Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. Graham McCann
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the era of Hugh Carleton Greene, a cultured and courageous Director-General who reminded his programme-makers that they were there to serve the public rather than the politicians or the press, and the BBC, in turn, was fortunate to be able to call on programme-makers of the calibre of Croft in order to fulfil this obligation. ‘It was a wonderful atmosphere in which to work,’ Croft recalled. ‘There were some very brilliant people there in those days and they were all devoted to the BBC. When commercial television started they could all have gone and earned much more money elsewhere, but they’d stayed with the BBC because they knew you could do good work there. It’s always important, you know, in the end, to get good programmes.’17
Croft had worked with Jimmy Perry, briefly, once before. At the suggestion of his wife, he had gone down to Watford to see her client appear on stage, and had subsequently cast him in a minor role in one episode of Hugh and I at the end of January 1966. Neither man, it seems, emerged from the encounter sensing that the seeds of a lasting friendship had been sown. Croft had been happy enough with Perry’s efforts – the lines had been learnt, the marks had been hit – but he was immersed in the production of fourteen half-hour episodes of a high-profile show, and there was no time to dwell on such transient contributions. Perry, on the other hand, had been somewhat intimidated by Croft’s briskly efficient style of direction: ‘I didn’t know if he was having an off day, or I was giving a bad performance, but I do remember thinking to myself: “He looks a bit grim. I’d better watch my step here, better mind my Ps and Qs – I think he could turn nasty.”’18
The second occasion when Croft met Perry, some eighteen months later, proved a far more memorable affair. Croft had recently started work on the second series of Beggar My Neighbour (starring Reg Varney, Pat Coombs, Desmond Walter-Ellis and June Whitfield). ‘We had an episode coming up,’ Croft remembered, ‘in which I wanted someone to play the rather noisy, uncouth brother of Reg Varney’s character, Harry Butt. So my wife took me to the theatre again to see Jimmy, and I could tell he was obviously very good for the part. He was a good actor, was Jimmy. And so I cast him in it.’19 Perry packed two scripts in his briefcase – one of Beggar My Neighbour, the other of The Fighting Tigers – and set off for his first day of rehearsal feeling, as he put it, ‘a bit apprehensive’.20 Eager to impress, anxious to please, he did what he was told, tried his best to do it well, and waited, patiently, nervously, for the right moment to make his move. It never came. Back in his flat, Perry rang his agent for advice. Croft recalled: ‘He said to my wife, “I’ve got this idea about the Home Guard – do you think I dare show it to David?” She said, “Yes, go ahead.”’21 Eventually, he did. ‘It was a hot summer’s day, a Friday, and we’d been rehearsing at this boys’ club. I’d been waiting, waiting, waiting. Finally, outside, I saw David was on his own, fiddling with this wonderful white sports car that he had, so I thought to myself, “Now!” So I went over to him and told him about my script. And he agreed to read it over the weekend.’22
The following Monday, the cast and crew congregated at Television Centre to record the next episode. Perry arrived a little earlier than necessary, hoping that, one way or another, Croft would put him out of his misery as promptly as possible, but the anxious actor soon realised that his busy producer-director was not going to have a spare moment for some time, and there was no option but to wait, and watch, and hope. Finally, after several long, agonising hours, Croft came over to Perry and delivered his verdict: ‘What a terrific idea!’23 The Fighting Tigers had a future.
Croft’s judgement carried some weight within the BBC’s Light Entertainment department. Although he had not been directly responsible for the scripts of either Hugh and I or Beggar My Neighbour, he had, in the past, collaborated on several musicals (including the Cicely Courtneidge vehicle Starmaker); contributed to various pantomimes and West End shows; spent eighteen months as a script editor at Associated-Rediffusion and two years as an extraordinarily industrious young producer, director and writer of around two hundred and fifty shows at Tyne Tees Television before moving to the BBC at the start of the 1960s. Consequently, his opinions – and ambitions – were taken very seriously indeed. ‘I had it in my contract that I could still write for the Palladium,’ he recalled. ‘And that was very unusual for the BBC in those days – to allow you to work for somebody else. I was always very busy. I think the BBC were rather pleased that somebody who actually had some sort of involvement in showbusiness would work for them.’24 Another thing that ensured that Croft, as a producer-director, was accorded an encouraging degree of autonomy was the fact that, once he had settled on a project, he could be relied on to pursue it in an exceptionally professional manner. Bill Cotton Jnr, Head of Variety at the time, remarked:
There were no frills with David. He always got in on time every morning. He always left at 5.30. And he’d always done his work. You’d see in other offices people tearing their hair out at seven or eight o’clock at night: ‘Oh, God! We’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that!’ Dennis Main Wilson, for example, he’d always be working late. David never worked late. He’d planned it, he knew how to produce it, he knew how to direct it, he knew who to talk to, he’d delegated a whole lot of work and then he went home and wrote it up. He was remarkable. I’m not denigrating Dennis Main Wilson, who had got tremendous creative abilities, but he was all over the bloody shop! David was remarkably well organised and efficient. And, of course, he was terribly talented.25
When, therefore, David Croft decided that his next project should be a situation-comedy about the Home Guard – even though it was 1967, twenty-two years after the end of the Second World War, eleven years after Suez, seven years after the end of conscription, three years after America began bombing Vietnam, and right in the middle of a long, hazy summer of love, peace and pot – no one, said Cotton, felt any strong inclination to object:
There’s no percentage in interfering. You trusted people like David, like Jimmy Gilbert, like Johnny Ammonds, to get on with it. And anyway, with most decisions in Entertainment in those days at the BBC, there were always two ways of doing it, so if you agreed one way early enough, and then it became obvious that it wasn’t working, there was still time to change it to the other way. So when someone like David came up with an idea you’d just let him go with it. I do admit that, when he first came into my office and told me that he was planning to do a situation-comedy about the Home Guard, I laughed and said, ‘You’re out of your mind!’ And I wasn’t the only one. But I knew he was going to make a really professional job of it, and, anyway, it wasn’t my decision.26
The man whose decision it was, in the first instance, was the BBC’s Head of Comedy, Michael Mills. Known affectionately to his friends as ‘dark, satanic Mills’27 (an epithet inspired by his Mephistophelean beard and deep-set eyes), this worldly, wordy, witty man had been involved in programme-making since 1947, when he became the Corporation’s – and therefore British television’s – first recognised producer in the field of light entertainment (‘a case,’ he liked to joke, ‘of the blind leading the short-sighted’).28 Mills was widely regarded as being one of the most bold and authoritative arbiters of comic potential in the business. His tastes were catholic – he adored the work of P. G. Wodehouse, and adapted several of his stories for the small screen, but he also relished broader styles, such as bawdy farce. His instincts were sound – he would be the one, prompted by the plays of Plautus, to come up with the idea of Up Pompeii! for Frankie Howerd. ‘Michael was great,’ remembered Bill Cotton. ‘Very, very, well-read, a good judge of a script and a good judge of actors, too. He was a brilliant producer, with enormous taste