A Croft and Perry script was there to be read, not revised. ‘Oh, they all wanted to change it,’ Perry said of the actors. ‘Of course they did. But that was something we would never tolerate. We had great strength, David and I, and we never tolerated any actor changing the lines. Mind you, there were some tough old pros among them, I can tell you, and they were good, they were smart – they’d try to separate David and me, get in between us, you know, but it never worked. We stuck together.’28 One reason why the writers saw no reason for revisions was the fact that so much of each script – the scenes, the lines, the attitudes and the actions – had been shaped to suit the strengths, and the weaknesses, of each individual member of the cast. ‘It wasn’t a case of them bringing themselves more and more to the characters,’ Croft explained. ‘It was a case of us writing the characters more and more towards their own personalities. As soon as you’ve got the actors – got to know them – then you can adapt the material to match the way they act and react.’29
Not all of the actors bore a particularly close family resemblance to the characters that they portrayed – Ian Lavender, for example, may have been the least experienced member of the cast, but he was no ‘stupid boy’; Clive Dunn did tend to panic sometimes, but, unlike his chronically respectful alter ego, his sympathies were firmly on the side of the socialists; Bill Pertwee was as pleasant and popular as the horrible Hodges was loutish and loathed; and Arnold Ridley (in spite of the fact that well-meaning assistants went to great lengths to assign him a dressing room within easy reach of the lavatory) was not incontinent – but in some cases the similarities were much too pronounced to be missed. John Le Mesurier, for example, was more than happy to blend in with Wilson’s air of lazy elegance. James Beck had all of Walker’s charm, and more than a little of his cheek. John Laurie, according to Jimmy Perry, was ‘just like’ Frazer: ‘He’d start work on each programme muttering, “I’m worried about this one, laddie, I don’t know if it’s going tae work”, and then he’d end it by saying, “Well, I never doubted that it would be all right!”’30 Arthur Lowe, perversely, used to solemnly insist that ‘there was nothing of my own personality in Mainwaring’31 – a claim that, as David Croft confirmed, caused many a jaw to drop: ‘Arthur was enormously like Mainwaring. No doubt about it at all. And Jimmy and I took all kinds of things from his own personality and wrote them into the part. Somehow, he never seemed to notice.’32
No one, not even his closest friends and family, denied that Lowe was indeed a somewhat pompous little man. ‘He was very conscious of his position,’ Ian Lavender recalled. ‘He saw himself as the senior man on the set, the leader of the cast as well as the captain of the platoon.’33 Clive Dunn was not alone in thinking of Lowe as ‘a true blue Conservative’ – ‘They should take them out and shoot a few,’ he once said of some striking dustmen, ‘that would teach the monkeys’34 – and he was certainly something of a snob – ‘He’s not our sort,’ he once said dismissively of Dunn, ‘he’s Variety, you know.’35 He was also rather prudish: the topic of trousers (the removal of) was guaranteed to get him hurriedly tut-tutting. ‘Trousers are very personal things, you know,’ Croft and Perry had Mainwaring say during one episode. ‘Not to be bandied about.’36 Lowe, they knew, agreed wholeheartedly with such a sentiment. Anything to do with the dropping, losing or doing without of the full set of conventional nether garments was deemed by Lowe to be far too suggestive and therefore completely unacceptable. He felt so strongly about this subject, recalled David Croft, that he ended up insisting upon the insertion of a clause in his contract which forbade his employers from forcing him to go trouserless in public:
That came about when we were making the film [in 1970]. Jimmy made the mistake of telling Arthur about this idea he had to denote the passage of time between the formation of the platoon and its emergence as more of a coherent unit. He saw them marching along as a mob, you know, and then gradually their clothes would come off – they’d be marching in their long johns – and then the uniforms would go on. So he told Arthur about this and how hilarious it was going to be – Jimmy had a habit of telling people ahead of time about how hilarious certain features were going to be – and Arthur, of course, got straight on to his agent [Peter Campbell] and said, ‘I’m not going to do that!’ And so he actually had it put into his contract – that he would not be required to remove his trousers! Why he was so sensitive, I don’t know, but that was Arthur – very much like Mainwaring.37
