After three weeks of rehearsal at the Richmond Theatre in Surrey, the cast prepared to travel north to Billingham, in Cleveland, for the show’s out-of-town try-out. ‘Why do we have to go to this Billingham place, Billy?’ John Le Mesurier moaned to Bill Pertwee. ‘It’s miles from anywhere, we shall all probably get lost.’11 Le Mesurier’s mood did not improve when he finally arrived at The Forum, the town’s modern-looking theatre, and was greeted by a doorkeeper who said, ‘Good morning, Sir, are you Arnold Lowe?’12 It was, in the words of David Croft, ‘quite a worrying time’,13 as the production team debated the best ways to knock the show into shape. Some scenes and songs were dropped and then reintroduced, various bits of business were added and subtracted, and the actors, as Bill Pertwee recalled, were driven increasingly hard:
We were working long hours on some days and Roger Redfarn was becoming oblivious of the time of day as we went through songs, dance routines, dialogue and costume rehearsal. At two o’clock one morning I realised that the uncomplaining boys and girls had had no supper, not even a sandwich, and our strength was beginning to sag. I therefore walked on to the stage and quite out of turn, announced that everyone had obviously had enough for that night. There was a silence in which you could have heard a pin drop. Suddenly Arthur Lowe said, ‘I quite agree’ and that was the end of rehearsals for that night.14
The opening night of what by this time was billed as ‘Dad’s Army: A Nostalgic Music and Laughter Show of Britain’s Finest Hour’ arrived on Thursday, 4 September 1975, to warm applause, and the remainder of the performances during the fortnight-long stay elicited a similarly enthusiastic response. ‘The jolly North Country audience had received us well,’ Clive Dunn reflected, ‘without looking for too many faults.’15 Richard Stone, however, considered the production, as it stood, to be ‘a mess’,16 and several changes were made before the show was allowed to commence its London run. ‘Bernie [Delfont] and I sat at the back of the Shaftesbury Theatre for the first preview in London,’ Stone recalled. ‘It seemed to us that Clive Dunn, bless him, was singing innumerable songs. Bernie was back where he belonged in live theatre, “sorting it out”’.17 Dunn did not have to wait very long to discover just what Delfont had succeeded in sorting out:
After the dress rehearsal, when Duncan Weldon, representing the management, came in to take my new agent, Peter Prichard, off for a little chat, I was highly suspicious. I had fluffed the patter a bit due to a few hitches in the staging, miscued lighting changes, and half expected to be told to polish up my lines, which I knew perfectly well. When my agent came back with the news that Delfont had cut [one of the songs] completely I should then and there have done the full demonstration and walked out of the theatre, threatening never to return. But that simply wasn’t my scene, and after Peter Prichard had convinced me that his protestations had been of no avail I swallowed my deep disappointment. I had lost the number, but gained a reputation with the management as a non-wavemaker, and so Bernie Delfont later described me as a ‘grand chap’.18
Further minor cuts were made, the running order was revised, ruffled thespian feathers were smoothed, and the show was pronounced ready.
