Dad's Army

by Graham McCann

  Snoad and Cleasby-Thompson liaised on a daily basis in order to ensure that the shooting schedule of Dad’s Army did not clash with that of the real Army, but there were, perhaps inevitably, one or two occasions over the years when, as Snoad put it, ‘things went slightly wrong’:

  We were at a stables (disused but it still looked OK) filming a complicated sequence with the platoon trying to learn to ride (Captain Mainwaring had decided that with strict petrol rationing the platoon’s transport would be equestrian) when suddenly there was a rustle in the bushes alongside our camera and a young officer in full camouflage uniform (blackened face, the lot) politely informed me that he and his men had orders to blow up this area in 10 minutes! At this a large degree of frenzied conversation ensued and, after I had made an urgent telephone call to the authorities, it was agreed, with only three minutes to go, that they could come back and blow it up the next day!15

  Most problems, however, were of a far more prosaic nature. The combined age of the cast, for example, was, at the start of the 1970s, 524,16 and David Croft was well aware of the fact that, whenever the time arrived for him to say ‘Action!’, some of the actors, through no fault of their own, would not be quite as active as the others. He was particularly anxious to ensure that the ensemble’s two septuagenarians, Arnold Ridley and John Laurie, never felt compelled to overexert themselves – and he always provided both of them with sturdy chairs in which they could relax while the others were obliged to stand – but whereas Ridley, for understandable reasons, welcomed such solicitude, Laurie, although only one year younger, seemed determined to do without it. On one occasion, for example, he and Bill Pertwee were being filmed on horseback, riding at a leisurely pace, when, in the distance, the sound of two practice shots cracked through the air and caused Laurie’s horse to bolt: ‘He managed after a time to bring it under control,’ remembered Pertwee, ‘but I knew he was shaken by the mishap. I asked him if he would like to go back to the caravans for a rest and a cup of tea, but he said, “No, laddie, I’ll be all right, and don’t mention it to the others, I don’t want any fuss.” And that just about summed John up. I think he believed he might break down and not be able to carry on at all if anyone had started showing concern.’17 The sight of Ridley settling into his special chair, said Ian Lavender, was usually the cue for Laurie to stagger past with some weighty piece of equipment, or break out into a gentle little jog, or stride briskly back and forth while ‘assuring’ his semi-recumbent colleague, ‘You just take it easy there, son!’:

  It was a game, really. There was always a sense of competition – friendly competition – between the two of them, because they were the oldest members of the cast. Arnold was very conscious of the fact that he wasn’t very fit – I mean, he hadn’t known a day without pain since the First World War – and both David and Jimmy, therefore, were very considerate towards him, giving him the first-aid bag instead of the heavy rifle, the galoshes instead of the boots, all of that, and, very sensibly, they didn’t write that Arnold should be picking up a telegraph pole. But John Laurie, wicked old man that he was, would be watching Arnold and muttering, ‘Ah, the silly auld fool! See what the auld duffer is doing now!’ And if there was a telegraph pole to be picked up, John would be the one who rushed over to pick it up. To show how fit he was. He wasn’t fit – the chest had gone – so he huffed and puffed. We all knew exactly why he was doing it: to get Arnold worried, to see that the other man in his seventies was still running about and helping. It wasn’t actually meant to make Arnold think that he was old and decrepit and on the verge of being written out. It was just John being a mischievous old man. And he loved doing it. I’d be saying, ‘John, what are you doing?’ ‘Oh, I need to be seen doing something.’ ‘John, go and sit down, you fool!’ He’d try to pick up the telegraph pole: ‘I can do it.’ ‘No, you can’t, sit down!’ ‘You can’t lump me in with him!’18

  One year, Lavender remembered, Laurie was distinctly rattled when Ridley rolled up a little late for the start of location filming in a sleek limousine:

