Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. Graham McCann
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tonight – she’s got a touch of rheumatism – but she sent you some of her upside-down cakes’), our irrepressible playfulness (‘We’ll do “Underneath The Spreading Chestnut Tree”! Sergeant Wilson will do the cheerful actions, and we’ll follow’), our loyalty (‘I’d go through fire, and brimstone, and, and, treacle for you, sir!’), our caution (‘Do you really think that’s wise?’), our courage (‘They could put twenty bombs down my trousers and they will not make me crack!’), our deep-rooted distrust of outsiders (‘Damned foreigners! They come over here and then have the cheek to fire at us!’), and, most of all, it was about our chronic consciousness of class.10
Class provided the grit that made this pearl. As Dennis Potter put it:
Dad’s Army is made possible by the extended joke which allows the British, or more specifically the English, to turn every possible encounter into a subtle joust about status. There is as much drama swilling about in our casual ‘good mornings’ as in the whole of Il Trovatore, and more armour-plating on a foot of suburban privet than in the latest Nato tanks … [Dad’s Army] is a conspiracy of manners between the loving caricatures in crumpled khaki and the complicit delight of an audience which likes pips as well as chips on its shoulders.11
There, on one side of the desk, sits the middle-class, grammar school-educated George Mainwaring, an overachiever desperate to seize the day, and there, on the other side, sits the upper-class, public school-educated Arthur Wilson, an underachiever content to cast a lazily discerning eye over each approaching day and remark on how perfectly lovely it looks before allowing it to amble idly by. There, between them, sparks and fizzes every kind of subtle slight, scornful sniff and furtive little dig that one class can direct at another without risking the ignition of outright civil war:
| MAINWARING | No question about it at all. It’s the families that make the trouble. I had to contend with all sorts of snobbish rubbish when I married Elizabeth. |
| WILSON | (smiling mischievously) Did you, er, did you, as it were, ‘marry beneath you’? |
| MAINWARING | Oh, no, no! The family rather thought that she did. She was very well-connected, you know, Elizabeth. Her father was the suffragan Bishop of Clagthorpe. |
| WILSON | (in mock awe) Was he really! |
| MAINWARING | Led a very sheltered life, you know, Elizabeth. (chuckles to himself) Do you know, she hadn’t even tried tomato sauce before she met me? Ah, I soon put that right! |
| WILSON | (sarcastically) You know, marrying you must have opened up a whole new world to her. |
| MAINWARING | Oh, yes, I think it did. But I never felt at ease with her parents, you know. Always got the impression they were looking down their noses at me. This was even after I’d become Assistant Manager. |
| WILSON | Weren’t they impressed by that? |
| MAINWARING | Oh, not a bit. It was quite a big branch, too, you know. I had my own partitioned cubicle. |
| WILSON | Ooh! Did you?12 |
George Orwell, who was an active member of the real-life Home Guard, likened England to ‘a family with the wrong members in control’.13 In wartime Walmington-on-Sea, the wrong members are recruited from Wilson’s side of the family, but Mainwaring continues to harbour the hope that one day the wrong members will arise from his side. There is, in the meantime, an uneasy truce, with both sides trapped in the same small, neat and nosy seaside town, the same tiny tumbledown church hall, the same ageing bodies, the same sobering predicament. ‘Still,’ as Orwell added, ‘it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.’14
Any vision of England is bound to be partial. The vision of England projected by Dad’s Army is England at its kindest, gentlest and most decent. This is the England that George Santayana hailed as ‘the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors’,15 the England that Emerson respected for its ability to ‘see a little better on a cloudy day’,16 the England that Arnold Bennett cherished for its ‘powerful simplicity’,17 the England that Orwell loved for the fact that the most stirring battle-poem in its history ‘is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction’.18 This is the England in which one can find oneself saying, with the very best of intentions, something as silly as ‘Don’t tell him, Pike!’ Few partial visions seem quite as familiar as this, and fewer still seem quite as appealing.
Dad’s Army encouraged the nation to laugh at itself, and that, as services go, is one of the most precious that any nation can receive. It does not deserve to be remembered merely as an extremely popular situation-comedy, nor as an admirable piece of light entertainment, nor as an ever-reliable ratings winner. It deserves to be treated with a little more respect, a little more care, than that. It deserves to be remembered as a truly great television programme, a fine example of what Huw Wheldon once described so well as ‘good programmes made for good purposes by good people doing their best and doing it well’.19
The day war broke out, my missus looked at me and she said: ‘What good are yer?’ I said: ‘How d’you mean, what good am I?’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re too old for the Army, you couldn’t get into the Navy and they wouldn’t have you in the Air Force, so … what good are yer?’ I said: ‘I’ll do something.’ She said: ‘What?’ I said: ‘How do I know? I’ll have to think.’ She said: ‘I don’t see how THAT’s going to help you – you’ve never done it before … So, what good are yer?’ I said: ‘Don’t keep saying what good am I!’
ROBB WILTON1
I think it’s true to say that at the present time this country of ours, because of its courage and its proud defiance, its determination to put an end to this international brigandage and racketeering of the Hitlers and Mussolinis and their riff-raff is the hope of all that is best in the world, which watches us with admiration.
J. B. PRIESTLEY1
| MAINWARING | You can’t win this war! See the sort of men that this country breeds? |
| U-BOAT CAPTAIN | Rather stupid ones. |
DAD’S ARMY2
It