Dad’s Army: The Story of a Very British Comedy

It took him just three days, from start to finish, to write the script. It was called The Fighting Tigers. He put it in the drawer of his desk and went back to work: ‘I just didn’t know who to show it to.’14

Early in July, during a break in the Theatre Workshop’s run, came a stroke of good fortune. Perry’s agent, Ann Callender, called with news of a small but eye-catching role in an episode of a popular prime-time BBC TV situation-comedy. As the situation-comedy was Beggar My Neighbour,15 whose producer-director happened to be David Croft, whose wife happened to be Ann Callender, Perry realised that he had not only found a good part, but also a great contact. David Croft was one of several top producers at the BBC, along with Duncan Wood (Hancock’s Half-Hour, Steptoe and Son), James Gilbert (It’s a Square World, The Frost Report), Dennis Main Wilson (The Rag Trade, Till Death Us Do Part) and John Ammonds (Here’s Harry, The Val Doonican Show, later The Morecambe & Wise Show).16 He had cut his teeth on a wide range of shows, including one technically inventive series of The Benny Hill Show (1961) and thirteen editions of This Is Your Life (1962) at its most Reithian, before carving out a niche for himself, starting with Hugh and I (1962–8), as the creator of well-crafted, character-driven situation-comedies. He was fortunate to be at the BBC during the era of Hugh Carleton Greene, a cultured and courageous Director-General who reminded his programme-makers that they were there to serve the public rather than the politicians or the press, and the BBC, in turn, was fortunate to be able to call on programme-makers of the calibre of Croft in order to fulfil this obligation. ‘It was a wonderful atmosphere in which to work,’ Croft recalled. ‘There were some very brilliant people there in those days and they were all devoted to the BBC. When commercial television started they could all have gone and earned much more money elsewhere, but they’d stayed with the BBC because they knew you could do good work there. It’s always important, you know, in the end, to get good programmes.’17

Croft had worked with Jimmy Perry, briefly, once before. At the suggestion of his wife, he had gone down to Watford to see her client appear on stage, and had subsequently cast him in a minor role in one episode of Hugh and I at the end of January 1966. Neither man, it seems, emerged from the encounter sensing that the seeds of a lasting friendship had been sown. Croft had been happy enough with Perry’s efforts – the lines had been learnt, the marks had been hit – but he was immersed in the production of fourteen half-hour episodes of a high-profile show, and there was no time to dwell on such transient contributions. Perry, on the other hand, had been somewhat intimidated by Croft’s briskly efficient style of direction: ‘I didn’t know if he was having an off day, or I was giving a bad performance, but I do remember thinking to myself: “He looks a bit grim. I’d better watch my step here, better mind my Ps and Qs – I think he could turn nasty.”’18

The second occasion when Croft met Perry, some eighteen months later, proved a far more memorable affair. Croft had recently started work on the second series of Beggar My Neighbour (starring Reg Varney, Pat Coombs, Desmond Walter-Ellis and June Whitfield). ‘We had an episode coming up,’ Croft remembered, ‘in which I wanted someone to play the rather noisy, uncouth brother of Reg Varney’s character, Harry Butt. So my wife took me to the theatre again to see Jimmy, and I could tell he was obviously very good for the part. He was a good actor, was Jimmy. And so I cast him in it.’19 Perry packed two scripts in his briefcase – one of Beggar My Neighbour, the other of The Fighting Tigers – and set off for his first day of rehearsal feeling, as he put it, ‘a bit apprehensive’.20 Eager to impress, anxious to please, he did what he was told, tried his best to do it well, and waited, patiently, nervously, for the right moment to make his move. It never came. Back in his flat, Perry rang his agent for advice. Croft recalled: ‘He said to my wife, “I’ve got this idea about the Home Guard – do you think I dare show it to David?” She said, “Yes, go ahead.”’21 Eventually, he did. ‘It was a hot summer’s day, a Friday, and we’d been rehearsing at this boys’ club. I’d been waiting, waiting, waiting. Finally, outside, I saw David was on his own, fiddling with this wonderful white sports car that he had, so I thought to myself, “Now!” So I went over to him and told him about my script. And he agreed to read it over the weekend.’22

The following Monday, the cast and crew congregated at Television Centre to record the next episode. Perry arrived a little earlier than necessary, hoping that, one way or another, Croft would put him out of his misery as promptly as possible, but the anxious actor soon realised that his busy producer-director was not going to have a spare moment for some time, and there was no option but to wait, and watch, and hope. Finally, after several long, agonising hours, Croft came over to Perry and delivered his verdict: ‘What a terrific idea!’23 The Fighting Tigers had a future.