Preparations for the second series went well. The writers were more comfortable with the actors, and the actors were more comfortable not only with their roles but also with each other; the world of Walmington-on-Sea now seemed more familiar, more convincing, more real, on both sides of the camera. Rehearsals, however, were not without their problems. ‘One of our big worries,’ said Jimmy Perry, ‘was Arthur Lowe. Although when it came to the recording in the studio he was magnificent, it was a struggle to get him to learn his lines during rehearsals.’38 There was always the danger that the innumerable delays and diversions caused by Lowe’s generally limp grasp of the script could have created serious tensions within the cast, but, according to Ian Lavender, the other actors were unusually understanding:
It wasn’t off-putting as such. Arthur did seem only to learn it on the rehearsal room floor, but it wasn’t exactly an onerous process. It wasn’t that long, for heaven’s sake. We were rehearsing 27 minutes, split up between all the actors, so no one had really huge chunks of dialogue to work on. But yes, an awful lot of time was spent whilst Arthur learnt his lines. If you didn’t like Arthur, or you didn’t like the end result, you would’ve resented it, but that was the way Arthur worked, and the end result was worth it.39
It hardly helped, however, that an unrepentant Lowe made a point of declining to take his script home with him – ‘Oh, I’m not having that rubbish in the house!’40 – and never seemed aware of the chaos that he was causing. ‘I remember one time,’ said Lavender, ‘when I thought we’d never finish the scene’:
It was in this episode [‘Everybody’s Trucking’] where Mainwaring had to inspect Jones’ van, and, every time he’d put his hand or foot on some part of it, something fell off. Now, this had to be planned very carefully, because there weren’t miniature cameras or anything wireless like that in those days [to enable a member of the crew to see when to trigger the ‘accidents’], so it all had to be done on word cues. When Mainwaring said so-and-so, the running board falls off. When he said so-and-so, the headlight falls off. And so on. Well, there was Arthur, not exactly ad-libbing but slightly fluffing his lines, and bits of the van were falling off without him being anywhere near them. The guys [in the crew] were going, ‘Er, that’s the word – off!’ And there was Arthur, still searching for a word, some distance away from the bit that had just dropped off. So it all had to be done over and over again. It was mayhem!41
David Croft, who was left to cover up the mess, probably had most cause, most often, to feel exasperated:
He never got any better. A lot of those hesitations that you see on the screen are actually Arthur thinking to himself, ‘What the hell am I supposed to say next?’ Sometimes, of course, that sort of thing helps an actor, because it means that the thought process has to be there – you know, if an actor knows the part inside out they can be inclined to push the line in too quickly, whereas if there’s a slight hesitation, although it’s only a fraction of a second, it’s an important fraction. So sometimes it worked to our advantage. On the other hand, he did paraphrase some very good lines; we didn’t get quite what we wanted and there was no hope of doing a re-take once the line had gone. So it could be very frustrating.
John Le Mesurier was quite different from Arthur in that respect. He had a photographic memory – he used to say, ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, it’s on top of page 82’, and he could ‘see’ the picture, see the page. And he was always in rehearsal a quarter of an hour before we started, and he always knew his part. Quite extraordinary.
Arthur just wouldn’t take away his script. He always kept it in a desk in the rehearsal room. I think his problem was that during his days in repertory he’d had a more or less photographic memory and later on it had begun to fail him. So he didn’t realise that he needed to actually get down and study the part. John Le Mesurier would call me and say, ‘Can’t you get him to learn the bloody thing?’ So I started sending him two copies of the script. I told him, ‘You can leave one in the rehearsal room and perhaps you’d like to place the other one under your pillow in the hope that some of it will percolate through the feathers during the night!’ But all he did was go up to Jimmy and say, ‘David seems to be in a foul mood these days. What do you think caused it?’42
Croft forgave him, just like everyone else forgave him, because of the innumerable occasions when he did everything right, and made an unfunny line seem funny, or a funny line seem even funnier, with a sublime piece of timing, or a sly arch of an eyebrow, or a sudden gasp of indignation, or some other smart little technical trick that only the finest kind of comedy actor could execute without the slightest sign of effort. He was good, and that made up for everything.