The West End opening, on Thursday, 2 October, was later described by Stone as ‘one of my happiest nights in the theatre’.19 The show began with David Croft’s cherished montage of Second World War news footage (he never would let it lie), followed by the familiar strains of ‘Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?’ and the appearance of the cast descending, rather gingerly, a steep flight of glittery stairs. Several of the sketches and routines that ensued had previously been seen, and enjoyed, on television. They reprised the increasingly aggressive morris dancing scene from ‘The Godiva Affair’ (JONES: ‘I’ve faced whirling Dervishes, and I’ve faced charging Fuzzie Wuzzies, but I don’t want to face Private Frazer when he’s waving his whiffling stick. He’s got a mad look in his eyes’) and a tetchy rehearsal of the Cornish Floral Dance which had first been witnessed as a segment in the 1970 edition of BBC1’s Christmas Night With the Stars (MAINWARING: ‘Wilson! Don’t anticipate me. Watch my stick!’). A number of new and in some cases quite unlikely flights of fancy were added to the mix, such as the sight of Private Pike, in a dream sequence prompted by the rigours of rationing, performing a lavish Carmen Miranda-style production number while zipped up in a giant plastic banana. Most of the actors were allowed at least one party piece: John Le Mesurier, for example, gave a rather charming rendition of ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square’ (‘I didn’t, of course, actually sing,’ he would explain; ‘it was a sort of half singing, half talking version, rather in the manner of a poor man’s Rex Harrison’);20 Arthur Lowe delivered a splendid impersonation of Robb Wilton; Bill Pertwee contributed an equally impressive impersonation of Max Miller; and Arnold Ridley recited the poem ‘Lords of the Air’. Lowe also teamed up with Le Mesurier to perform the old Flanagan and Allen number, ‘Hometown’, but, as an opening night surprise, he returned to sing it a second time with the surviving member of the double act, Chesney Allen: ‘When Ches strolled on with Arthur Lowe for the encore,’ Richard Stone recalled, ‘the whole audience stood and cheered. It was a great moment.’21 The two-and-a-half-hour show came to its conclusion with a short, poignant scene set on the beach at Walmington-on-Sea soon after the end of the war: ‘The Home Guard never went into battle,’ Mainwaring reflected, ‘but the two million men – shop assistants, factory workers, doctors, lawyers, men from every walk of life – gave of their spare time and, in some cases, their lives, to defend their homeland. And if ever this island were in danger again, men like those would be there once more – standing ready.’22 The speech was followed by an upbeat orchestral version of the Dad’s Army theme song, and a succession of loudly applauded curtain calls.
The critics, on the whole, were kind. John Elsom, writing in The Listener, complained that the show was nothing more than ‘a crude cartoon’ with ‘some appallingly jingoistic moments’,23 but a far more typical response came from Harold Hobson, the distinguished drama critic of the Sunday Times, who declared that Croft and Perry had ‘produced something whose subtle simplicity is a total artistic success’: ‘[The show] is funny and touching; it is satirical, and it has a great pride. It is remarkable what you can do if you wear your heart on your sleeve, but also have a brain in your head.’24 The most measured appraisal was probably B. A. Young’s account in the Financial Times: ‘A kind of double nostalgia is seen to be working,’ he remarked. ‘Half the time the audience are nostalgic about the Dad’s Army programmes themselves; the other half, they are nostalgic about the real wartime life.’ Young doubted that ‘these two kinds of nostalgia really blend’, but acknowledged that ‘this is an academic judgement’. The first appearance of the cast was greeted, he noted, with ‘a standing ovation’, and the audience ‘were just as enthusiastic’ during the subsequent sketches and solo spots, and when ‘your actual Chesney Allen’ made his unexpected entrance ‘the cheers were deafening’. Young concluded: ‘The impression I came away with was of enormous good nature on both sides of the footlights, friendliness and companionability and all those good qualities associated with wartime and the theatrical representation of wartime. Not such a bad thing, really, especially with Arthur Lowe at the head.’25
There was nothing truly exceptional about the show: it had no pretensions to bold theatrical ambition and it served its modest purpose. It enabled the audience to see a set of small screen stars fully sized and in the flesh, and it enabled the actors to see for themselves just how popular they, and the programme, had actually become. ‘It was lovely,’ said Ian Lavender. ‘I don’t think any of us, at the start, had known quite what to expect, and it had come as quite a bit of a surprise when it turned into a sort of musical, but, yes, it worked, it was very enjoyable, and it was a very warm, very affectionate kind of occasion.’26 The demand, undeniably, was there: in addition to the actual West End run itself (which continued until February the following year), the cast also t
ook part in a prestigious Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium,27 recorded an album based on the show28 and made numerous personal appearances. John Le Mesurier also pondered an invitation from a kindred spirit, Derek Taylor (the former Beatles press officer who at that time was director of special projects at Warner Brothers), to make a suitably unorthodox solo album (it would eventually be released, two years later, under the title What Is Going To Become Of Us All?),29 and Bill Pertwee, along with his fellow member of cast Norman MacLeod, was persuaded to release a novelty single called ‘Hooligans!’30
Each actor was experienced enough to take it all in a steady stride. The production was disrupted on two separate occasions during the autumn by bomb scares – this was a period of intense terrorist activity in the English capital by the Irish Republican Army – but Arthur Lowe, as the self-appointed leader of the company, responded to both of these unhappy events by snapping into action and saying, ‘Right, follow me, men’,31 and then leading his fellow performers straight out of the theatre and up the road to the nearest acceptable pub, where they would have a leisurely drink and relax until the message came that it was safe to return and resume the show. There was another brief interruption early on in the new year, but this time the reason was entirely welcome: Arnold Ridley, who had been coping remarkably well with a fairly draining schedule, reached the age of 80, and the occasion was celebrated on stage in the presence of both the press and the public. ‘The more I work,’ he declared, ‘the better I feel.’32
After five well-attended months in the West End, the production went on tour: Manchester, Nottingham, Bradford, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Blackpool, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Richmond, Brighton and Bath were all visited during the period from March through to September 1976. Clive Dunn had not been keen to continue, but, after receiving a firm assurance from Croft and Perry that his ‘missing’ epic song (about the demise of General Gordon at Khartoum) would be reinstated, he agreed to commit himself to half of the tour. David Croft replaced him for the remaining dates with the actor who, ironically, had been his first choice for the role of Jones back in 1968, Jack Haig.
