Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. Graham McCann
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LARRY GELBART
It all began, in another way, one day back in the summer of 1967. Shortly before 11.30 in the morning, at the end of May, Jimmy Perry, a 42-year-old actor, was strolling through St James’s Park when, in the distance, he heard the sound of the band playing for the Changing of the Guards. As he drew nearer, he could make out the rows of marching men, smart and sharp in their striking scarlet tunics and their towering bearskin hats. He stopped and watched. The longer he looked, however, the more vivid, in his mind’s eye, seemed a scene from twenty-six years before, when, as a youth, he had stood in much the same place at much the same time and surveyed the rows of oddly shaped, drably dressed men marching rather less neatly but rather more proudly outside Buckingham Palace on behalf of Britain’s Home Guard. It made for quite a contrast. It gave him an idea.
Jimmy Perry had been searching for an idea, the right idea, for some time. His career, so far, had been pleasantly varied. There had been concert parties and Gang Shows during wartime, followed by RADA, Butlins, repertory companies, and nine absorbing years (in partnership with his wife, Gilda) as actor-manager of the Palace Theatre, Watford. His current activity, as a member of Joan Littlewood’s left-wing Theatre Workshop in the east London surburb of Stratford, was providing him with plenty of challenges (such as portraying Bobby Kennedy in Barbara Garson’s US political satire MacBird, and then moving straight on to a role in Vanbrugh’s Restoration comedy The Provok’d Wife), but, nonetheless, he still felt unfulfilled. ‘I was doing all right,’ he recalled, ‘I was earning a living, but, you know, I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. So let’s say I was looking at that point to really establish myself.’3
Although the stage remained, in many ways, his natural habitat – he cherished its traditions and relished its immediacy – he recognised that television, with its massive audience and prodigious output, now represented his best chance to advance. Finding a foothold in the medium was, however, far from easy: in spite of the fact that Perry had already made several small-screen appearances over the course of the previous two years, he was no nearer than ever to making his mark. ‘I needed to get noticed,’ he recalled. ‘I’d been in situation-comedies and bits and pieces, but I was still waiting for the role that would let me show people what I could do. Then one day I thought to myself: “I must have a decent part. I know what – I’ll write my own sit-com, and I’ll write a really good part in it for me!”’4 Writing, at that stage, was regarded purely as a means, not an end. ‘I had no ambition to be a writer. None at all. Writing is hard – acting is blooming easy! I just wanted to establish myself as a performer, an actor, and the only way I thought I could do that was by pushing myself from the writing side.’5
It needed a sharp idea, however, to spark the strategy into life. ‘Nothing came to begin with,’ Perry admitted. ‘I’d written bits of stuff before, but not really much, and I didn’t know what I was going to write about. I just knew I wanted to write a sit-com with a nice part for myself! So I looked, I thought, I looked, I thought.’6 Then came that summer stroll through St James’s Park, and the sight of the soldiers, and the memory of the Home Guard. Perry had been in the Home Guard himself, in the 19th Hertfordshire Battalion, at the age of fifteen. ‘My mother was always fearful of me being out at night and catching cold, but I loved it.’7 Suddenly, all of the old incidents and images came tumbling back into consciousness: the late arrival of the ill-fitting uniform, the odd weapons (wire cheese-cutters, sharpened bicycle chains), the commanding officer who concluded each parade by waving his revolver in the air and shouting, ‘Kill Germans!’, the elderly lance corporal who continually reminisced about fighting for General Kitchener against the ‘Fuzzy Wuzzies’, the long, rambling lectures on how to tackle tanks with burning blankets, the Blimps, the booze-ups, the banter and the bravery. ‘To be alive at that time,’ he reflected, ‘was to experience the British people at their best and at perhaps the greatest moment in their history.’8
Then the idea struck him: ‘The Home Guard! What an idea for a situation-comedy!’9 As he made his way back to his flat in Morpeth Terrace, he started to assess the idea in his mind:
I broke it down. I thought to myself: well, it was important that I wrote about something I’d experienced and understood; and service things are always funny, always popular; and there was that thing about reluctant heroes, you know, people who were civilians in the daytime and part-time soldiers at night; and there was that whole background to it, and the attitude of the British people at that time; and no one had done the Home Guard before, no one had tackled the subject; and I was to be in it. That’s how it started.10
Later that day, during his regular train journey from Victoria to Stratford East, he took out his notebook and scribbled down some ideas. Research began in earnest the following morning:
I thought I’d better brush up on my facts, so I went to the Westminster public library and looked through all of the shelves: nothing, not a single book on the subject. Then I asked a young librarian if she could help me: ‘The Home Guard?’ she said. ‘Never heard of it.’ Astonishing. So I moved on to the Imperial War Museum, and they did have some Home Guard training pamphlets, a couple of memoirs, that sort of thing. But apart from that there was nothing – no reference to it anywhere. The public had forgotten about the Home Guard, and I thought it was time they were reminded of it.11
Devising a basic storyline did not pose the novice scriptwriter too great a problem. ‘Don’t forget I’d run Watford Rep with my wife for nine years, and we did over six hundred plays. I regarded that as my apprenticeship. If you do a fresh play every week, year after year, boy oh boy, do you know how to move actors about. That’s how I learnt my craft. Probably few other writers have had that opportunity, and I like to think that it helped me considerably.’12 His own wartime memories had enabled him to sketch out the situation, but the focus for the comedy was suggested by a 1937 English movie:
I’d been asking myself: ‘Now, what am I going to do with this? What sort of comedy set-up?’ And that Sunday afternoon, showing on television, was Oh! Mr Porter, with Will Hay, Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt – the pompous man, the old man and the boy. And the movie’s great strength was the wonderful balance of these three characters. So I thought, ‘That’s it: pompous man, old man, young boy!’13
It took him just three days, from start to finish, to write the script. It was called The Fighting Tigers. He put it in the drawer of his desk and went back to work: ‘I just didn’t know who to show it to.’14
Early in July, during a break in the Theatre Workshop’s run, came a stroke of good fortune. Perry’s agent, Ann Callender, called with news of a small but eye-catching role in an episode of a popular prime-time BBC TV situation-comedy. As the situation-comedy was Beggar My Neighbour,15 whose producer-director happened to be David Croft, whose wife happened to be Ann Callender, Perry realised that he had not only found a good part, but also a great contact. David Croft was one of several top producers at the BBC, along with Duncan Wood (Hancock’s Half-Hour, Steptoe and Son), James Gilbert (It’s a Square World, The Frost Report), Dennis Main Wilson (The Rag Trade, Till Death Us Do Part) and John Ammonds (Here’s Harry, The Val Doonican Show, later The Morecambe & Wise Show).16 He had cut his teeth on a wide range of shows, including one technically inventive series of The Benny Hill Show (1961) and thirteen editions of This Is Your Life (1962) at its most Reithian, before carving