Pike, last man standing, signs off from lifetime of service to comedy
Actor who endeared himself to millions as the ‘stupid boy’ Private Pike in the BBC’S Dad’s Army
IAN LAVENDER, the actor who played Private Pike in Dad’s Army, has died at the age of 77.
Lavender had been the last surviving main cast member of the much-loved series.
Producers of The Dad’s Army Radio Show, a stage production, said: “We are deeply saddened to hear the passing of the wonderful Ian Lavender. In what truly marks the end of an era, Ian was the last surviving member of the Dad’s Army main cast.
“His wonderful performance as Private Frank Pike will live on for decades to come. He leaves behind a legacy of laughter enjoyed by millions.”
JASPER REES recalls the crafting of an unforgettable if hapless star of British television comedy.
The obituary pages often pay tribute to the last men and women who made a contribution to the war effort between 1939 and 1945. Those heroes of yore must now budge up and make room for that least military of veterans: Private Pike of Dad’s Army.
Ian Lavender, who played Pike, was the last surviving member of the Home Guard who dauntlessly defended British shores against German invasion in Walmington-on-sea. In 1968 he was only 20 when, fresh-faced, he was cast in a new BBC sitcom, the juvenile in a troupe of codgers, two of whom had been born in the 19th century (John Laurie and Arnold Ridley). Most had died by the early 1980s, only Clive Dunn surviving to 2012.
By dint of being the youngest member, Lavender was left to carry on talking about the show as its surviving repository of memories. He accepted with grace the reality that
Dad’s Army was the only thing anyone ever wanted to ask him about. Including me when I met him in 2006.
“How can you be upset that people still want to talk about it?” he said. “Go up to a young actor and say, ‘Here’s a script, it will run over 10 years, so it’ll keep you nicely employed, lots to do in between, there’ll be repeat fees through the rest of your life, it’s going to create work for you but stop other work.’ Show me the actor who says, ‘I don’t want to know about that, I don’t want to be in a success’.”
Private Pike was a unique position. While many who watched
Dad’s Army
could remember the war, younger viewers – the ones who were supposedly liberated by the Sixties revolution – had only one character anywhere near their own age to identify with. And he was a far from impressive specimen. The mollycoddled bank clerk was known immortally to Captain Mainwaring, his pompous bank manager, as “stupid boy”. With his weak chest he had evaded conscription, marooning him far from the front lines in North Africa or Normandy among men who were too old to take part in the First World War, let alone the Second.
Through Pike, a gang show about class and age became something else too. There was comedy but also pathos in Pike’s unrelenting naivety, which initially was also Lavender’s. “I nearly caused a strike in the first series by moving furniture on the set,” he recalled. “I thought I was being helpful.” Wet behind the ears, Pike had no understanding that his over-protective mother was carrying on with Sergeant Wilson, though he never stopped gnawing at the conundrum.
“By the time we finish supper,” he would puzzle, “it’s always so late, you never leave our house until after I’ve gone to bed and then you’re back early for breakfast before I’m awake. But what I can’t understand is that I never hear you leave at night and I never hear you come back in.”
“Well I let myself in and out very quietly,” purrs Wilson.
“You don’t do anything else very quietly!”
Many of the older cast members had done serious and reputable work by the time they were cast in Dad’s Army. Lavender began with noble aims to tear up the stage. “When I was a student sitting up in those slips seats at the Old Vic to see Olivier in Love for Love and Othello, it was the ambition of everybody to work at the National. We all wanted to be stars, we knew in our heart of hearts Olivier had to die at some point. I’d come out of the Bristol Old Vic School play the ‘juve’ leads – Florizel and Romeo. Dad’s Army was going to be six tellies, a fun way of spending the summer.”
The show’s success put a stop to his dream of playing Hamlet. Instead he learnt a different sort of craft from Arthur Lowe. “Arthur was a pompous little man with all that that entails,” he recalled. “But he knew he was as well and he played at it, and then eventually he’d let you in on the joke.
Towards the end of that first series he took me on one side and said, ‘Don’t worry if there aren’t a lot of lines. They’ll come. Meanwhile, get yourself a funny costume and stand near me’.”
Lavender took to wearing a claret and blue scarf, in homage to his home club, Aston Villa, and David Croft and Jimmy Perry started writing about it and the mother’s boy wrapped inside it. Pike would be the butt of one of the most indelible gags in all British sitcom. As a punchline, “Don’t tell him, Pike” worked because by the sixth series Pike had been drawn in such beautiful detail that every contour of his character was known: his stupidity, his petulance, his cowardice, but also his vulnerability. The joke works so well because it was quite clear the Germans would make mincemeat of Pike in particular.
Time would go to work on Lavender. The hair went as white, the midriff grew distended. Beyond Dad’s Army, the work came in: The Glums,
Eastenders, serious musical theatre in the shape of Into the Woods and Caroline, or Change.
