Dad’s Army goes back on parade
The sitcom classic that refuses to surrender
Sometimes, the past is so seductive that we feel compelled to bring it back into being. In the early 1900s, the classicist Arthur Evans went to Crete and used concrete and guesswork to raise the lost city of Knossos. In 1945, the academic Jan Zachwatowicz rebuilt Warsaw’s Old Town, employing old photographs as his guides. This year, Gold, the free-to-view TV channel, embarked upon its own version of these projects. Using a platoon of experienced actors, a painstaking recreation of a Forties Anglican church hall and scripts by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, it has filled a regrettable gap in our nation’s archive.
Three 1968 episodes of the muchloved sitcom Dad’s Army were junked by the BBC in the Seventies when the preservation of monochrome television was considered a senseless abuse of shelf space. But now, thanks to Gold, they exist as plausible modern reproductions. In The Loneliness of the
Long Distance Walker, Mathew Horne plays Walmington-on-sea’s favourite spiv, unexpectedly called up to fight. In A Stripe for Frazer, promotion induces megalomania in the platoon’s resident apocalyptic Scotsman (now played by David Hayman). In Under
Fire, the new cast tackle a fire in the church hall. (Here, they had more than a script to guide them – Perry and Croft recycled the sequence in a later episode, Uninvited Guests.)
The cultural archaeology is impeccable. As Captain Mainwaring, Kevin Mcnally abides by Arthur Lowe’s decision not to separate his teeth unless absolutely necessary. The new Sergeant Wilson, Robert Bathurst, has made a forensic study of John Le Mesurier’s habit of rubbing his face while focusing on the middle distance. The producers have even replicated a version of the closing titles appropriate to the 1968 series, filming the actors against a back-projected battlefield, rather than recreating the more familiar on-location version that made its debut in 1969.
The original run of Dad’s Army
concluded in 1977, with Mainwaring and his men breaking the fourth wall to toast Britain’s Home Guard with champagne. But the series won’t stay in the past. It is more accessible now than when it was in production. Repeats retain a commanding position in the BBC Two schedule. The radio version performs endless duty on Radio 4 Extra. A two-man touring stage adaptation begins a second patrol in the autumn. Oliver Parker’s starry 2016 film demonstrated that Perry and Croft’s characters were sufficiently strong to bear interpretation by new actors.
Much as everyone adores Private Godfrey, with his sweet smile and his weak bladder, few in the Seventies would have anticipated that Arnold Ridley’s character would join King Lear and Uncle Vanya in the repertoire of Timothy West and Michael Gambon. The biggest surprise, though, is the promiscuous afterlife Dad’s Army now enjoys in our political conversation. Like the Keep Calm and Carry On poster that became a locus of British self-pity during the Gordon Brown years, the age of Brexit has requisitioned Dad’s Army as a battleground. Last month the TV producer Daisy Goodwin argued that unending repeats of the show had encouraged the British electorate to over-romanticise the war and vote like a fortress nation. Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s first vice-president, used the sitcom to characterise Theresa May’s Brexit negotiators. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, they haven’t got a plan,” he told the BBC. “It’s like Lance Corporal Jones. ‘Don’t panic! Don’t panic!’ Running around like idiots.” The sharpest part of that remark? Timmermans’s absolutely precise and correct identification of the rank of Clive Dunn’s character.
And yet, political arguments have attended Dad’s Army since its inception, when Jimmy Perry clashed with the BBC executives who objected to his mockery of the Home Guard. “The whole object of this comedy series,” protested Perry in a memo to his bosses, “is to contrast the pathetic, comic, but valorous nature of the Home Guard, who believed at the time that this [the Nazi hordes] was what they were up against. It seems to me to be not only right but essential that this fact is brought home to the viewers.” Perry was an inexperienced writer, but he was also a veteran of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, which, with Oh! What A Lovely War, had written the rule book on how to turn global conflict into comedy. A compromise was reached. Perry agreed to give the first episode a present-day prologue, which would establish a more respectful note and turn the series into a flashback. But like many executive attempts to reduce ambiguity, it generated more.
The prologue takes us to a black-tie dinner in 1968. The cast are not as we remember them. Pike is a middle-aged pipe-smoker with a luxuriant moustache. Frazer has grown a goatee beard. A hearing aid dangles at his collar. Walker has lost his spiv’s moustache and gained an enormous cigar. All are seated below a giant Union Jack.
Captain Mainwaring gets up to speak. And there is a kind of genius in the words that Perry wrote for him. “When I was first invited to be guest of honour tonight at the launching of Walmington-on-sea’s ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign, I accepted without hesitation. After all, I have always backed Britain. I got into the habit of it in 1940, but then we all backed Britain.”
Dad’s Army now serves double helpings of nostalgia – both for the war years and the time in which it was produced. But we forget the fragility of Britain’s status as that first episode was transmitted. In 1968, the Angloamerican relationship was cool, thanks to Harold Wilson’s devaluation of sterling and refusal to support the war in Vietnam. Relations with Britain’s former colonies had not been warmed by the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, legislation in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. The weakness of the economy was proverbial. “It ought to be shaming for British people, with our history, to let our country be the sick man of Europe,” declared an editorial in The Times of December 1968.
The Tories’ preferred cure, as prescribed by the party’s 1966 manifesto – “Restore respect for Britain and lead her into Europe” – would remain unadministered until 1973. In that moment, the Wilson government had given its approval to “I’m Backing Britain” – an initiative that encouraged UK workers to improve the economy by doing unpaid overtime. It was short-lived, much derided, and faded away after the press baron Robert Maxwell attempted to hijack it with his own “Buy British” campaign. (The promotional T-shirts turned out to be made in Portugal.) But British comedy now memorialises it – in the final shot of Carry On Up the Khyber (1968), where the slogan flutters over the fictional Indian state of Khalabar, and in the first scene of Perry and Croft’s greatest sitcom.
From then to now, Dad’s Army marches on. Future historians trying to reconstruct its progress through British culture will have their work cut out for them. But it would be quite legitimate to ask: who did we think we were kidding?
Dad’s Army: the Lost Episodes begins on Gold at 8pm on Sunday.
‘The biggest surprise, though, is the promiscuous afterlife Dad’s Army now enjoys in our political conversation’