Quality was what counted. Everything about the show – not just the script and the acting, but also the sound and the images – had to be of the highest possible standard. The choice of studio, for example, was, as David Croft explained, always an important consideration:
We tried, whenever possible, to avoid the big studios [at Television Centre]. Studio 1, for example, was massive – you could get lost in there. Also, in those days, there were no curtains around the audience to contain them – I had to introduce that – and they were not lit at all; they were in a dark limbo, like a sort of operating theatre, really. And we had enormous problems getting the right balance between the position of the microphones over the audience and the speakers. I did a lot of work with the sound engineers to get that balance right, because it’s a very tricky thing: if you had a good sound engineer – and we had [from the third series onwards] a great one, Mike McCarthy – he would understand where the laughs were and wind up the microphones, because you can’t have them up all the time – you’d get echoes. That sort of thing actually makes a real difference to how a show comes across on the television.43
Croft also ensured that the camera captured the essence of the comedy:
In those days, the picture wasn’t all that big, and so therefore you needed your close-ups. The art of direction involved choosing which shot to draw the attention of the audience to. You had to know where the laugh was. You had to study the scene in rehearsal, look at the person giving the feed-line, and the person giving the reply, and the person giving their reaction to the reply, and see where the funny bit was. Some quite good stuff goes down the drain in some shows because the director misses the reaction to a line. You have to be aware of all of that.44
The stop-start nature of the recording process meant that a good ‘warm-up man’ was invaluable, and, in the case of Dad’s Army, that task fell to an ‘insider’ – Bill Pertwee:
Arthur Lowe had been pretty insistent, for some reason, on me doing the warm-ups, so, after the first few [shows], I came in and did practically the whole lot. The only times I didn’t were when I had a bigger than usual part in the actual show, which would have made it difficult for me to keep switching backwards and forwards between being the nasty guy [warden Hodges] in a scene to being the nice guy with the audience saying ‘How are you?’ and telling jokes during the breaks. It was okay when I only had a couple of scenes. I could climb out of the role and say, ‘I hope you’re enjoying it. We’ve got a bit more of a break here’, then I’d tell them a gag or whatever it might be and then climb back into the role. It didn’t bother me. One had to keep the audience happy.45
When it came to the scenes themselves, Clive Dunn remembered, the crafty veteran actors knew precisely how to charm their way out of the occasional slip-up: ‘Sometimes the highly temperamental John [Laurie] would fluff his lines … Then he would run to the audience with his lean arms outspread and say in broad Scots, “Y’see, ladies and gentlemen, why ah’m given a small part. Ah cannie even remember the simplest thing, ahm such a silly auld sod.” The audience would cheer him on, and in a now charged atmosphere John would have another go and get it right.’46
David Croft had hoped to revert to his original title sequence for the start of the second series, but Michael Mills advised him that neither Tom Sloan nor Paul Fox was likely to countenance such a switch: ‘Their argument – incontrovertible, without being rude to them – is that “it’s a success as it was, so why change it?”’47 The scene-setting ‘newsreels’, however, were dispensed with, and the structure of the series was made a little more flexible than before (with the emphasis switching from the evolution of the Home Guard to the development of the individual characters), but otherwise the format remained the same. It was unfortunate, however, that the second series more or less coincided with the brief but destructive period at the BBC when, as part of an ill-conceived cost-cutting exercise, all but a few Light Entertainment shows were wiped after being broadcast so that the videotape could be reused. ‘One of the factors which [normally] helped to save my programmes from destruction,’ commented David Croft, ‘was that I was on the staff and, therefore, always present when a piece of paper came round requiring a producer’s agreement for a show to be wiped. I always contrived to withhold consent. I can only conclude that when the necessary form appeared for these six programmes I must have been on holiday.’48 Only one episode – ‘Sgt Wilson’s Little Secret’ – was thought, initially, to have survived the subsequent carnage (copies of two more would be uncovered more than thirty years later),49 but it appears, on the evidence both of the scripts and the record of contemporary reactions, that the series picked up rather neatly where its predecessor had left off. Episode 1 (‘Operation Kilt’) saw the platoon commence the long and arduous process of semi-professionalisation (fifteen minutes of PT before parade and a testing sequence of Regular Army-style training exercises), while Episode 6 (‘Under Fire’) focused on the anxious watch for incendiary bombs. The episodes in between tended to centre on particular characters and relationships: there was one on Godfrey along with his two sisters, Dolly – ‘Charles, dear, it’s that nice bank manager, Mr Mainwaring. He’s got a big gun with him’ – and Cissy – ‘Have a little word with that nice Mr Walker tonight, will you Charles? We need some more chocolate drops’; one on Jones – ‘Ah, a competition like. Well, that seems fair, don’t it, Mr Frazer?’ – and Frazer – ‘It will be if you stop bribing them with steak’; one on the awkward ménage à trois of Wilson, Mrs Pike – ‘He does look pale, doesn’t he, Frank?’ – and her curiously fatherless son – ‘You know what they say, Mum: pale and passionate!’; and one on Walker and the rest of the platoon – ‘Walker is just one of millions … but to us he’s an important counterstone in our organisation!’. Three of the shows were directed by Croft’s very able assistant, Harold Snoad, but both the tone and the style remained constant.
