Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. Graham McCann
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own youthful experiences as a movie-mad, scarf-clad, impressionable raw recruit.
Casting Mainwaring, Perry believed, would be easy. There was one actor in particular who, in his opinion, bore a striking family resemblance to Walmington-on-Sea’s uppity little fusspot: Arthur Lowe. What impressed Perry most about Lowe was his technical brilliance: his timing – like that of Jack Benny or Robb Wilton – was flawless; his mid-sentence double takes – like those of Bob Hope or Cary Grant – were exquisite; and his control of crosstalk – like that of Will Hay or Jimmy James – was seemingly effortless. ‘You just had to watch him,’ said Perry. ‘It takes an awful long time to learn how to do those things even moderately well, but he did them beautifully.’11 Lowe had been acting professionally for more than twenty years, starting off in Manchester rep before graduating to West End musicals (including Call Me Madam, Pal Joey and The Pyjama Game), plays (Witness for the Prosecution, A Dead Secret, Ring of Truth) and movies (including a brief role as a reporter in Kind Hearts and Coronets and a more significant part in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life). By the mid-sixties he was best known for his long-running role on television as the irascible and fastidious Leonard Swindley – first, from 1960, in Coronation Street (where he managed Gamma Garments boutique, unsuccessfully fought a local election as the founder and chairman of the Property Owners and Small Traders Party, and was jilted at the altar by the timid Emily Nugent), and then, from 1965, in a broader spin-off situation-comedy, Pardon the Expression (which saw him leave Weatherfield to become assistant manager at a northern branch of a department store called Dobson and Hawks). ‘I’d seen him in those two things,’ said Perry, ‘and somehow he’d clicked with me. He was such a funny little man.’12 By 1967, after appearing in yet another spin-off series called Turn Out the Lights, Lowe, having tired of being associated so closely with one long-running role, had left Mr Swindley behind and returned to the theatre. He was available, but, much to Perry’s surprise, the BBC did not appear to want him.
‘Arthur Lowe?’ exclaimed Michael Mills when the name first came up. ‘He doesn’t work for us!’13 This was not entirely true – he had, in the past, appeared in the odd episode of such programmes as Maigret and Z Cars – but it was true enough to make Mills (ever protective of the BBC’s distinctive identity) urge his producer to look elsewhere. David Croft had, in fact, already done so, and had settled on Thorley Walters – an actor whose most recent role on television had been that of Sir Joshua Hoot QC in BBC1’s A. P. Herbert’s Misleading Cases. Walters was no stranger to playing either stuffy or inept military characters – and in the Boulting Brothers’ satire Private’s Progress (1956) he had played Captain Bootle, who was both – although his movie career now centred on such Hammer horrors as Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966) and Frankenstein Created Woman (1967). Croft went ahead and offered him the role. Walters turned it down. ‘He thanked me very much for asking,’ recalled Croft, ‘but he said that he couldn’t think why I’d thought of him. But he would have been very good.’14 Perry, once again, suggested Arthur Lowe, but Croft, once again, already had someone else in mind: this time it was Jon Pertwee.
Pertwee was one of those actors who seemed almost too serviceable for their own good. Whenever a radio producer wanted someone to play a gibbering Norwegian, or a spluttering English aristocrat, or a windy Welshman, or just about any other comical accent, tic or turn, Pertwee invariably came top of the list (in The Navy Lark, for example, he supplied the voices for no fewer than six distinctive characters);15 whenever a television show or movie required a piece of Danny Kaye-style verbal dexterity or a quirky characterisation, Pertwee would, inevitably, find himself in demand. Croft had worked with him on an episode of Beggar My Neighbour,16 and had been very impressed: ‘He’d played this major – quite similar, really, to the part [of Mainwaring] as it was conceived at that time – and he’d been very funny. So I sent him the script and offered him the part.’17 This time, it seemed, Croft had succeeded in getting his man. On 13 November 1967, Michael Mills instructed the BBC bookings department to ‘negotiate a fee with [the agent] Richard Stone for the services of Jon Pertwee’, adding that ‘Pertwee is in America at the moment, and has seen [the] script and wished to do [the] show. I would like him to be aware of the fee that we are offering, so that we can make a firm casting.’18 What happened next remains unclear: it could have been the case that Pertwee, or his agent, judged the proposed fee (which would not, at best, have been many shillings more than £250 an episode)19 too low, or he might have decided, on reflection, that he did not wish to risk being typecast in a series that might just possibly run for several years, or he might simply have been enjoying himself too much in New York (where he was appearing in the Broadway production of There’s a Girl in My Soup) to seriously consider making an early return, but, whatever the real reason, the result was that he changed his mind and chose to drop out. Croft, once again, found himself back at square one.
It was at this point that Perry saw his chance. Knowing that Arthur Lowe was currently appearing in a play called Baked Beans and Caviar at Windsor, he persuaded David Croft to go along with him to see it. ‘Unfortunately,’ Perry recalled, ‘Arthur was dreadful in it – it wasn’t his sort of thing at all – but David, to his great credit, backed me and agreed to consider him for Mainwaring.’20 Perry’s persistence was about to pay off, but not without one final scare – courtesy of none other than Arthur Lowe himself. Croft had arranged for the actor to meet him and Perry at Television Centre:
It didn’t get off to a good start. We’d whistled him up to the Centre so that we could talk over lunch in the canteen, and the first thing he said was: ‘I’m not sure, you know, about a situation-comedy. I hope it’s not going to be one of those silly programmes. The sort of show I hate is Hugh and I.’ So I had to tell him the fact that I’d done about eighty Hugh and Is! He quickly backed out of that one. After all, it was work, and he wasn’t over-employed at the time.21
Croft forgave the faux pas; he knew that Lowe, so long as he could shake off the ghost of Mr Swindley, had both the wit and the ability to make the role his own. It was, he concluded, a risk, but a risk well worth taking. A fee was agreed of £210 per programme, and a contract was sent out on 21 February 1968. Lowe signed it immediately. Captain Mainwaring, at long last, was cast.
Sergeant Wilson, Perry would later reveal, could have been played by the portly and bespectacled Robert Dorning: ‘I’d seen him with Arthur in Pardon the Expression – he’d played Arthur’s boss – and I’d thought to myself: “Wouldn’t they make a good couple to play the leads [in Dad’s Army]?” So I was very keen on getting them both, and Dorning could certainly have been good as Wilson, but then, of course, Michael Mills stuck his oar in … ’22 Mills – who was indeed an ex-Navy man – announced that he was absolutely convinced about who was the right man for the role. David Croft – who was never surprised to hear that Michael Mills was absolutely convinced about anything – invited him to share this information. ‘You must have John Le Mesurier!’ barked Mills. ‘He suffers so well!’23 Croft found, on reflection, that he rather liked this idea. Le Mesurier did suffer well. No post-war British movie seemed complete without his furrowed brow, frightened eyes, sunken cheeks and world-weary sigh. He had been the psychiatrist with the nervous twitch in Private’s Progress, the time-and-motion expert (also with a nervous twitch) in I’m All Right Jack (1959) and the City office manager (sans twitch)