target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">33 Jason had just started work on the show that represented his first real breakthrough on television – the ITV/Rediffusion teatime sketch show Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967–9) – but, even so, was quite prepared to commit himself to a high-profile David Croft comedy. Late in February 1968, Croft, who was now growing impatient, spotted Dunn in the BBC canteen, and took the opportunity to ask him if he had reached a decision yet about joining the cast; an embarrassed Dunn stalled again, and then slipped quietly away ‘hoping that John would [soon] make up his mind and that David would not resent the delay’.34
Wheels began turning within wheels: Dunn’s agent, Michael Grade, was a close friend of Bill Cotton, and spoke to him on an informal basis in order to ensure that someone at the BBC realised that his client really was predisposed to join the show. David Croft, meanwhile, had begun taking steps to resolve the matter once and for all. The following day, David Jason recalled, proved full of surprises: ‘The order of events was as follows: I went to the BBC and read for the part at 11 a.m.; soon after, my agent received the message that I had the part; by 3 p.m., I was out of work! Over the lunch period Bill Cotton had persuaded Clive to take the part, and hadn’t informed the producer. The rest is history!’35
Dunn, it seems, had just heard via Freddie Joachim that Le Mesurier had finally decided to accept, and the news had sparked him into action.36 Once his billing had been secured – third, below Lowe and ‘Le Mez’ – and the assurance had been given that he would be handed the pick of the ‘Joey Joeys’ – the physical comedy – he proceeded to make a commitment. Both men received and signed their contracts on 29 February 1968 (although Le Mesurier’s fee was set at a sum £52 10s higher than Dunn’s – or Lowe’s),37 and the first tier of the cast was complete.
The remainder of the platoon proved somewhat easier to assemble. Croft cast Arnold Ridley as Private Godfrey. Up until this point, Ridley’s life had been chequered with bad luck: he had been invalided out of the Army on two separate occasions (first in 1917, following the Battle of the Somme, then after talking his way back into service, in 1940, following the evacuation from Dunkirk); his production company, Quality Films, went bust after just one, well-received release (Royal Eagle, 1936), and he had been forced to sell the rights to some of his most enduringly popular – and lucrative – plays (including The Ghost Train, 1925) in order to stave off bankruptcy. There had been spells in various soap operas – including Crossroads (as the Revd Guy Atkins) and Coronation Street (as Herbert Whittle, the would-be wooer of Minnie Caldwell), as well as an ongoing role in The Archers (as Doughy Hood) – and undemanding one-off appearances in such series as White Hunter (1958) and The Avengers (1961 – as, all too predictably, ‘Elderly Gent’), but, at the beginning of 1968, the septuagenarian actor was still performing primarily because he could not afford not to. ‘He was another one who’d worked for me before,’ Croft recalled:
He’d been very good, very funny, and he was a lovely, gentle character. He looked right, sounded right. I was a bit worried about him because I think he was already 72 when I first interviewed him for the part. I’d said, ‘I don’t think I can save you from having to run about a bit now and then. Are you up for it?’ And he’d said, ‘Oh, yes, I think I’ll manage.’ As it turned out, of course, he couldn’t, but we got an enormous amount of capital out of helping him on to the van and things like that, you know. So he turned out to be a very successful character.38
Casting Dumfries-born John Laurie as Private Frazer had been another one of Michael Mills’ suggestions. Laurie, who at 71 was Ridley’s junior by a single year, was a hugely experienced actor: he had played all of the great Shakespearean roles at the Old Vic and Stratford, and appeared in a wide range of movies, including two directed by Alfred Hitchcock – Juno and the Paycock (1930) and The 39 Steps (1935) – three by Laurence Olivier – Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1954) – and four by Michael Powell (the most notable of which was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, in which he played the ever-loyal Murdoch), as well as one starring Will Hay – The Ghost of St Michael’s (1941). He had been working intermittently on television since the mid-1930s, but it had only been since the start of the 1960s that he had begun appearing on a relatively regular basis (first as thriller writer Algernon Blackwood in Associated-Rediffusion’s 1961 Tales of Mystery, and later as Dr McTurk in the 1966 TVS children’s science-fiction series The Master, as well as several cameo roles in both The Avengers and Dr Finlay’s Casebook). David Croft was well aware of what Laurie could do – he had worked with him before in a 1965 episode of Hugh and I,39 and had every faith in his ability to flesh-out the still-skeletal figure of Frazer – but was apprehensive about the actor’s reaction to such an under-developed character:
‘Frazer’, at that time, was described in the script simply as ‘A Scotsman’. It can’t have been very inspiring to such an experienced actor. Michael Mills said, ‘Make him into a fisherman.’ So Jimmy and I made him into a fisherman for that first episode. No use to us at all, of course, as a fisherman never went out to sea in those days because it was the invasion coast. Later on, we started allowing him to make coffins in his workshop, and that developed into him becoming the undertaker – and then he became very useful indeed, a marvellous character. But we did find it difficult, at the start, to write for him, as this ‘Scottish fisherman’, and I doubt that John was too impressed either.40
Laurie, sure enough, was far from impressed, but he had a policy of never refusing offers of work, and so he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to play a character whose lifetime he confidently expected to last no longer than six half-hour episodes.
James Beck was a far more willing recruit. The 39-year-old actor from Islington had been working extremely hard at establishing himself on television since the start of the 1960s – following a formative period spent in rep at York – but had not yet succeeded in securing a regular role in a significant show. At the end of 1963 he had written a typically polite letter to Bush Bailey, the BBC’s assistant head of artists’ bookings, asking if there was any chance of an interview (‘as I don’t seem to be making a great deal of headway’).41 Bailey did see him early the following year, and filed a favourable report, but nothing tangible came of the meeting except for more of the same old bits and pieces. By 1968, most viewers would have glimpsed him at some time or other in the odd episode of such popular police drama series as Z Cars, Dixon of Dock Green and Softly Softly, or in a one-off role in a situation-comedy such as Here’s Harry, but few could have put a name to the face. The prospect of a major role in a new show such as Dad’s Army, therefore, was precisely the kind of opportunity that Beck had been waiting for. Playing a spiv actually represented something of a departure for an actor who had grown used to being cast as characters on the right side of the law: even in his two previous appearances in Croft situation-comedies he had played a police constable on the first occasion and a customs officer on the second.42 As someone who had grown up in the same working-class environment that had (with more than a little help from capitalism and rationing) formed such ambiguous characters, and also as a great fan – and gifted mimic – of Sid Field, it was a departure that Beck relished. ‘He was obviously a talented actor,’ Croft recalled. ‘He just came to me, in fact, in an audition. I had used him before, and I fancied him very much for that particular part. There weren’t any other real competitors for it – except Jimmy, of course, and we’d already ruled him out – so casting Walker turned out to be one of the easiest ones of the lot.’
