Dad’s Army at 50
Charles Moore on the heroes that almost were
‘Anyone who watched the programme will be able to describe the character of every major participant, and probably every minor one’
At 8.15pm on July 31 1968, we turned on our black-and-white television, sat down, and waited for it to warm up. At 8.20, the awaited programme began. There had been strong advance interest from the Moore family, but also some disquiet, due to the programme’s title. My father much disliked the word “Dad”, preferring “Daddy” or “Papa”. He was very keen on the idea of a comedy about the Home Guard; but he infected us with the fear that a show called Dad’s Army might be filled by – to him – nightmarishly vulgar figures from the world of light entertainment, people like Rolf Harris or Bruce Forsyth.
That year, Brucie was famous for singing the song I’m Backing Britain, which supported a short-lived campaign to get everyone to work harder.
The opening sequence – now forgotten – of the first episode was indeed about “I’m Backing Britain”. It was set in the 1968 present. Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) is introduced as the guest of honour at the launch of the Walmington-on-sea “I’m Backing Britain” campaign. In his speech of self-congratulation, he says, “After all, I have always backed Britain. I got into the habit of it in 1940…”
Then came the opening song, by Bud Flanagan: “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler/ If you think we’re on the run?” and the viewer was transported to May 14 1940, the day the Local Defence Volunteers (quickly renamed the Home Guard by Churchill) were created. I remember knowing, from that moment, that the programme would be a success.
How did I know that? After all, I was only 11 years old, and therefore had no memory of the Second World War. Partly, it was a matter of local patriotism. We lived (as my family and I still do) in East Sussex, a likely spot for the German invasion – just where that Union Jack arrow in the opening credits pokes back at the swastika. When Flanagan sang about Mr Brown going “up to town on the 8.21”, I misheard him as saying “A21”, the appalling road all too near our house. Our village, Whatlington, sounded quite like Walmington.
In our area, therefore, the Home Guard was particularly and urgently needed. In our village, it started (as the LDV) with 12 members. My grandfather was the oldest, my uncle the youngest. The Moores provided its most lethal weapons – two shotguns, one of them so old that it had the hammers on the outside, and a pike surrendered to my ancestors at the end of the Irish rebellion of 1798. The pike stands on the stairs still.
So naturally I wanted the programme to succeed. Much more important than the local interest, though, was the tone.
In all the stories I had heard about the home front, one tone dominated. It was comic, with something else underneath. It trapped the very big, bad thing that is war and brought it, tamed, into the small room of home life. An example: during the war, all church bells were silenced, with orders that they were to be rung only if the Germans invaded. One morning in 1940, my family’s gardener came into our kitchen. Everyone was gathered for breakfast, which his wife May was preparing. “The church bells are ringing,” he said, “The Germans are invading!” “Well,” said May, “there’ll be no breakfast for them.” (It was a false alarm, of course.)
Dad’s Army captured that tone from the first moment, and never lost it through nine series and 80 episodes. It is what made the programme both funny and moving, a bit like Shakespeare’s soldiers the night before Agincourt. We, the viewers knew that, in 1940, Agincourt never came (except in the skies). But Mainwaring, Sergeant Wilson, Corporal Jones and the rest of them could not know that. With their inadequate weapons and their shabby uniforms (“All caps too small and the fit of the rest grotesque”, wrote my grandfather in his diary when the rig finally arrived), they expected to fight. This their creators, David Croft and Jimmy Perry, never forgot. The storylines of Dad’s Army are what I remember the least. People remind me of incidents – the appearance of Barbara Windsor, for example, as Laura la Plaz, a sharpshooting artiste (“the crackshot of the pampas”) – which I had completely forgotten. What endures is the overall situation of the comedy – never was the word “sitcom” more apposite – that might at any moment have turned into tragedy.
And, of course, the characters. Anyone who watched the programme will be able to describe the character of every major participant, and probably every minor one, such as the vicar and the verger, as well. At the end of each programme, the camera would single them out as they marched raggedly along – the tottering Godfrey (Arnold Ridley); Walker (James Beck) puffing furtively on a cigarette; the alarmist, contemptuous Frazer (John Laurie); poor, silly, young Pike (Ian Lavender); foolish old Jones (Clive Dunn); vague, bored Wilson (John le Mesurier); and their proud captain, Mainwaring, strutting in the lead. This trick turned them into comedy’s Magnificent Seven, and fastened all of them in our minds.
Like PG Wodehouse, though in quite different style, the authors understood that English humour relies on catching exactly what it is that people say. “Trousers are very personal things, you know,” says Mainwaring in one episode, “not to be bandied about”. Only Mainwaring could have used those words. Indeed, Arthur Lowe so absolutely was Mainwaring that, as Graham Mccann’s excellent book on the programme discloses, he actually had a clause inserted in his contract saying that at no time would he be required to remove his trousers.
Related to this exactitude was the authors’ feel for the great staple of British comedy – class distinctions. It would have been much less funny if Wilson, Mainwaring’s social superior, had been his commanding officer, rather than the other way round.
Mainwaring’s lust for power is inspired by the chip he carries on his shoulder from having been to Eastbourne Grammar. Wilson, by contrast, went to what Mainwaring calls “some tuppenny ha’penny public school”.
Mainwaring also has something to prove because he served in 1919 only, whereas Wilson fought at Mons, Gallipoli and Passchendaele.
This absurd little man performs numerous acts of bravery, including walking through what he thinks is a minefield, and jumping into Jones’s van when it is heading, driverless, towards an electricity supply station with an unstable bomb on board. Nothing explodes.
The power of Dad’s Army is the comedy of the bomb that might go off, but doesn’t – the heroism that might have been.