The creator of Dad’s Army, who also co-wrote Hi-de-hi!
Jimmy Perry, who has died aged 93, created and co-wrote – with David Croft – one of the best-loved British comedies of all time. But Dad’s Army, based on Perry’s own wartime experience in the Home Guard, was almost never made, said The Daily Telegraph. With Mary Whitehouse waging war on the BBC, its executives were worried that a show that poked fun at Britain’s war veterans would just bring them more trouble; one head of department called the concept “absolutely mad”. And test screenings of the pilot episode were not positive: the public wanted to forget about the War. But Croft – who was already working for the BBC – managed to hide the report from his superiors, and Dad’s Army got the green light. An immediate hit, it ran for 80 episodes, attracting up to 18 million viewers. “Of all the cultural success stories of the late 1960s,” noted the historian Dominic Sandbrook, “Dad’s Army was not only the most unexpected, but one of the most enduring.”
Jimmy Perry was born in 1923 into a middle-class family in Barnes, in southwest London, said The Guardian. His father was an antiques dealer, but Jimmy had showbiz aspirations from a young age – and little interest in his schooling. Presenting his parents with one particularly dismal report, he declared that it didn’t matter because “I’m going to be a famous film star one day”. To this, his father – more in sorrow than in anger – replied: “You stupid boy.” Years later, he would make this the regular admonition given by the officious bank manager Captain Mainwaring to the mollycoddled Private Pike, whom Perry based upon his own younger self. Having left St Paul’s School at 14, he found a job in a department store while appearing in talent shows in his spare time. At 16, he joined the 10th Hertfordshire Battalion – the Watford Home Guard. His mother didn’t like him being out so late at night. “She didn’t go so far as making me wear a scarf,” Perry later recalled – but she came close. Called up to the Royal Artillery, he was posted to the Far East, where he joined his unit’s concert party – an experience that would provide the inspiration for another of his and Croft’s comedies, and his personal favourite, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974 to 1981). Still dreaming of becoming an actor, he then enrolled at Rada, but not until he’d spent a season working as a red coat at Butlins.
In the mid-1960s, he was working as a bit-part actor when he had the bright idea of writing his own comedy, and casting himself in it. The result was a script for what he called The Fighting Tigers, which he gave to Croft, then a BBC comedy producer. Perry never did get to play the part he’d created for himself – the cockney spiv Private Walker – as he was too busy writing; but Dad’s Army turned him and Croft into one of the hottest partnerships in British comedy. Like Perry, Croft had done a stint at Butlins, and in 1980, they produced Hi-de-hi!, set in a dismal postwar holiday camp called Maplins. It ran for nine series. Their final collaboration was You Rang, M’lord? (1988 to 1993).
It was Croft’s idea to end each programme with the caption You Have Been Watching, but Perry wrote the theme tunes, and for Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?, sung by Bud Flanagan, he won an Ivor Novello Award. He was appointed OBE in 1978. He married the actress Gilda Neeltje in 1953 (her sister, Diane Holland, played the snooty dancer Yvonne in Hi-deHi!). They had no children.