Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. Graham McCann
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would just push on with it regardless.’29 David Croft agreed:
Michael was a marvellous Head of Comedy. Very enthusiastic. Everything was possible once you’d decided that you could do something. He didn’t ever really discuss budget. He was quite flamboyant like that. I remember, for example, taking over a production of The Mikado from him – it was called Titti-Pu – and finding that he’d already ordered elephants, lions, tigers – the lot. I spent the first few days cancelling all the things we couldn’t afford! So he was wonderfully ambitious, and he had a very broad picture of what you should be doing and what he could do for you, and he did it. He was, I suppose, a genius, and he could do everything in a television studio: if, for example, he wasn’t happy about the way a cameraman was shooting something, he’d go down there, take the camera from him and do the shot himself – ‘From there, understand? That’s what I want you to do, so do it!’ Of course, the result was that the crews were inclined to hate him! But he knew exactly what he was doing. No doubt about it. And as soon as I’d read Jimmy’s script I didn’t hesitate before taking it to Michael.30
Mills duly read the script and agreed immediately with Croft: this was an idea that, if it was handled in the right way, had the potential to run and run.
There was one more obstacle that needed to be overcome, however, before the official programme-making process could really begin. Tom Sloan, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment and the mercurial Mills’ immediate superior, needed to rubber-stamp the decision. In stark contrast to Mills, Sloan was a man who preferred to err on the side of caution, and there was always a chance that he would react warily – or worse – to the prospect of a comedy set in wartime. The son of a Scottish Free Church minister, he was certainly no great admirer of the new strains of humour that seemed intent on mocking all of the old traditional values, and had once insisted upon removing a sketch from a Peter Sellers show on the grounds that ‘to refer to someone who was obviously Dorothy Macmillan as “a great steaming nit” was not in good taste’.31 The brilliant but increasingly embittered programme-maker and executive Donald Baverstock dismissed Sloan as someone who ‘didn’t have an idea in his head’,32 but, as Paul Fox, the newly-appointed Controller of BBC1 in 1967, recalled, the truth was considerably more complex:
Tom had ideas. Good, solid ideas. He did have old-fashioned BBC standards; I think that is absolutely true. But he wasn’t a reactionary. I mean, yes, he spoke out against That Was The Week That Was, and that was mainly for territorial reasons – it was made by the Talks Department rather than his own Light Entertainment – but he defended Till Death Us Do Part solidly and sincerely through thick and thin. And he was an exceptionally good organiser, a good commander of a difficult group of people in Light Entertainment who needed a little bit of binding together. He wasn’t the inspiration behind the success of Light Entertainment at that time; but he was the man who made sure that all of that success became possible, because he allowed Bill [Cotton] and Duncan [Wood] and Michael [Mills] their heads and let them get on with it.33
Barry Took, whom Sloan recruited as a comedy adviser, agreed:
Tom was a decent man. He had a very stiff, military view of the world, but he meant well. He just didn’t like messiness. He didn’t like people who got things wrong, or things that went wrong. And in comedy, of course, people fail most of the time, and many things fail all of the time, so poor old Tom was always a bit anxious, a bit edgy, about it all. But I admired and respected him because his only real concern was to make sure that what ended up on the screen was something to be proud of.34
What is beyond doubt is the fact that Sloan was driven by the passionate conviction that the BBC’s Reithian fundamentals should be reordered from ‘information, education and entertainment’ to ‘entertainment, information and education’.35 He was, in his own sober-suited way, a committed populist. When he took over as Head of Light Entertainment in 1963, the department’s output, he said, was still regarded by the management as ‘something that had to be done rather than something that should be done’.36 Later on in the decade, after the department had played a pivotal role in the Corporation’s successful campaign to win back mass audiences from its commercial competitor (winning every prestigious prize available in the process), the attitude of the powers that be had ‘improved’, he said, to the point where it reminded him of the Pope’s view of the nuns who sold religious relics in St Peter’s Square: ‘They may not be quite of the true faith, but they do bring a great deal of happiness to millions of people.’37
The most promising thing about Sloan, as far as Mills and Croft were concerned, was the fact that he was a great believer in the value of well-made, audience-pleasing situation-comedies. Satire, in his view, was a ‘pretentious label’ that on countless occasions in the past had been used to legitimise material that was ‘quite often unfunny’ and sometimes ‘needlessly shocking [or] just plain silly’.38 Many of the new youth-oriented comedy shows that were emerging struck him as reminiscent of ‘one large cocktail party – or should one say nowadays, one large wine and cheese party – where everybody is sounding off and no one hears the wit for the noise’,39 and the continuing success of the Variety format, he acknowledged, relied on the availability of peripatetic talent, which was increasingly expensive. The more coherent genre of situation-comedy, he believed, formed the spine of his department’s body of work, the one, true, sure thing that drew viewers to the screen on a regular basis and settled them down comfortably within a routine. This was a subject about which he held, and expressed, strong opinions:
In situation comedy, our aim is to involve you in something you recognise, for thirty minutes, and make you laugh and feel happy. It sounds easy but it is not. There are three key factors in any success: the writers, the performers, and the producer.
The writers … are craftsmen who speak from experience and who try and be funny with it. They are the key and without them the door cannot be unlocked …
[The performer] is really your guest, and if you don’t happen to like him, you ask him to leave by the simple act of switching him off. It is a cruel fact that on television an artist can have mastered every technique of his craft, but if his face or even his voice doesn’t fit, he will never be a star on the box …
The third and equal element in this complicated business is the producer. It is not enough to have a funny script and acceptable artists to perform it, it has to be presented in television terms in an acceptable way. We must assume that the producer is technically competent. He knows what his cameras can do and he knows how to use them. But the good producer brings something else, he brings flair. What is flair? I wish I could define it … Flair is production that brings the qualities of the script and the abilities of the artist face to face with the limitations of the medium, and then adds that magic ingredient, x, which makes the whole a memorable experience for those who watch. It is style, it is pace, it is polish, it is technique: it is all these things controlled in harmony, without a discord, and when you see it, you know it. And when any one element is missing, you know that too.40
Sloan’s ideal situation-comedy was the one that seemed most true to life: ‘We must be able to identify ourselves with the characters or the situation. We must be able to cry, “He’s behaving just like Uncle Fred” or “Do you remember when exactly that happened to us?”’41
The Fighting Tigers looked, on paper, as if it would fit fairly neatly within Sloan’s chosen