Perry in his flat in Westminster, Perry visited Croft in his house in Notting Hill; ideas were exchanged, possible plots roughed out, a few comic lines devised, and then each man withdrew to work on the script alone. The collaboration seemed to work, their methods seemed to mesh: Croft was cool, calm and clear-headed, Perry was warm, lively and enthusiastic; Croft could sit back and visualise entire scenes, Perry could leap up and perform particular routines; Croft was a master of ensemble comedy, Perry a connoisseur of comic turns; Croft had a sharp eye for the telling detail, Perry had a keen ear for the serviceable phrase; neither man was too proud to learn from the other, both men were determined to succeed. They had, they soon realised, much more in common than at first they had thought. Both men had fallen in love with the world of entertainment at a very early age (Croft’s parents, Reginald Sharland and Ann Croft, had been stars of the British theatre during the 1920s and 1930s, and the baby David had slept in a prop basket backstage; Perry, thanks to his mother, had visited most of the cinemas, theatres and music-halls in and around London before his childhood was complete). Both had attended a distinguished public school (Croft Rugby, Perry St Paul’s), and both had departed prematurely (Croft because the money ran out, Perry because he ‘was tired of being thrashed’).51 Both had seen the Home Guard in action at first-hand (Croft as an air-raid warden, Perry as an enthusiastic volunteer) and had gone on to join the Royal Artillery (Croft served in North Africa, India and Singapore, becoming a major at twenty-three, and was on the verge of being made a lieutenant-colonel when he ended the war on General Montgomery’s staff in the War Office; Perry served in the Far East, where he rose to the rank of sergeant and became the life and soul of the concert party). Both had been singers (Croft a tenor, Perry a baritone) and actors (Croft starting out as the butcher’s boy in the 1938 movie Goodbye, Mr Chips, Perry in the 1952 Anna Neagle vehicle The Glorious Days); both had worked in holiday camps (Croft as a producer, Perry as a Redcoat); and both had married women from within showbusiness. Both enjoyed fine wines, classic movies and great comedy, and both had the same motto: ‘Never take no for an answer.’52
They wrote quickly but carefully. A good pilot script, they appreciated, was an introduction, not an imposition; it needed to appear familiar without appearing false, to intrigue without seeming to intrude, to inform without straining to educate. In the space of half an hour, the pilot episode would have to set the right tone, establish the essential situation, adumbrate the key characters, touch on some special central tension, nod at its probable causes, wink at its possible consequences, and, last but by no means least, entertain a curious but uncommitted audience sufficiently to make it want to come back for more. It was not a task for either the faint-hearted or the foolhardy, and countless talented writers before Croft and Perry had tried to come to terms with it and failed. Nevertheless, through a combination of courage and prudence, the two men came up with a creation that seemed as if it might, with a little luck, serve each of their multiple needs.
The first episode of Dad’s Army, they had decided, would mirror the real-life sequence of events that began on Tuesday, 14 May 1940, with Anthony Eden’s announcement of plans for the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers, and continued with the frantic rush to enrol and the scramble to establish some kind of broadly recognisable hierarchy. With only the minimum exercise of artistic licence – the timing of Eden’s announcement was brought forward to a brighter, more television-friendly hour – this structure allowed each character to be introduced to the audience simply as a matter of course. George Mainwaring, Arthur Wilson and Frank Pike (the ‘pompous man – passive man – young boy’ comic triangle replacing Perry’s earlier arrangement) would hear the radio broadcast inside the Walmington-on-Sea branch of Swallow53 Bank; Mainwaring would assert his authority (‘Times of peril always bring great men to the fore … ’), and then, later that day, the action would shift to the inside of the church hall, and the arrival of the first few volunteers – Frazer, the fierce-looking Scotsman; Godfrey, the genial old gent; Walker, the cheeky spiv; Jones, the eager veteran; and Bracewell, the sweet-natured, wing-collared, bow-tied toff – as well as the rude intervention of a brash, bumptious ARP warden and an officious little fire chief. It was an eminently productive pilot script: lean and energetic (the only character who is allowed to sit down, and then only briefly, is Mainwaring: first to read out an important message from the War Office, and later to write down the names of the new recruits); informative (a remarkable number of historically-accurate facts, relating to the LDV’s chaotic formation, are woven neatly into the narrative); socially suggestive (with a bank manager exploiting his position, a chief clerk exploiting his good looks, a butcher exploiting the demand for rationed meat and a ‘wholesale supplier’ exploiting the demand for everything else); and, unlike many opening episodes, encouragingly funny.
The right idea really had come to fruition. On 4 October 1967, Michael Mills not only confirmed that the pilot script had been accepted, but also announced that he was ready to commission an initial series of six programmes (‘with an option for a further six’).54 On 25 November, Croft and Perry signed the contract and committed themselves to Dad’s Army.55 They were ready: ready for their finest half-hour. Now all that was needed was a cast.
CHAPTER III You Will Be Watching …
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD1
| MAINWARING | Fine body of men, sergeant, aren’t they? |
| WILSON | Yes. Awfully nice. |
DAD’S ARMY2
Anyone other than David Croft would surely have been in grave danger of hyper-hyphenating: already installed as producer-director-co-writer of Dad’s Army, he now added to his multiple responsibilities by assuming control of casting as well. ‘There was never going to be any doubt about that,’ he explained. ‘Right back in the earliest days of my career, when I was offered a casting person, I’d said, “No way – that’s my business!”, and I’ve always stuck to that. If you don’t know who you want in a show, you shouldn’t be doing the job, quite frankly. Certainly, as far as the established characters are concerned, you should know exactly who you want – even if you can’t get them.’3
Croft, in fact, was not just good at casting a show; he had a genius for it. Just like the classic Ealing movie comedies of the 1940s and 1950s – whose distinctive tone and texture owed as much to those actors (such as Miles Malleson, Hugh Griffith, Jack Warner, Gladys Henson, Clive Morton, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) who regularly animated the background as they did to those (such as Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood and Cecil Parker) who frequently filled in the foreground – Croft’s situation-comedies were all about believable little worlds rather than brilliantly big stars. Throughout the first half of the 1960s he had cherry-picked the choicest character actors in British television comedy until, in effect, he had assembled his own unofficial repertory company, his own private Ealing. All of the following actors were used by Croft in one or more episodes of both Hugh and I and Beggar My Neighbour and would go on to feature in one or more episodes of Dad’s Army: Arnold Ridley, Bill Pertwee, James Beck, Edward Sinclair, Harold Bennett, Felix Bowness, Arthur English, Carmen Silvera, Robert Raglan, Queenie Watts, Robert Gillespie, Julian Orchard, Jeffrey Gardiner and Jimmy Perry. The familiarity bred contentment: the audience knew who was who, and the director knew who could
