time, it seemed, Croft had succeeded in getting his man. On 13 November 1967, Michael Mills instructed the BBC bookings department to ‘negotiate a fee with [the agent] Richard Stone for the services of Jon Pertwee’, adding that ‘Pertwee is in America at the moment, and has seen [the] script and wished to do [the] show. I would like him to be aware of the fee that we are offering, so that we can make a firm casting.’18 What happened next remains unclear: it could have been the case that Pertwee, or his agent, judged the proposed fee (which would not, at best, have been many shillings more than £250 an episode)19 too low, or he might have decided, on reflection, that he did not wish to risk being typecast in a series that might just possibly run for several years, or he might simply have been enjoying himself too much in New York (where he was appearing in the Broadway production of There’s a Girl in My Soup) to seriously consider making an early return, but, whatever the real reason, the result was that he changed his mind and chose to drop out. Croft, once again, found himself back at square one.
It was at this point that Perry saw his chance. Knowing that Arthur Lowe was currently appearing in a play called Baked Beans and Caviar at Windsor, he persuaded David Croft to go along with him to see it. ‘Unfortunately,’ Perry recalled, ‘Arthur was dreadful in it – it wasn’t his sort of thing at all – but David, to his great credit, backed me and agreed to consider him for Mainwaring.’20 Perry’s persistence was about to pay off, but not without one final scare – courtesy of none other than Arthur Lowe himself. Croft had arranged for the actor to meet him and Perry at Television Centre:
It didn’t get off to a good start. We’d whistled him up to the Centre so that we could talk over lunch in the canteen, and the first thing he said was: ‘I’m not sure, you know, about a situation-comedy. I hope it’s not going to be one of those silly programmes. The sort of show I hate is Hugh and I.’ So I had to tell him the fact that I’d done about eighty Hugh and Is! He quickly backed out of that one. After all, it was work, and he wasn’t over-employed at the time.21
Croft forgave the faux pas; he knew that Lowe, so long as he could shake off the ghost of Mr Swindley, had both the wit and the ability to make the role his own. It was, he concluded, a risk, but a risk well worth taking. A fee was agreed of £210 per programme, and a contract was sent out on 21 February 1968. Lowe signed it immediately. Captain Mainwaring, at long last, was cast.
Sergeant Wilson, Perry would later reveal, could have been played by the portly and bespectacled Robert Dorning: ‘I’d seen him with Arthur in Pardon the Expression – he’d played Arthur’s boss – and I’d thought to myself: “Wouldn’t they make a good couple to play the leads [in Dad’s Army]?” So I was very keen on getting them both, and Dorning could certainly have been good as Wilson, but then, of course, Michael Mills stuck his oar in … ’22 Mills – who was indeed an ex-Navy man – announced that he was absolutely convinced about who was the right man for the role. David Croft – who was never surprised to hear that Michael Mills was absolutely convinced about anything – invited him to share this information. ‘You must have John Le Mesurier!’ barked Mills. ‘He suffers so well!’23 Croft found, on reflection, that he rather liked this idea. Le Mesurier did suffer well. No post-war British movie seemed complete without his furrowed brow, frightened eyes, sunken cheeks and world-weary sigh. He had been the psychiatrist with the nervous twitch in Private’s Progress, the time-and-motion expert (also with a nervous twitch) in I’m All Right Jack (1959) and the City office manager (sans twitch) in The Rebel (1961), as well as innumerable other bewildered-looking barristers, bureaucrats, officers and doctors who together seemed to sum up a certain sense of home-grown ennui. He had reprised the role on television in both Hancock’s Half-Hour (1956–60) and Hancock (1961), and more recently he had shown a little of the warmer side to his nature as the retired Colonel Maynard – ‘a dear old stick’24 – in the situation-comedy George and the Dragon (1966–8). Croft sent him the pilot script of Dad’s Army. Le Mesurier, on reading it, thought it had the potential to become a ‘minor situation comedy’, but he was intrigued by the news that he was wanted for the role of the sergeant rather than the captain – ‘casting directors usually saw me as officer material’.25 He read the script again, and liked it a little more: Perry, he felt, ‘knew how to turn a funny line’, and Croft, he noted, was ‘a theatre man who had brought to television a reputation for cool, calm organisation’. ‘Promising,’ he thought to himself, ‘all promising.’26 He informed his agent, Freddie Joachim, that he only had one real reservation: the fee. Joachim, who regarded the medium of television as beneath his calibre of client, proceeded, without the slightest sign of enthusiasm, to haggle on Le Mesurier’s behalf.
Croft, in the meantime, was busy trying to persuade Clive Dunn to accept the role of Lance Corporal Jones. Jack Haig, an old favourite of Croft’s from his time at Tyne Tees in the 1950s, had been first choice, but, after discussing the offer with the ultra-cautious Tom Sloan (who appears to have given him the impression that the show was by no means assured of a long run),27 Haig had turned the part down in order to concentrate on a lucrative new vehicle for his popular children’s character, ‘Wacky Jacky’. Dunn, though a mere forty-eight years of age, was the obvious alternative: like Haig, who was nine years his senior, he knew how to portray elderly comic characters. An alumnus of the Players’ Theatre, which was a well-respected club in Villiers Street, London WC2, specialising in Victorian/Edwardian-style music hall, pantomime and melodrama, Dunn had appeared in everything from Windmill revues to children’s situation-comedies (such as The Adventures of Charlie Quick, broadcast by BBCTV in 1957), and had first made his name on television as Old Johnson, the aptly-named 83-year-old waiter and Boer War veteran in Granada’s Bootsie and Snudge (1960–3), the popular follow-up to The Army Game. Like Croft, he came from an established showbusiness family – his maternal grandfather, Frank Lynne, had been a moderately popular music-hall comedian, his uncle, Gordon Lynne, was also a comic and both his parents, Bobby Dunn and Connie Clive, had been professional entertainers – and the two men had known and liked each other for years (Dunn’s mother, in fact, had once had an affair with Croft’s father).28 Putting their friendship to one side, however, he had not jumped at the offer when Croft first made his approach: he had just started work on The World of Beachcomber, BBC2’s fine adaptation of J. B. Morton’s much-admired newspaper columns, and, as he would put it later, he ‘wasn’t particularly hungry’.29 As a former prisoner of war – he had spent four harrowing years in a German labour camp in Liezen, Austria – he would have been forgiven for regarding the subject matter with suspicion, but, in fact, he found it quite appealing. The reason for his reluctance had more to do with the high casualty rate of new situation-comedies: ‘The ups and downs of the profession had made me cautious.’30
He decided to phone a friend: John Le Mesurier. ‘I’ll do it if you do it,’31 said Dunn. ‘Yes,’ replied Le Mesurier, ‘but … ’, and suggested that they ‘hung out a little’ in the hope that the money might improve.32 Dunn agreed with ‘Le Mez’ (as he was known to his friends), and delayed making a decision. Croft, however, had already enlisted a standby: an inexperienced but very promising 28-year-old actor by the name of David Jason. ‘I didn’t know