  Arnold had broken his hip, and his leg, which was covered in plaster, was sticking straight out in front of him, so he’d needed to travel in something that gave him plenty of leg room. Naturally, he instantly became the centre of attention – which enraged John. David Croft was the first to rush over, lean into the car and start shaking Arnold’s hand. Now, from a distance, as the rest of us walked over to join him, all we could see was the back of David, leaning towards Arnold, with his arm going up and down, so John turned to me and said: ‘Look! Look! They’re pumpin’ him up! They’re pumpin’ him up again!’ There really wasn’t anything vindictive about it. He was just relishing the fact that he didn’t require the same kind of treatment. It was another little victory for John.19

  When it came to the most physical – and hazardous – routines, Croft had no choice but to rely heavily on the three most agile members of the cast: Clive Dunn, Ian Lavender and Bill Pertwee. It was down to Dunn, for example, to execute the kind of stunts – climbing up and hanging from trees, swinging over the side of bridges, tumbling into the hopper of a threshing machine – that required him to summon up all of the strength of a super-fit 50-year-old while still behaving like a vulnerable 70-year-old, and it was usually Lavender or Pertwee who was exposed to the worst of the mud, sludge and water. ‘You could chuck anyone into a river, if you wanted to, in those days,’ recalled Croft wistfully, ‘and we chucked Bill into quite a few. He was terribly good-natured about it. Ian Lavender spent quite a bit of time in the water, too, and once had a large frog work its way up one of his trouser legs. Eventually, however, we had to put a stop to it, because there were rats in the rivers. Health and Safety weren’t keen.’20

  One feature of filming that never changed was the range of carefully-chosen period vehicles which helped lend the outside sequences such an authentic wartime feel. Hodges’ greengrocer’s lorry, for example, was a 1939 Bedford truck, owned originally by the Air Ministry, which was borrowed each year from a collector in Suffolk, and Jones’ navy-and-white butcher’s van – which served as the platoon’s principal mode of transport – was a 1935 Ford box van that the BBC had found, restored and customised (complete with a line of lidded holes along each side through which the platoon’s rifles could be poked) for use in a series of memorable set pieces. The odd elderly machine would sometimes misbehave – Bill Pertwee, Frank Williams and Edward Sinclair once overshot the set and ended up being thrown into a ditch when the throttle of their vintage motorbike and sidecar became stuck – but most of the assorted staff cars, coaches, trucks, fire engines and steamrollers remained in excellent working order. The butcher’s van, in particular, became a great favourite, and, according to Clive Dunn, there was never any shortage of volunteers to sit behind its steering-wheel when the vehicle was off-camera. On one occasion, he claimed, he and the other actors were on their way back to Thetford after a long day of filming when Arthur Lowe made his bid to assume control: ‘He said, “Can I drive the van for a bit?” So I said, “Do you know how to drive it?” So he said, “Yes, ‘course I do” … So he drove it round for a bit, and then we went near a farm and unfortunately he ran over a cockerel. Well, he was a perfect gent – stopped the van, knocked on the farmer’s door and said, “I’m awfully sorry, my man, I’d like to replace your cockerel.” And the farmer said, “Well, please yourself – the ’ens are round the back!”’21

  The final daily ritual was the viewing of the rushes at The Palace, a little cinema in Thetford. Each evening at 10.30 p.m., the cast and crew would arrive outside the building and wait for the ‘late’ doors to open. Once inside, everyone would settle down and watch a few cartoons while the local projectionist spooled up the latest reel of newly-processed film – sent down by train from London – and readied it for screening. When the sequences were shown, Bill Pertwee remembered, they were often accompanied by such teasing remarks as, ‘Look at the warden, overacting again’, ‘How many more faces is he going to pull
?’, or ‘so and so could have done better then’: ‘A funny sequence would be greeted with spasmodic applause or laughter. Arthur Lowe would generally fall asleep but wake up at just the right moment to make a cryptic remark. We would then return to our respective hotels for a night-cap or two.’22

  When the fortnight finally came to an end, everyone paused to thank the local people for their patience and hospitality, and then packed up, checked out and returned, a little reluctantly, to London. The next time the cast and crew would see each other, a short while later in the rehearsal room, the weather, more often than not, would have turned to rain.

  CHAPTER XI

  Shepperton

  PIKE Mum was ever so surprised when I told her I was going to be a film star.

