Stupid boy?
But I’ve got 12 O-levels and four A-levels, says Dad’s Army’s Pike
AS THE butt of Dad’s Army’s most enduring catchphrase, he will for ever be known as: ‘You stupid boy.’
But actor Ian Lavender insists he’s nothing like the dim-witted Private Pike, whom he played in the long-running sitcom.
‘I don’t think you could ever say I was stupid ’ says the actor. ‘I got 12 O-levels and four A-levels.
‘I also got two Scholarship levels, but I don’t think they have them any more. And the only reason I don’t have a degree is because I went to drama school.’
And at 69, he no longer fits the dismissive ‘boy’ label levelled at him by Arthur Lowe’s Captain Mainwaring, either.
Lavender admits, however, that writers Jimmy Perry and David Croft did base their characters on the actors who played them, with Lowe ‘pompous’ and John Le Mesurier ‘vague’ like Sergeant Wilson. ‘If you look at the very earliest scripts, they are very different to the ones that followed,’ he has said. ‘Jimmy and David had got to know all the actors and started to write scripts around our personalities.’
Capt Mainwaring and Sgt Wilson will be played by Toby Jones and Bill Nighy in the big-screen remake due out in February, with Inbetweeners star Blake Harrison as Pike. But Lavender will return to Walmington-on-Sea, ‘massively promoted’ to play Brigadier Pritchard. The only other original cast member, Frank Williams, will reprise his role as Rev Timothy Farthing.
Williams, 84, says the BBC series remains a favourite because it celebrates ‘Britishness’ – even if that limits its success elsewhere. ‘It achieved some success in Australia and New Zealand, and there have even been one of two German members of the Dad’s Army Appreciation Society. But that’s about it.’
Ominously, for the makers of the new film, he says that cinema audiences have not previously taken to their favourite characters being recast.
‘In the 1971 film, they cast Liz Fraser as Mrs Pike, which desperately hurt Janet Davies, who had created the character on TV. That, I think, was a mistake. People had got used to Janet in the role. You do get to feel you know these characters. They become like friends, like one of the family. The parts fitted all the actors like a glove.’
Dad’s Army is still repeated on BBC2, which Williams says earns him ‘a thousand times’ his original fee – but that with inflation, ‘that works out as what we would get in today’s money for doing a half-hour episode’.