Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy. Graham McCann
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There were no frills with David. He always got in on time every morning. He always left at 5.30. And he’d always done his work. You’d see in other offices people tearing their hair out at seven or eight o’clock at night: ‘Oh, God! We’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that!’ Dennis Main Wilson, for example, he’d always be working late. David never worked late. He’d planned it, he knew how to produce it, he knew how to direct it, he knew who to talk to, he’d delegated a whole lot of work and then he went home and wrote it up. He was remarkable. I’m not denigrating Dennis Main Wilson, who had got tremendous creative abilities, but he was all over the bloody shop! David was remarkably well organised and efficient. And, of course, he was terribly talented.25
When, therefore, David Croft decided that his next project should be a situation-comedy about the Home Guard – even though it was 1967, twenty-two years after the end of the Second World War, eleven years after Suez, seven years after the end of conscription, three years after America began bombing Vietnam, and right in the middle of a long, hazy summer of love, peace and pot – no one, said Cotton, felt any strong inclination to object:
There’s no percentage in interfering. You trusted people like David, like Jimmy Gilbert, like Johnny Ammonds, to get on with it. And anyway, with most decisions in Entertainment in those days at the BBC, there were always two ways of doing it, so if you agreed one way early enough, and then it became obvious that it wasn’t working, there was still time to change it to the other way. So when someone like David came up with an idea you’d just let him go with it. I do admit that, when he first came into my office and told me that he was planning to do a situation-comedy about the Home Guard, I laughed and said, ‘You’re out of your mind!’ And I wasn’t the only one. But I knew he was going to make a really professional job of it, and, anyway, it wasn’t my decision.26
The man whose decision it was, in the first instance, was the BBC’s Head of Comedy, Michael Mills. Known affectionately to his friends as ‘dark, satanic Mills’27 (an epithet inspired by his Mephistophelean beard and deep-set eyes), this worldly, wordy, witty man had been involved in programme-making since 1947, when he became the Corporation’s – and therefore British television’s – first recognised producer in the field of light entertainment (‘a case,’ he liked to joke, ‘of the blind leading the short-sighted’).28 Mills was widely regarded as being one of the most bold and authoritative arbiters of comic potential in the business. His tastes were catholic – he adored the work of P. G. Wodehouse, and adapted several of his stories for the small screen, but he also relished broader styles, such as bawdy farce. His instincts were sound – he would be the one, prompted by the plays of Plautus, to come up with the idea of Up Pompeii! for Frankie Howerd. ‘Michael was great,’ remembered Bill Cotton. ‘Very, very, well-read, a good judge of a script and a good judge of actors, too. He was a brilliant producer, with enormous taste and flair, and he knew how to put a show together, but he could also be quite impetuous and take some pretty big risks. If he had faith in something he 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