It was in sentimental tribute to Dad’s Army that Victoria Wood gave him a cameo in her final drama, That Day We Sang. He took the advice of the jobbing comic actor Roy Kinnear. “His philosophy was ‘Take the next job’. Didn’t matter what it was. As a result of Dad’s Army there’s always been one. Nearly always.”
It was the best of British television, and it feels both poignant and significant that its last star has now departed. Lavender himself got used to saying goodbye to his colleagues.
“My friends were 50 and 40 years older than me,” he told me. “To get so close to people and lose them quickly was odd. There was obviously sadness but I couldn’t feel that I had been cheated. I remember one night at dinner John Laurie said, ‘Look at us round this table!’ And he went round the whole cast and described us. He got every one of us.
‘“Arthur Lowe, number two tenor. John Le Mesurier, dilettante. Jimmy Beck, a leading man from a dubious rep in York. Arnold Ridley, failed playwright, failed film producer, failed director, failed actor. Ian Lavender, wet behind the ears, not done nothing. Clive Dunn, spent his life since his first day in prisoner-ofwar camp playing an old man and has no need of the wig now.’
“And here’s me who’s played every part in Shakespeare apart from Henry
VIII and that’s only because I was thin. I’ve become famous for doing this crap!”
They all did, and none was more grateful for it than Dad’s Army’s lowliest old soldier.
‘Arthur was a pompous little man with all that entails. But he knew he was as well and he played at it’
IAN LAVENDER, the actor who has died aged 77, was celebrated for his portrayal of the endearingly naive Private Pike in the hugely successful television comedy series Dad’s Army (BBC, 1968-1977), and he was the last surviving member of the main cast.
Pike, an immature and buttoned-up mother’s boy among the veteran members of the Walmington-on-sea Home Guard, worked in the bank alongside the languid and effete Sergeant Wilson (John Le Mesurier) and the pompous, bossy Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe).
It was implicit in the script that the world-weary Wilson was carrying on an irregular liaison with Pike’s formidable mother. Young Frank Pike – invariably admonished as a “stupid boy” by Captain Mainwaring – would embarrass Wilson by addressing him on parade as “Uncle Arthur” and by innocently passing on such intimate messages as “Mum says can you pick up some sausages for tea?” Lavender delivered Pike’s lines with superb timing and to great comic effect, and his character was based on that of the series co-writer, Jimmy Perry, as a young man.
Lavender’s best-known scene came in an episode called “The Deadly Attachment” (1973), in which the platoon guarded the crew of a German U-boat in the church hall. When the U-boat commander, understatedly played by Philip Madoc, menacingly demands to know the name of his youngest captor for goading him with a put-down of the Führer (“Whistle while you work/hitler is a twerp”), Mainwaring intervenes, shouting: “Don’t tell him, Pike!” This classic one-liner was often reckoned the funniest in the history of British sitcoms.
That episode was watched by an audience put at nearly 13 million, and when it was repeated the following year, nearly
11 million viewers tuned in to see it. Lavender also earned praise for his portrayal of a Germanic Pike in “Ring Dem Bells”, an episode screened in 1975, in which he donned a monocle and adopted a Hollywood-german accent and an air of cruel arrogance. Viewers telephoned the BBC to congratulate him on his versatility and comedic talent.
But his default mode in the series was as the fragile, whey-faced weed. With his over-long Aston Villa scarf – which he picked himself from the costume department as a nod to the team he supported – and khaki cap pulled over his ears, Lavender played Pike, the mollycoddled bank clerk and spare-time private, with a nicely observed range of mannerisms and neurotic twitches.
At 22, he was already several years older than his character when the series began, and by the time it ended his hair had long since turned grey, a transition arrested on screen using a combination of colour spray and Brylcreem.
John Le Mesurier wrote in his memoirs that he feared his Dad’s Army “nephew” would be typecast as a bumbling juvenile, but he was pleased to observe that Lavender’s subsequent career belied this.
Only after nine years and 80 episodes of Dad’s Army did Lavender finally learn the truth about the character he played. When the cast wrapped for the last time, the show’s co-creator David Croft told him that Pike really was Sgt Wilson’s son, the product of a furtive relationship with Mrs Pike. “I never knew until then,” Lavender confessed. “I just said the lines.”
While Lavender never again found quite such a successful or identifiable role as Pike, he scored a modest hit with the television series of The Glums (LWT, 1978-79), in which he played Ron, the gormless son of Jimmy Edwards’s mouldy patriarch. Lavender’s character, as one critic put it, “made Private Pike look like a contestant on Mastermind”.
His other television series included Mr Big (1977) with Prunella Scales and Come Back Mrs Noah (1977-1978), with Mollie Sugden. Having finally cast aside callow, dim-witted youths, he went on to play a wide variety of parts both on television – such as a dentist in Have I Got You… Where You Want Me? (Granada, 1981) and a travelling salesman in The Hello Goodbye Man (BBC, 1984) – and on the stage. In 1989 he appeared with Dustin Hoffman in The Merchant of Venice at the Phoenix Theatre in London.