The opening episode – broadcast on 1 March 1969 in the more high profile slot of 7 p.m. on a Saturday – was seen by 13,887,500 people: about 6.5 million more than had watched the competing programmes on ITV, and over four million more than had seen the final show of the previous series.50 ‘[I]f this was a sample of what was to come,’ the BBC’s Audience Report declared, the viewers ‘were in for a real treat.’51 The prediction, it seems, was proven right: subsequent episodes attracted similarly sized audiences (the average was 12.2 million), and similarly positive responses.52 The final episode – broadcast on 5 April 1969 – received a particularly enthusiastic internal report: ‘Over two-thirds of [the sample audience] again found themselves laughing “immoderately and out loud” at these characters and their antics which, although larger than life, were basically so true to the spirit of the Home Guard’, with some viewers adding that ‘their youngsters wouldn’t miss it for anything!’, and the ‘majority … des
cribed [Dad’s Army] as the “best current comedy series on either channel”’.53 Both the cast and the crew were in Norfolk at the time, shooting external sequences for the next set of shows, and Bill Cotton travelled down to congratulate the entire team on its current success: ‘It was just a little gesture,’ he said, ‘to let everyone know they were being properly appreciated.’54
The message got through. The work that followed was more confident, more ambitious, more assured than before. The third series, the first to be broadcast in colour, was notable both for the length of its run – fourteen weeks rather than the usual six – and the depth of its characterisations. Mainwaring became bolder, but also more vulnerable; Wilson was a little less submissive, and, in his own sly way, slightly more sardonic; Frazer, who would soon be securely ensconced as the town’s undertaker, grew even spikier, as well as – thanks to all of those candle-lit tales of the countless terrible ways to die on and around the gloomy Isle of Barra – spookier; Godfrey was frailer than ever and, once his rifle had been replaced with a first-aid kit, more sleepily pacific; Walker’s rough diamond seemed to have received a furtive little polish, and Jones was still Jones, only more so. A more prominent role for the remorselessly crude (but newly promoted) chief ARP warden Hodges ensured that Mainwaring’s social pretensions would from now on be under fire not only from above but also from below, and his patience on parade was set to be strained even further by the introduction of two more irregular irritants: the vicar and the verger.
Frank Williams – best known to viewers in those days for his long-running role as the dithering Captain Pocket in The Army Game – was cast as the fussy and epicene Revd Timothy Farthing, while Edward Sinclair, yet another Croft original, was invited back to play the part of the permanently gurning Maurice Yeatman. ‘I’d worked for Jimmy Perry before [in Watford rep],’ Williams recalled, ‘and I’d also done a couple of episodes of Hugh and I for David Croft, but when I first came into [Dad’s Army] I thought it was just going to be for one episode.’55 Right from the start, however, it was clear that there was a real rapport between Williams – a bright, gregarious, genuinely religious Londoner – and Sinclair – a somewhat reserved and rather studious Mancunian – as well as an obvious comic bond between their on-screen characters. ‘Teddy and I got on so well together,’ Williams remembered. ‘We became very close friends. In fact, socially, Bill [Pertwee], Teddy and myself developed into something of a trio, just like, in the show, the warden, verger and vicar teamed up to provide Mainwaring and the Home Guard with a sense of conflict.’56
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