following morning:
I thought I’d better brush up on my facts, so I went to the Westminster public library and looked through all of the shelves: nothing, not a single book on the subject. Then I asked a young librarian if she could help me: ‘The Home Guard?’ she said. ‘Never heard of it.’ Astonishing. So I moved on to the Imperial War Museum, and they did have some Home Guard training pamphlets, a couple of memoirs, that sort of thing. But apart from that there was nothing – no reference to it anywhere. The public had forgotten about the Home Guard, and I thought it was time they were reminded of it.11
Devising a basic storyline did not pose the novice scriptwriter too great a problem. ‘Don’t forget I’d run Watford Rep with my wife for nine years, and we did over six hundred plays. I regarded that as my apprenticeship. If you do a fresh play every week, year after year, boy oh boy, do you know how to move actors about. That’s how I learnt my craft. Probably few other writers have had that opportunity, and I like to think that it helped me considerably.’12 His own wartime memories had enabled him to sketch out the situation, but the focus for the comedy was suggested by a 1937 English movie:
I’d been asking myself: ‘Now, what am I going to do with this? What sort of comedy set-up?’ And that Sunday afternoon, showing on television, was Oh! Mr Porter, with Will Hay, Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt – the pompous man, the old man and the boy. And the movie’s great strength was the wonderful balance of these three characters. So I thought, ‘That’s it: pompous man, old man, young boy!’13
It took him just three days, from start to finish, to write the script. It was called The Fighting Tigers. He put it in the drawer of his desk and went back to work: ‘I just didn’t know who to show it to.’14
Early in July, during a break in the Theatre Workshop’s run, came a stroke of good fortune. Perry’s agent, Ann Callender, called with news of a small but eye-catching role in an episode of a popular prime-time BBC TV situation-comedy. As the situation-comedy was Beggar My Neighbour,15 whose producer-director happened to be David Croft, whose wife happened to be Ann Callender, Perry realised that he had not only found a good part, but also a great contact. David Croft was one of several top producers at the BBC, along with Duncan Wood (Hancock’s Half-Hour, Steptoe and Son), James Gilbert (It’s a Square World, The Frost Report), Dennis Main Wilson (The Rag Trade, Till Death Us Do Part) and John Ammonds (Here’s Harry, The Val Doonican Show, later The Morecambe & Wise Show).16 He had cut his teeth on a wide range of shows, including one technically inventive series of The Benny Hill Show (1961) and thirteen editions of This Is Your Life (1962) at its most Reithian, before carving out a niche for himself, starting with Hugh and I (1962–8), as the creator of well-crafted, character-driven situation-comedies. He was fortunate to be at the BBC during 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,
