perhaps he did. It had been his idea in the first place. He’d said: ‘Look, we’ve got this organisation [the Audience Research Department], why don’t we bloody well use it?’ Well, we did. I never heard of them using it again! Anyway, it was not a good report – if people had heard about it there probably wouldn’t have been a second series – so I’m afraid I suppressed the evidence and we went ahead just the same.42

  Paul Fox scheduled the opening episode to go out on BBC1 on Wednesday, 31 July, at 8.20 p.m., and, in keeping with BBC Light Entertainment policy, the critics were denied a preview screening. ‘There were two basic reasons for that,’ explained Bill Cotton:

  First of all, we believed that it was important that one saw a new show at home, in the evening, in a domestic environment, with all the usual distractions – the telephone ringing, little conversations, people coming and going, the cat and the dog, all those things – instead of seeing it at eight o’clock in the morning – which is not the best time to see comedy anyway – on your own or in a small group, and possibly nursing a hangover. We didn’t want people to be led into a reaction by a critic; we wanted them to come to their own conclusions. Secondly, we didn’t see any reason why we should make it easier for the critics to clobber us!43

  Viewers, however, did receive a friendly nudge in the show’s direction from the Radio Times:

  Dad’s Army will bring memories flooding back for anyone who remembers the days of Dunkirk. It may even – as producer David Croft says – ‘make father’s wartime reminiscing respectable’.

  But although Dad’s Army is set firmly in wartime – the fun itself is timeless. Why not join the little community of Walmington on Wednesday as they face a probable invasion … and decide to answer the call?44

  Fortune seemed to be favouring the show as the day of its debut arrived. A bitter and chaotic ongoing dispute between the contractually-reconstituted ITV companies and the Association of Cinematography, Television and Allied Technicians Union (ACTT)45 was playing havoc with ITV’s schedules: the union (which was not recognised by the BBC) had begun by blanking out the screen during advertisements, losing the ITV companies around £50,000 each night in revenue, and had then progressed to pulling the plug on a number of programmes as well. Audiences, as a consequence, were being driven over to the ‘other side’: ‘We usually watch the commercial channel and hardly ever switch over,’ complained one viewer, ‘but with the strikes and my favourite programmes like Coronation Street going off, we have been forced to watch BBC.’46 According to one newspaper poll, 62 per cent of the viewing public was watching ‘more BBC programmes than usual’.47 Dad’s Army, it appeared, was about to find itself in the right place at the right time.

  One or two of the cast and crew – such as Bill Pertwee – were working on that warm Wednesday evening when the show first went out, but most had settled down in front of their television sets to watch the world of Walmington-on-Sea finally reach the screen. ‘I’d been in the most terrible state all day long,’ Jimmy Perry revealed. ‘We’d made all six shows by then of course, and I’d thought, “Well, it’s quite good”, but you never know how a sit-com’s going to be received, so I was nervous.’48 At 8.19 p.m., another episode of the popular western series The Virginian came to an end, and then, as a familiar revolving black-and-white globe appeared, a sombre male voice announced, ‘This is BBC1’, and, all of a sudden, there they were – Mainwaring, Wilson and all the rest of them – starting after they had finished, in 1968, with the announcement of a speech from ‘a man of many parts – banker, soldier, magistrate, alderman and secretary of the rotary club – a good fellow all round’: George Mainwaring. Rising proudly to his feet in front of a large union flag, this round little man began:

  Mr Chairman, Mr Town Clerk, ladies and gentlemen. When I was first invited to be guest of honour tonight at the launching of Walmington-on-Sea’s ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign, I accepted without hesitation. After all, I have always backed Britain. I got into the habit of it in 1940, but then we all backed Britain. It was the darkest hour in our history: the odds were absurdly against us, but, young and old, we stood there, defiant, determined to survive, to recover and, finally, to win! The news was desperate, but our spirits were always high.49

  The picture dissolved, the credits ran, Bud Flanagan sang the theme song, and then the E. V. H. Emmett-narrated ‘newsreel’ transported the audience back to the May of 1940. ‘The massive Nazi war machine is pushing its way across Europe,’ boomed Emmett as the screen filled with archival images of German tanks moving inexorably through virgin cornfields, ‘laying waste neutral countries with a savagery unmatched in history.’ Brave-looking British soldiers were pictured, and Churchill was shown inspecting the troops – ‘Is Tommy Atkins downhearted? We’ll say he’s not! Why should he be, with a leader like this?’ – followed by freshly filmed footage of the soon-to-be members of the LDV – Jones altering the direction of a road sign, Frazer sharpening the point of a wooden stick – and ending with the defiant declaration, ‘So look out, Adolf! Every day our defences are strengthened! And, if they do come, let’s give them a sharp word!’ The sound of an ‘all-clear’ siren followed, accompanied by an establishing shot of the brightly polished front door of Swallow Bank, and then, inside, the camera caught sight of Mainwaring, standing by the window, smiling triumphantly to himself as the enemy planes departed. ‘Ah!’ he barked. ‘Going home, are they?’ The story, at last, had begun.

  No time, from now on, was wasted, and everything flowed. One by one, each theme, each character, each connection, was introduced and established with rare speed an
d ease. Mainwaring, for example, sparked off the class struggle more or less immediately by boasting that he held a commission and had served in the last war:

  WILSON Somewhere in the Orkneys, wasn’t it, sir?

  MAINWARING I was a commissioned officer, Wilson, and I served in France. During the whole of 1919.

  WILSON Yes, but the war ended in 1918, I thought, sir.

  MAINWARING Well, somebody had to clear up the mess!

  WILSON Oh, yes, of course.

  MAINWARING Where were you during the war?

  WILSON Oh, Mons, Gallipoli, Passchendaele – I was a sergeant in the RA, sir.

  MAINWARING Oh, never mind that!

  Wilson, in turn, sparked off the war of dispositions by issuing a decidedly limp introduction to the first group of volunteers:

  WILSON Would you, er, would you mind stepping this way, please?

  MAINWARING Wilson! Come here, come here! I intend to mould those men out there into an aggressive fighting unit. I’m going to lead them, command them, inspire them, to be ruthless killers. And I’m not going to get very far if you’re going to invite them to ‘step this way’, am I? ‘Quick march’ is the order!

  Frazer soon underlined his impudence:

  MAINWARING Occupation?

  FRAZER I keep a philatelist’s shop.

  MAINWARING How do you spell that?

  FRAZER ‘S-H-O-P.’

  MAINWARING ‘S-H-’ Ah! Thank you very much. I imagine you’ve not had any previous Army experience?

  FRAZER No. None at all.

  MAINWARING No. We can usually tell, can’t we, sergeant?

  WILSON Yes, we can, sir.

  MAINWARING Once a soldier, always a soldier.