Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
Missing original episodes have been reshot with a marvellous cast
I was still a student when I hosted my first TV show, exactly fifty years ago. It was called Child of the Sixties and featured me sitting on a stool, quizzing the great and the good of the day about the decade that was just coming to an end. Michael Foot and Iain Macleod were two of my star interviewees. I think they were rather brilliant, but we will never know because, shortly after transmission, the videotape on which the show was recorded was wiped.
That was the way it used to be. Programmes were wiped routinely, so that the costly tape could be recycled and used to record new stuff. You don’t give a toss about my show, I know, but you probably do care about the missing episodes of Dad’s Army. David Croft and Jimmy Perry’s Home Guard sitcom ran to 80 episodes between 1968 and 1977; three of the great originals are missing, presumed wiped.
An enterprising producer has just remade them, using the original shooting scripts – though not, of course, the original cast. I went to Pinewood to watch the filming – with Kevin Mcnally as Captain Mainwaring, Robert Bathurst as Sergeant Wilson and Timothy West as Private Godfrey – and was blown away. The scripts have stood the test of time and, in terms of clout and quality, the new casting rivals the old. The BBC was not interested in recreating these lost episodes; you will find them on Gold. You are in for a treat. And given that the first two series of Dad’s Army were shot in black and white for a small square screen, I am encouraging the producer to remake all those as well.
I had lunch the other day with my old friend Anthony Holden, 72, journalist, biographer and poker player. We have known each other for more than half a century, since our Oxford days. Unhappily, Tony has had a stroke, which has confined him to a wheelchair and
robbed him of the use of his left arm and leg. Happily, his mind is as sharp as ever and, albeit with effort, he can use his right hand to keep on tapping out his memoirs. They will be brilliant, both because Tony has quite a tale to tell (of cosy lunches with Diana, Princess of Wales; of poker nights with Martin Amis and David Mamet), and also because he has a special way with words. I know few writers who use them with such style and precision, which is why I agree with my friend when he says we need to stop using the word ‘stroke’ as a medical term. ‘Stroke is a gentle word,’ insists Tony. ‘You stroke a hand or a cheek. A stroke is a loving caress. There was nothing loving or gentle about what happened to me.’ I have decided to support my friend and strike stroke from my vocabulary in future. An ischemic stroke is similar to a heart attack, except it occurs in the blood vessels of the brain – so let’s call it what it is: a brain attack.
I am halfway through the 42-date national tour of my one-man theatre show, Break a Leg! It’s going well. The downside is that after the show there is almost never anywhere decent to eat. The Chinese restaurants that I loved in my twenties when I first went touring don’t exist any more: the children of the families who ran them are all accountants now. The upside is that I have a good companion with me as I sit on my bed in my B and B, tucking in to
my M&S takeaway quinoa salad with a little plastic fork. It is Sir Roy Strong, CH – not someone you would normally associate with a little plastic fork.
I knew Roy would be fun company, because my friend the singer, dancer and former child star Bonnie Langford once crossed the Atlantic with him (they were each providing on-board entertainment for Cunard and shared the ‘artistes’ table’ at dinner) and loved him. He is 83 now and not actually sharing my digs – but I feel he is, because I am reading myself to sleep every night with Volume One of his published diaries. They are as good as those of my favourites (Noël Coward and Virginia Woolf) and cover Strong’s years as the young director of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, with glorious set-pieces featuring royals (major and minor) and needle-sharp descriptions of the key figures of the time.
Last night, Grey Gowrie made his first appearance: ‘He is a curious saturnine fellow with a dark complexion, as though descended from Spaniards wrecked in the Armada.’ Strong’s descriptions of his wedding day and of the death of his cat both brought tears to my eyes and I have learnt from him the way to deal with any trauma. Following the first nightmarish meeting of the new trustees of the V&A, Sir Roy reports, ‘I sent for tea and chocolate cake to aid recovery.’
After almost three years of postreferendum trauma, I reckon that’s just what the entire nation needs now.