  FRAZER Rubbish!

  DAD’S ARMY1

  Film is a collaborative business: bend over.

  DAVID MAMET2

  In the summer of 1970, the cast took a short break from the small screen in order to prepare for an appearance on the big one: Dad’s Army, after completing three successful series on television, was set to be made into a movie. It was considered to be more or less de rigueur, in those days, for a British situation-comedy to attempt this hazardous transition – during the first three years of the decade alone, the likes of Up Pompeii!, On the Buses, Please, Sir!, Steptoe and Son, Father, Dear Father, Bless This House and even Love Thy Neighbour, aided and abetted by an ailing and risk-aversive British film industry desperate to tap into television’s mass audience, would all spawn at least one cinematic spin-off – and neither Croft nor Perry had felt inclined to fly in the face of such a fashion.

  The man responsible for getting the project into production was a 34-year-old Dublin-born film-maker called Norman Cohen. He had already directed one situation-comedy spin-off – the workmanlike Till Death Us Do Part (1969) – and his search for another had brought him into contact with Croft and Perry. ‘He offered us a £500 advance to let him find a way to get the movie off the ground,’ Croft recalled. ‘We knew he was quite an entrepreneur, and he was certainly good at that sort of thing, so we told him to go ahead.’3 Armed with Croft and Perry’s synopsis, Cohen proceeded to sound out a number of potential investors, and eventually, after suffering several setbacks, he managed (with the assistance of his agent, Greg Smith) to secure a deal with a US-based producer, John R. Sloan, and a Hollywood studio, Columbia Pictures.

  Croft and Perry were delighted: now, freed from the kind of constraints that came with television’s modest budgets and short spans of time, they could craft the sort of 90-minute screenplay that would allow them to tell a richer, more intricate story, at a more delicately modulated pace, against the backdrop of a fully-visible town peopled by innumerable extras. Cohen – who was duly set to direct – was similarly enthusiastic, announcing that he expected the movie to be ‘clean, harmless fun’, with ‘a lot of visual humour’ which he aimed to achieve without the use of ‘gimmicks or tricksy camera work’: ‘The natural humour is in the playing, and it’s in my job as director to bring it out and make it work on the big screen.’4 His first encounter with the cast, however, was not a great success. ‘He came to see us at Television Centre,’ recalled Ian Lavender, ‘and he admitted that he’d never seen a single episode. I don’t know if he was winding us up or not, but we all thought, “What?”’5 It was not long before news of Columbia’s plans to ‘improve’ certain aspects of the production arrived to further dampen people’s spirits.

  The Americans decided, for example, to use the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St Giles, rather than the familiar surroundings of Thetford, for most of the scenes set in Walmington-on-Sea, to explore all of the ways in which Croft and Perry’s screenplay (which had already been revised once by Norman Cohen) might be made a little more ‘dynamic’, and to cast Liz Fraser, rather than Janet Davies, in the role of Mrs Pike on the grounds that Fraser, fresh from the Carry On franchise, was a performer with a far higher profile.6 ‘Most of the changes struck us as arbitrary,’ said Ian Lavender. ‘I mean, why film in Chalfont St Giles instead of Thetford? Chalfont St Giles wasn’t any nearer to the seaside! No explanation was given to us. And why was Jones’ van changed for the film? Why was that necessary? They wanted another signature tune, too – not to replace “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding …?”, but for us to whistle and sing during the marching sequences and so on – and it was awful. [Columbia’s] attitude seemed to be: “We’re doing the film, we’ll do it differently.” The thought that went through our minds was: “What was wrong with how it was? Why do you want to make it different, if what you wanted to make was that?”’7