The son of a policeman, Arthur Ian Lavender was born in Birmingham on February 16 1946 and educated at Bournville Technical School, where, he recalled, he “studied music, drama, cricket and girls”.
Up to the age of 17 he had hopes of a professional cricketing career, but the acclaim for his performance as Pontius Pilate in the school production of The Man Born to be King convinced him that he should go on the stage.
He attended the Bristol Old Vic drama school before going into repertory at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. Strapped for cash, he returned to Birmingham, where he worked as a hospital porter and telephonist.
Lavender’s big break came in 1968 when he took the lead in a half-hour Rediffusion play, Flowers at My Feet, produced by Stella Richman. Then, having been taken on by a new agent, Ann Callender, the wife of the television producer David Croft, he was cast for a role in Croft’s new BBC series, which he thought would employ him for no more than the scheduled seven weeks, as he could not imagine a successful comedy about the wartime Home Guard.
Certainly the first series of Dad’s Army proved to be something of a “sleeper” and made no great impact. But the second series was tremendously popular, and in 1970 the Variety Club gave their Personality of the Year award to the entire cast.
By the mid-1970s, Lavender had grown into the part of Pike to the extent that the writers decided to push him further to the fore. As the show’s biographer Graham Mccann noted, Lavender’s youthful energy, combined with a mature acting technique, proved increasingly valuable to an otherwise elderly cast.
Lavender himself counted the day he was cast as Pike as the luckiest of his life, and Dad’s Army went on to become a television classic. He also appeared in the ill-conceived 1971 film version directed by Norman Cohen, and the West End stage adaptation in 1975.
His other stage credits included George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart (Mermaid, 1970), a touring production of The Ghost
Train (1971), written in 1923 by Arnold Ridley (Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army) and Anita Loos’s play Happy Birthday (Apollo, 1979) with Christopher Timothy, Elizabeth Counsell and Julia Foster in the cast. He gave a notable performance in
J V Stevenson’s Schooldays (Arts, Cambridge, 1980) and played the nosey neighbour in Ray Cooney’s farce, Run for Your Wife.
In the provinces and on tour he appeared in French Dressing and Getting Married. He also won approving notices for his interpretations of Buster Keaton (Theatr Clwyd, Mold), and the lecherous director Lloyd Dallas in Noises Off, and toured New Zealand with One for the Road.
Together with two other well-known television faces, Lavender formed the theatre production company MSL with Malcolm Mcfee of The Fenn Street Gang and Ian Sharrock of Emmerdale Farm. Mcfee and Lavender had a party piece performing There’s a One-eyed Yellow Idol to the North of Kathmandu, which they did to uproarious applause at charity events. Lavender also presented a one-man show, Don’t Tell Him, Pike at the Edinburgh Festival in which he reminisced and took questions about Dad’s Army.
Lavender returned to prime-time television in 2001 as Derek Harkinson, Pauline Fowler’s gay friend in Eastenders,a
role he played until 2005, returning briefly in 2016 to appear with the Walford Players in their Christmas show. That year he also contributed a cameo role as a brigadier to a new film version of Dad’s Army.
Lavender was diagnosed with bladder cancer while preparing to appear in a play in Manchester in 1993, and survived a mild heart attack in 2004.
His first marriage, to the actress Suzanne Kerchiss was dissolved; they had two sons. He married, secondly, the actress Michele (Miki) Hardy.
Ian Lavender, born February 16 1946, died February 2 2024
David Croft, who died in 2011, wrote: My wife, Ann, first spotted Ian playing at the Bristol Vic and brought him into her agency. I saw him on television in Flowers at My Feet with Jane Hylton in which he gave a charming and sensitive performance. He was soon persuaded to join the cast of a new television comedy.
His first day’s filming on Dad’s Army gave an insight into what was to come. He quickly realised that he was liable to be overwhelmed by the team of elderly and experienced actors that surrounded him, so he swiftly acquired the long scarf and the uniform cap worn dead straight and pulled down to his ears. Pike, the Mother’s Boy, began to emerge.
A great friendship sprung up between Ian and the oldest member of the cast, John Laurie (Private Frazer). Ian revelled in John’s wicked sense of humour and a great rivalry sprung up between them as to who would be first to finish the Times crossword.
Arthur Lowe loved working with Ian and close observers of the programme can see a joyous conjuring trick which they frequently performed together. Arthur would fall over a chair or off a ladder or trip on mounting Jones’s van. Ian would be there to catch him and, during the chaos that ensued, Ian would fix the hat and Arthur would take care of the specs.
Arthur would then emerge from the melee, hat awry and glasses askew. After the gales of laughter had peaked, Arthur would contemptuously say “Stupid boy!” and Ian would look deeply wounded. Renewed laughter.