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

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 shiver up my spine. What a moment! To think that dear old Bud Flanagan, whom I’d sat and watched as a kid up in the gallery at the Palladium, was right there now, singing a song that I’d written. Marvellous!’

(#litres_trial_promo) After eight takes – Flanagan had stumbled a few times over one or two of the unfamiliar lines – the song had been captured to everyone’s satisfaction. It was a sound from a bygone era (the final sound, in a way, because Flanagan would die a few months later), and it set the tone for all that was to follow.

Location filming took place between 1 and 6 April. Harold Snoad, David Croft’s production assistant, had selected the old East Anglian market town of Thetford as the regular base. It was a shrewd choice: inside the town itself, the neat rows of grey-brick and flinty houses implied just the right degree of close-knit intimacy. The surrounding area boasted a rich range of vivid natural sights – pine forests stretching out to the north and west, wide open fields, long meandering streams – and man-made contexts – the Army’s Military Training Area was only six miles away at Stanford – in which to frame the fictional world of Walmington-on-Sea. Arthur Lowe travelled down to Thetford by train, Clive Dunn and John Le Mesurier together by car and the remainder of the cast and crew by coach. ‘Everyone knew exactly what they were doing,’ Ian Lavender recalled, ‘except me’:

I didn’t know anything about location shooting. I lived near Olympia in those days, and the journey to TV Centre wasn’t very long, so I just wandered over in the belief that I was going to spend a few hours in Thetford and then come home on the coach. When I got to TV Centre, however, I noticed that everybody had brought their suitcases with them, so I had to invest several shillings for a taxi ride back to pack some clothes! It had never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be coming home at nights – that was how green I was.

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Every external scene for the whole of the first series had to be filmed during that single (unseasonably chilly) week in Norfolk, and, as Lavender remembered, the pace was unrelenting:

It was all a bit of a blur. The only thing I remember of the filming, quite honestly, was when I accidentally came up with Pike’s voice. Most of the filming was mute – because it was going to be mixed in with stock newsreel footage – but one scene, featuring these circus horses going round and round, was done with sound. And all I said was, ‘Have you got the rifles, Mr Mainwaring?’ And this voice came out: ‘Have you got the rifles, Mr Mainwaring?’ Pure shock, I think. And so I more or less stuck with that voice for the next nine years.

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The most surreal moment, said Clive Dunn, occurred when the cast was racing through a few light-hearted scene-setting motions: ‘As we filmed our bits of comedy showing the Home Guard changing road signs to fool the German invaders, a staff car loaded with German NATO officers passed by …, smiling and unaware that we were about to launch into a long comedy series about the Second World War.’

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The evenings were reserved for socialising. ‘There was a good atmosphere right from the very first day,’ Ian Lavender recalled:

I’d been terrified at the start – terrified – but they were all so welcoming. I think I’d already been put through my ‘initiation process’ back in that pub at Chiswick by Arthur. He’d shown me how to smoke a cigarette ‘Arabian style’. He had his own private supply of these cork-tipped Craven ‘A’ cigarettes, and he’d got me to hold one of them like he did, suck it – phew! – and I’d fallen off my stool. That was my first memory of Arthur, socially – making me fall off a bar stool. And then in the hotel at Thetford they were lovely. They’d sort of say things like, ‘Come on, this is your bit as well’, you know, ‘Don’t be afraid of … ’ It wasn’t a matter of taking me under their wing and protecting me, but neither was it a matter of leaving me to sink or swim. They were just very, very, welcoming.

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After Thetford came the rehearsals: at 10.30 on the morning of Monday, 8 April, the cast, Croft and Perry reassembled at St Nicholas Church Hall in Bennett Street, Chiswick, to begin work on the pilot episode, which by this time had been given the title ‘The Man and the Hour’. Some of the actors seemed well-advanced in their characterisations – Arthur Lowe, for example, was quietly confident that both his look (a compressed Clement Attlee) and manner (proud, pompous and pushy) would work rather well, and Ian Lavender (whose prematurely greying hair would be disguised on screen by a combination of colour spray and Brylcream) had decided to give Pike a long Aston Villa scarf (hastily replaced, in the opening credits sequence, by a blue towel because the wardrobe van had left Thetford early), a mildly quavering vocal manner and a childishly inquisitive expression – but one or two, it seemed, were still in need of some advice. Bill Pertwee kept being urged by David Croft to make Hodges even louder and more obnoxious, delivering each line in the music-hall style of ‘on top of a shout’, and Jimmy Perry was and would remain astonished by John Le Mesurier’s unorthodox methods of assimilation:

Talk about casual! The previous week, on the first day of filming at Thetford, John was sitting there very nonchalantly in the lounge of the hotel, and he’d said to me: ‘Oh, James: how do you want me to play this part?’ Well, that was a laugh for a start! As far as I knew, John Le Mesurier only had one performance. Anyway, I said to him: ‘Look, John, it’s all yours on a plate – just do it as you feel.’ So he said, ‘Yes, oh, all right, old boy’, and then he lit a cigarette and said, ‘Who are you going to bet on in the 2.30 today?’ Make no mistake, he was very, very, good, but, really, that man just swanned