Croft’s judgement carried some weight within the BBC’s Light Entertainment department. Although he had not been directly responsible for the scripts of either Hugh and I or Beggar My Neighbour, he had, in the past, collaborated on several musicals (including the Cicely Courtneidge vehicle Starmaker); contributed to various pantomimes and West End shows; spent eighteen months as a script editor at Associated-Rediffusion and two years as an extraordinarily industrious young producer, director and writer of around two hundred and fifty shows at Tyne Tees Television before moving to the BBC at the start of the 1960s. Consequently, his opinions – and ambitions – were taken very seriously indeed. ‘I had it in my contract that I could still write for the Palladium,’ he recalled. ‘And that was very unusual for the BBC in those days – to allow you to work for somebody else. I was always very busy. I think the BBC were rather pleased that somebody who actually had some sort of involvement in showbusiness would work for them.’24 Another thing that ensured that Croft, as a producer-director, was accorded an encouraging degree of autonomy was the fact that, once he had settled on a project, he could be relied on to pursue it in an exceptionally professional manner. Bill Cotton Jnr, Head of Variety at the time, remarked:

There were no frills with David. He always got in on time every morning. He always left at 5.30. And he’d always done his work. You’d see in other offices people tearing their hair out at seven or eight o’clock at night: ‘Oh, God! We’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that!’ Dennis Main Wilson, for example, he’d always be working late. David never worked late. He’d planned it, he knew how to produce it, he knew how to direct it, he knew who to talk to, he’d delegated a whole lot of work and then he went home and wrote it up. He was remarkable. I’m not denigrating Dennis Main Wilson, who had got tremendous creative abilities, but he was all over the bloody shop! David was remarkably well organised and efficient. And, of course, he was terribly talented.25

When, therefore, David Croft decided that his next project should be a situation-comedy about the Home Guard – even though it was 1967, twenty-two years after the end of the Second World War, eleven years after Suez, seven years after the end of conscription, three years after America began bombing Vietnam, and right in the middle of a long, hazy summer of love, peace and pot – no one, said Cotton, felt any strong inclination to object:

There’s no percentage in interfering. You trusted people like David, like Jimmy Gilbert, like Johnny Ammonds, to get on with it. And anyway, with most decisions in Entertainment in those days at the BBC, there were always two ways of doing it, so if you agreed one way early enough, and then it became obvious that it wasn’t working, there was still time to change it to the other way. So when someone like David came up with an idea you’d just let him go with it. I do admit that, when he first came into my office and told me that he was planning to do a situation-comedy about the Home Guard, I laughed and said, ‘You’re out of your mind!’ And I wasn’t the only one. But I knew he was going to make a really professional job of it, and, anyway, it wasn’t my decision.26

The man whose decision it was, in the first instance, was the BBC’s Head of Comedy, Michael Mills. Known affectionately to his friends as ‘dark, satanic Mills’27 (an epithet inspired by his Mephistophelean beard and deep-set eyes), this worldly, wordy, witty man had been involved in programme-making since 1947, when he became the Corporation’s – and therefore British television’s – first recognised producer in the field of light entertainment (‘a case,’ he liked to joke, ‘of the blind leading the short-sighted’).28 Mills was widely regarded as being one of the most bold and authoritative arbiters of comic potential in the business. His tastes were catholic – he adored the work of P. G. Wodehouse, and adapted several of his stories for the small screen, but he also relished broader styles, such as bawdy farce. His instincts were sound – he would be the one, prompted by the plays of Plautus, to come up with the idea of Up Pompeii! for Frankie Howerd. ‘Michael was great,’ remembered Bill Cotton. ‘Very, very, well-read, a good judge of a script and a good judge of actors, too. He was a brilliant producer, with enormous taste and flair, and he knew how to put a show together, but he could also be quite impetuous and take some pretty big risks. If he had faith in something he would just push on with it regardless.’29 David Croft agreed:

