IV The Pilot
You put your head on the block every time you televise comedy, for everybody in the audience is an expert in a way that they never are with drama.
DUNCAN WOOD1
It’s folly – sheer folly!/I never doubted you could do it!
PRIVATE FRAZER2
The atmosphere, according to Jimmy Perry, was ‘very tense’3 on the chilly morning at the end of March 1968 when the cast came together for the first time. In those days, before the construction of the BBC’s own rehearsal rooms in North Acton, programmes were prepared in a wide variety of unlikely-looking venues secreted among London’s least alluring nooks and crannies, and, in the case of Dad’s Army, the site for the initial read-through was a stale-smelling back room of The Feathers public house in Chiswick. Here, seated side-by-side around a large mud-coloured table, were the actors whose task it now was to bring the inhabitants of Walmington-on-Sea into life. ‘I looked at that motley crew,’ remembered Perry, ‘and I thought to myself: “This is either going to be my biggest success or my biggest failure – it all depends how they get on.”’4
Some of them – such as Clive Dunn and John Le Mesurier – were old friends; others – such as Arthur Lowe and Arnold Ridley – were merely vague acquaintances; and a few – such as James Beck and Ian Lavender – were total strangers. David Croft took all of the nervy uncertainty in his stride – he was used to the awkwardness of these occasions – but Jimmy Perry could not help scrutinising every look, every nuance, every mild little moan and over-loud laugh for portents of good days or bad days to come. His spirits sagged when John Laurie turned to him and said in a voice of casual menace, ‘I hope this is going to work, laddie, but to my mind it’s a ridiculous idea!’, but later, during a coffee break, they were revived when Bill Pertwee came over and assured him that the show was ‘going to be a winner’.5 He remained, nonetheless, over-sensitive and apprehensive; this had been his big idea, his personal project, and now it was set to be tested.
Preparations had certainly been thorough. David Croft was determined to make the programme seem as true to its period as was humanly possible. Any line that sounded too ‘modern’, such as ‘I couldn’t care less’, was swiftly removed from the script. The services of E. V. H. Emmett, the voice of the old Gaumont-British newsreels from the 1930s and 1940s, were secured to supply some suitably evocative scene-setting narration. Two talented and meticulous set designers, Alan Hunter-Craig and Paul Joel, were brought in to create a range of believably 1940s-style surroundings, and, after researching the era at the Imperial War Museum, they either found or fabricated the right kinds of food – Spam, snoek, dried egg, fat bacon pieces, rabbit, potatoes, cabbages and carrots – brands – Camp coffee, Typhoo tea, Bird’s custard, Brown’s ‘Harrison Glory’ peas, Porter’s ‘Victory’ self-raising flour, Orlox beef suet, Horlicks tablets, SAXA salt, Sunlight soap, Craven ‘A’ cigarettes – furniture – elderly desks, ‘utility’-style shelves, sideboards, cabinets – portraits – of the King and Queen, and Churchill (‘Let Us Go Forward Together’) – and posters – bearing such advice as ‘Keep it under your hat’, ‘Hitler will send no warning’ and ‘Keep it dark’ – to ensure that every home, hall, bank and butcher’s shop in Walmington-on-Sea would reach the screen reflecting a richly authentic wartime look. Sandra Exelby, an accomplished BBC make-up specialist, developed a variety of period hairstyles and wigs, while George Ward, the costume designer, searched far and wide for genuine LDV and Home Guard brassards, badges, boots, uniforms, respirators and weapons, ordering what other outfits were needed from Berman’s, a London costumier (and he made a point of having Captain Mainwaring’s uniform made from out of a slightly superior quality material in order to reflect the higher salary he would, as a bank manager, have received). Someone even managed to find an old pair of round-rimmed spectacles for Arthur Lowe to wear.
‘It had to look right,’ Croft confirmed, ‘and, of course, people had to be able to really believe in the characters.’6 Both he and Perry had worked hard to provide each major character with a plausible past – Jack Jones, for example, had been given a long and elaborate military career (which went all the way from Khartoum, through the Sudan, on to the North-West Frontier, back under General Kitchener for the battle of Omdurman, the Frontier again, then on to the Boer War and the Great War in France) to lend more than a little credence to his regular rambling anecdotes. Each actor was encouraged to draw on any memories which might help them to add the odd distinguishing detail (John Laurie remembered his time as a Home Guard in Paddington – ‘totally uncomical, an excess of dullness’ – and found an easy affinity with Frazer’s strained tolerance of ‘a lot of useless blather’).7
The theme song was Jimmy Perry’s idea. ‘I wouldn’t call myself a composer,’ he explained, ‘I’d call myself a pastiche artist. My aim is to write something that makes you know, as soon as the show starts, exactly what it’s going to be about. For Dad’s Army, I wanted to come up with something that took you straight back to the period and summed up the attitudes of the British people.’8 His lyrics, when they came, could not have seemed more apposite:
Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler
If you think we’re on the run?
We are the boys who will stop your little game.
We are the boys who will make you think again.
’Cause who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler
If you think old England’s done?
Mister Brown goes off to town
On the eight twenty-one
But he comes home each evening
And he’s ready with his gun.
So who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler
If you think old England’s done?9
Everything about these words – their polite defiance, their frail ebullience, their easy grace – belied their belated origin. ‘I was very proud of it,’ Perry admitted.10 He composed the music in collaboration with Derek Taverner, whom he had known since their time together in a Combined Services Entertainment unit in Delhi, and then resolved to persuade Bud Flanagan, one of his childhood idols, to perform the finished song. Flanagan (along with his erstwhile partner, Chesney Allen) was still associated firmly and fondly in the public’s mind with such popular wartime recordings as ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ and ‘We’re Gonna Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line’, and his warm and reedy voice was the ideal instrument to age artificially this new ‘old’ composition. Fortunately, although the 72-year-old music-hall veteran was not in the habit of recording songs that he had not previously performed, he agreed, for a fee of 100 guineas, to supply the vocal. On the afternoon of 26 February 1968, he arrived at the Riverside Recording Studio in Hammersmith and, to an accompaniment from the Band of the Coldstream Guards, he proceeded to sing: ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler … ’ Jimmy Perry, standing at the back of the production booth, was visibly thrilled: ‘It sent a sort of
