Square: ‘They may not be quite of the true faith, but they do bring a great deal of happiness to millions of people.’37
The most promising thing about Sloan, as far as Mills and Croft were concerned, was the fact that he was a great believer in the value of well-made, audience-pleasing situation-comedies. Satire, in his view, was a ‘pretentious label’ that on countless occasions in the past had been used to legitimise material that was ‘quite often unfunny’ and sometimes ‘needlessly shocking [or] just plain silly’.38 Many of the new youth-oriented comedy shows that were emerging struck him as reminiscent of ‘one large cocktail party – or should one say nowadays, one large wine and cheese party – where everybody is sounding off and no one hears the wit for the noise’,39 and the continuing success of the Variety format, he acknowledged, relied on the availability of peripatetic talent, which was increasingly expensive. The more coherent genre of situation-comedy, he believed, formed the spine of his department’s body of work, the one, true, sure thing that drew viewers to the screen on a regular basis and settled them down comfortably within a routine. This was a subject about which he held, and expressed, strong opinions:
In situation comedy, our aim is to involve you in something you recognise, for thirty minutes, and make you laugh and feel happy. It sounds easy but it is not. There are three key factors in any success: the writers, the performers, and the producer.
The writers … are craftsmen who speak from experience and who try and be funny with it. They are the key and without them the door cannot be unlocked …
[The performer] is really your guest, and if you don’t happen to like him, you ask him to leave by the simple act of switching him off. It is a cruel fact that on television an artist can have mastered every technique of his craft, but if his face or even his voice doesn’t fit, he will never be a star on the box …
The third and equal element in this complicated business is the producer. It is not enough to have a funny script and acceptable artists to perform it, it has to be presented in television terms in an acceptable way. We must assume that the producer is technically competent. He knows what his cameras can do and he knows how to use them. But the good producer brings something else, he brings flair. What is flair? I wish I could define it … Flair is production that brings the qualities of the script and the abilities of the artist face to face with the limitations of the medium, and then adds that magic ingredient, x, which makes the whole a memorable experience for those who watch. It is style, it is pace, it is polish, it is technique: it is all these things controlled in harmony, without a discord, and when you see it, you know it. And when any one element is missing, you know that too.40
Sloan’s ideal situation-comedy was the one that seemed most true to life: ‘We must be able to identify ourselves with the characters or the situation. We must be able to cry, “He’s behaving just like Uncle Fred” or “Do you remember when exactly that happened to us?”’41
The Fighting Tigers looked, on paper, as if it would fit fairly neatly within Sloan’s chosen framework, and neither David Croft nor Michael Mills anticipated a negative response (‘Tom’s great advantage,’ said Croft, ‘was that he knew what 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
