Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. Graham McCann
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he didn’t know, and therefore he hired people to do the things that he didn’t know about and then he let them get on with it’),42 but Sloan, as an executive, did have one or two reasons to be fearful. Mary Whitehouse’s private army of middle-class, middle-brow, middle-Englanders – the self-appointed National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association – had declared war on Hugh Carleton Greene for having the temerity to, in his words, ‘open the windows and let the fresh air in’,43 or, in hers, contribute to ‘the moral collapse in this country’.44 Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, in response to Whitehouse, had just switched Charles Hill straight from the chairmanship of the commercial ITA to that of the BBC in order, as Richard Crossman remarked, ‘to discipline it and bring it to book, and above all to deal with Hugh Greene’.45 The knives were out for the BBC. It was, in short, the wrong time, politically, to risk causing – or being accused of causing – unnecessary offence. There had, Sloan appreciated, been situation-comedies before with military themes: the BBC had imported The Phil Silvers Show (featuring the scheming US Army sergeant Ernest G. Bilko and his motor-pool platoon of gambling addicts)46 in April 1957, and ITV had started screening The Army Game (featuring a group of work-shy Army conscripts in Hut 29 at the Surplus Ordinance Depot at Nether Hopping in deepest Staffordshire)47 two months later, and both programmes had proved hugely popular. Neither of these shows, however, had actually been set during wartime. One current show that was – ITV’s Hogan’s Heroes, a spectacularly tasteless US-made series set inside a German prisoner-of-war camp – had either been shunned or condemned by the majority of British critics, and some ITV regions had simply chosen not to show it.48 The Fighting Tigers, therefore, was – at least as far as home-grown situation-comedies were concerned – something different, something new, and Sloan had to be satisfied in his own mind that its humour would not inadvertently aggravate painful memories or reopen relatively recently-healed wounds.
As soon as he received a copy of the script he proceeded to read, and reread, it with uncommon care, second-guessing the most likely objections: ‘Were we,’ he asked himself, ‘making mock of Britain’s Finest Hour?’ Once he had finished, he felt absolutely sure of his conclusion: no. ‘Of course it was funny,’ he reflected, ‘but it was true. [Such characters] did exist in those marvellous days, pepper was issued to throw in the face of invading German parachutists, sugar was recommended for dropping in the petrol tanks of German tanks, and the possibility of defeat did not enter our minds!’49 Sloan was satisfied. The Fighting Tigers would go ahead with his full support.
The pre-production discussions began in earnest. Michael Mills gave Croft his typically incisive critique of Perry’s original script: it was, he agreed, a fine first attempt, full of vivid, accurate period details and promising comic characters, but, of course, it still needed a considerable amount of work. The title, he said, would have to go: instead of The Fighting Tigers, he suggested, it should be called Dad’s Army. He liked the south-east coastal town setting, but disliked the choice of ‘Brightsea-on-Sea’ as its name, so David Croft came up with ‘Walmington-on-Sea’ as an alternative. Some of the characters’ names, too, Mills argued, did not sound quite right: ‘Mainwaring’ suited the pompous man, as did ‘Godfrey’ the old man and ‘Pike’ the young boy. He did not care at all, however, for ‘Private Jim Duck’, instead he suggested ‘Frazer’; for ‘Joe Fish’ he proposed ‘Joe Walker’ and for ‘Jim Jones’ he preferred ‘Jack Jones’. Mills also felt that the platoon would benefit from being made somewhat more variegated in terms of background: one character, for example, might be made an ex-colonel or perhaps a retired admiral, another the ex-officer’s old gardener, and maybe young Pike would be more interesting if he became the local rapscallion. A little more regional diversity would not go amiss, while one was at it, with a Scot, perhaps, tossed in to the mix. There was one more recommendation that Mills wanted to make: Perry, as an inexperienced television scriptwriter, was in need of a well-qualified collaborator, and the obvious in-house choice, reasoned Mills, was David Croft.50 Perry happily acceded to the proposal, and the two men set to work on a second script.
Croft visited Perry in his flat in Westminster, Perry visited Croft in his house in Notting Hill; ideas were exchanged, possible plots roughed out, a few comic lines devised, and then each man withdrew to work on the script alone. The collaboration seemed to work, their methods seemed to mesh: Croft was cool, calm and clear-headed, Perry was warm, lively and enthusiastic; Croft could sit back and visualise entire scenes, Perry could leap up and perform particular routines; Croft was a master of ensemble comedy, Perry a connoisseur of comic turns; Croft had a sharp eye for the telling detail, Perry had a keen ear for the serviceable phrase; neither man was too proud to learn from the other, both men were determined to succeed. They had, they soon realised, much more in common than at first they had thought. Both men had fallen in love with the world of entertainment at a very early age (Croft’s parents, Reginald Sharland and Ann Croft, had been stars of the British theatre during the 1920s and 1930s, and the baby David had slept in a prop basket backstage; Perry, thanks to his mother, had visited most of the cinemas, theatres and music-halls in and around London before his childhood was complete). Both had attended a distinguished public school (Croft Rugby, Perry St Paul’s), and both had departed prematurely (Croft because the money ran out, Perry because he ‘was tired of being thrashed’).51 Both had seen the Home Guard in action at first-hand (Croft as an air-raid warden, Perry as an enthusiastic volunteer) and had gone on to join the Royal Artillery (Croft served in North Africa, India and Singapore, becoming a major at twenty-three, and was on the verge of being made a lieutenant-colonel when he ended the war on General Montgomery’s staff in the War Office; Perry served in the Far East, where he rose to the rank of sergeant and became the life and soul of the concert party). Both had been singers (Croft a tenor, Perry a baritone) and actors (Croft starting out as the butcher’s boy in the 1938 movie Goodbye, Mr Chips, Perry in the 1952 Anna Neagle vehicle The Glorious Days); both had worked in holiday camps (Croft as a producer, Perry as a Redcoat); and both had married women from within showbusiness. Both enjoyed fine wines, classic movies and great comedy, and both had the same motto: ‘Never take no for an answer.’52
They wrote quickly but carefully. A good pilot script, they appreciated, was an introduction, not an imposition; it needed to appear familiar without appearing false, to intrigue without seeming to intrude, to inform without straining to educate. In the space of half an hour, the pilot episode would have to set the right tone, establish the essential situation, adumbrate the key characters, touch on some special central tension, nod at its probable causes, wink at its possible consequences, and, last but by no means least, entertain a curious but uncommitted audience sufficiently to make it want to come back for more. It was not a task for either the faint-hearted or the foolhardy, and countless talented writers before Croft and Perry had tried to come to terms with it and failed. Nevertheless, through a combination of courage and prudence, the two men came up with a creation that seemed as if it might, with a little luck, serve each of their multiple needs.
The first episode of Dad’s Army, they had decided, would mirror the real-life sequence of events that began on Tuesday, 14 May 1940, with Anthony Eden’s announcement of plans for the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers, and continued with the frantic rush to enrol and the scramble to establish some kind of broadly recognisable hierarchy. With only the minimum exercise of artistic licence – the timing of Eden’s announcement was brought forward to a brighter, more television-friendly hour – this structure allowed each character to be introduced to the audience simply as a matter of course. George Mainwaring, Arthur Wilson and Frank Pike (the ‘pompous man – passive man – young boy’ comic triangle