  The shooting schedule said it all: Columbia expected the movie to be completed in six weeks – an almost risibly short period of time (seven weeks fewer, for example, than it took a disciplined director like Howard Hawks, back in the days when Hollywood studios were at their most efficient, to make Bringing Up Baby),8 and a clear message to both the cast and the crew that they would not be encouraged to pause and polish. Like so many inexperienced directors before and after him, Cohen began to feel increasingly peripheral, and did what he could to claw back a little of what he took to be his original authority, but the only thing that he came close to achieving was the abrupt termination of his contract. ‘Three weeks before they started filming,’ David Croft recalled, ‘I was told [by representatives of Columbia] that they’d had a lot of trouble with Norman Cohen and they asked me to take over. I said: “No, I won’t do that, because, quite frankly, I don’t really like the script now. It’s been rewritten for him, to his specifications, and there are quite a lot of things which I think could have been done much, much better.” I didn’t actually think Cohen was competent as the director, but I was busy at the BBC, and it was really too late to become involved, so I turned them down.’9 Jimmy Perry was still involved, as a ‘technical adviser’ (on £50 a day), yet he, too, felt disillusioned: ‘I was fully prepared to stay on and fight a few battles, but it was obvious that the decision-making power had been taken out of our hands: they were going to do what they were going to do.’10

  The first day of shooting began on 10 August 1970 at Shepperton Studios in Middlesex. Such was the depressed state of the British film industry at this time that Dad’s Army, during the initial week or so of its production, was the only movie that was actually being made on the historic lot, and, as Clive Dunn was disappointed to discover, ‘the vast studio restaurant was nearly always empty except for the Boulting brothers, who lunched there every day’.11 John Le Mesurier, who over the course of a long film career had come to regard Shepperton as his own ‘very much loved stamping ground’,12 had the greatest cause to feel saddened by the striking evidence of its decline, but he found some comfort in the fact that so many of his old friends – such as Bobby and Chuck, two of the most colourful and conscientious props men in the business – were still around and available to assist and reminisce.

  Filming progressed, as expected, at a breathless pace, with the cast moving back and forth between the studio sets and a variety of outside locations (not only in Chalfont St Giles, but also in Chobham in Surrey and Seaford in Sussex), and Norman Cohen being badgered on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis by John R. Sloan and an assortment of Columbia executives. ‘They rather bullied him,’ recalled Bill Pertwee. ‘They used to keep coming up to him and saying: “How much have you got in the can today?” And he’d say: “I’ve got six minutes.” So then they’d say: “That’s not good enough! You should have nine minutes in the can each day! What’s going wrong?”’13 The principal actors, who had grown accustomed to working in Croft and Perry’s warm and friendly atmosphere, suddenly found themselves being treated like mere employees. ‘It was a lot of niggly little things,’ remembered Ian Lavender. ‘Like John R. Sloan coming over and saying, “Hey, guys, you shouldn’t be sitting out here in the sun – you’ll change colour!” We weren’t wild about that.’14 The regular members of the platoon’s second row – the ‘extra-specials’ �
� suddenly found themselves being treated like mere extras. ‘It wasn’t an enjoyable time,’ admitted Lavender, ‘and the treatment of the so-called “extras” – lovely people like Colin Bean, Hugh Hastings, George Hancock and so on – upset us all. We’d keep hearing them being referred to as “extras”, and we’d say, “No, they’re part of us, actually,” and we’d be told, “No, they’re extras – same as all the rest.” And they’d be shoved around, made to travel on public transport to locations and to the studios, and they were kept apart from us. Sloan once found me playing cards with some of them. “What are you doing with the extras?’ he said. “We can’t have that!” I said, “Look: they’re my friends. We’re playing threepenny poker here. Don’t tell me I should not be playing cards with my friends!”’15 Colin Bean, who played the discreetly eager Private Sponge, recalled an occasion early on when Arthur Lowe decided to intervene, in his inimitable manner, on the second row’s behalf:

  To one rather officious crowd marshal (according to his very prominent armband) Arthur introduced us as ‘an essential part of this team which enables this show to retain its popularity’. He asked this man, in authoritative tones, if he’d be so kind as to remember this in future and when it came to catering and ‘break’ times we were part of the artists’ cast. The said gentleman was, if no longer so officious, even less cordial towards us than before. He’d issue shouted orders to ‘You extras!’ and then equally loudly remember – ‘Except, of course, these stars!’16