Michael was a marvellous Head of Comedy. Very enthusiastic. Everything was possible once you’d decided that you could do something. He didn’t ever really discuss budget. He was quite flamboyant like that. I remember, for example, taking over a production of The Mikado from him – it was called Titti-Pu – and finding that he’d already ordered elephants, lions, tigers – the lot. I spent the first few days cancelling all the things we couldn’t afford! So he was wonderfully ambitious, and he had a very broad picture of what you should be doing and what he could do for you, and he did it. He was, I suppose, a genius, and he could do everything in a television studio: if, for example, he wasn’t happy about the way a cameraman was shooting something, he’d go down there, take the camera from him and do the shot himself – ‘From there, understand? That’s what I want you to do, so do it!’ Of course, the result was that the crews were inclined to hate him! But he knew exactly what he was doing. No doubt about it. And as soon as I’d read Jimmy’s script I didn’t hesitate before taking it to Michael.30

Mills duly read the script and agreed immediately with Croft: this was an idea that, if it was handled in the right way, had the potential to run and run.

There was one more obstacle that needed to be overcome, however, before the official programme-making process could really begin. Tom Sloan, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment and the mercurial Mills’ immediate superior, needed to rubber-stamp the decision. In stark contrast to Mills, Sloan was a man who preferred to err on the side of caution, and there was always a chance that he would react warily – or worse – to the prospect of a comedy set in wartime. The son of a Scottish Free Church minister, he was certainly no great admirer of the new strains of humour that seemed intent on mocking all of the old traditional values, and had once insisted upon removing a sketch from a Peter Sellers show on the grounds that ‘to refer to someone who was obviously Dorothy Macmillan as “a great steaming nit” was not in good taste’.31 The brilliant but increasingly embittered programme-maker and executive Donald Baverstock dismissed Sloan as someone who ‘didn’t have an idea in his head’,32 but, as Paul Fox, the newly-appointed Controller of BBC1 in 1967, recalled, the truth was considerably more complex:

Tom had ideas. Good, solid ideas. He did have old-fashioned BBC standards; I think that is absolutely true. But he wasn’t a reactionary. I mean, yes, he spoke out against That Was The Week That Was, and that was mainly for territorial reasons – it was made by the Talks Department rather than his own Light Entertainment – but he defended Till Death Us Do Part solidly and sincerely through thick and thin. And he was an exceptionally good organiser, a good commander of a difficult group of people in Light Entertainment who needed a little bit of binding together. He wasn’t the inspiration behind the success of Light Entertainment at that time; but he was the man who made sure that all of that success became possible, because he allowed Bill [Cotton] and Duncan [Wood] and Michael [Mills] their heads and let them get on with it.33

Barry Took, whom Sloan recruited as a comedy adviser, agreed:

Tom was a decent man. He had a very stiff, military view of the world, but he meant well. He just didn’t like messiness. He didn’t like people who got things wrong, or things that went wrong. And in comedy, of course, people fail most of the time, and many things fail all of the time, so poor old Tom was always a bit anxious, a bit edgy, about it all. But I admired and respected him because his only real concern was to make sure that what ended up on the screen was something to be proud of.34

What is beyond doubt is the fact that Sloan was driven by the passionate conviction that the BBC’s Reithian fundamentals should be reordered from ‘information, education and entertainment’ to ‘entertainment, information and education’.35 He was, in his own sober-suited way, a committed populist. When he took over as Head of Light Entertainment in 1963, the department’s output, he said, was still regarded by the management as ‘something that had to be done rather than something that should be done’.36 Later on in the decade, after the department had played a pivotal role in the Corporation’s successful campaign to win back mass audiences from its commercial competitor (winning every prestigious prize available in the process), the attitude of the powers that be had ‘improved’, he said, to the point where it reminded him of the Pope’s view of the nuns who sold religious relics in St Peter’s 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 work on a second script.

Croft visited 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