Each enforced omission inspired a new commission: ‘We had a marginally smaller cast,’ Frank Williams remembered, ‘and so Edward [Sinclair] and I were roped into one or two extra numbers, including the “banana” number, which was a great deal of fun.’33 Colin Bean, who had declined to be involved in the show on the grounds that he feared it might become ‘too “hyped up”, glamorised and far from the spirit of the TV show’,34 found this particular number to be slightly too odd when he attended a performance in Manchester: ‘The sight of the “vicar” and the “verger” (still in flat cap) rumbaing away in a full-blown “Carmen Miranda”-style South American scene amid a bevy of clamorous dancers was not my idea of what Dad’s Army was all about.’35 The only occasions, however, when the routine failed to provoke the desired response were those when Jeffrey Holland, rather than Ian Lavender, played the part of Private Pike. ‘Poor Jeff,’ Lavender recalled, ‘went through the whole performance without getting a single laugh – except from some of the other members of the cast, who were sniggering at his discomfort. He told me: “Even when I went on dressed as a six-foot banana, dancing around, with all the ‘Ay! Ay! Ays!’, I got no reaction. Nothing. Total silence. I knew it was a funny routine. I wasn’t that bad doing it. But I wasn’t you.” That was the problem: he was funny, but he wasn’t Pike.’36
The tour was punctuated by all kinds of extra-curricular adventures: The cast took part in a cricket match to raise money for the construction of a new pavilion at Hayfield Cricket Club (Arthur Lowe was its proud president), and Arnold Ridley, after executing one or two elegant cover drives and a surprisingly lusty square cut, became so excited that he forgot that he had been provided with a runner and started jogging down the wicket (‘We all finished up in a heap at one end,’ recalled his fellow batsman, Bill Pertwee, ‘and it was deemed that I was out’).37 Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier agreed to fly to The Netherlands in order to appear on an irreverent television programme, dressed in their Dad’s Army outfits, and, as Le Mesurier put it, ‘say two rather rude words in Dutch’ (‘The live audience seemed to think that what we had said was the funniest happening that had ever come their way. Neither Arthur nor I knew what the real meaning of the words was, nor did we care very much. We took a bow and fled the building for the last plane out of Amsterdam’).38 When the show finally reached Bath, the last stop, the principal actors were invited to lunch at the home of Neville Chamberlain’s daughter-in-law, where they had the opportunity to examine some of the letters written by the Prime Minister during the Munich crisis of 1938.39 There was always some kind of novel experience to brighten the dull routine.
It all came to an end, after six generally enjoyable months, on Saturday, 4 September 1976. The production had not, in fact, been much of a money-spinner – ‘the cast was large and pricey,’ explained Clive Dunn, ‘the sets enormous’40 – but it had generated a great deal of good will. When the diversion was over, the attention turned back to television, the central attraction, and to those things that the makers of Dad’s Army did best.
THE CLASSIC
Wit lasts.
PENELOPE GILLIATT1
CHAPTER XIII
The Nation’s Favourite
There is always a laugh in the utterly familiar.
JAMES THURBER1
Nothing would please me more than to have Dad’s Army on every week.
HUW WHELDON2
‘You’ll undoubtedly go on for ever and ever with Dad’s Army,’3 Prince Philip opined, rather forcefully, when he encountered a crowd of BBC executives in the early 1970s, and none of them, on this particular occasion, felt inclined to disagree. Dad’s Army, by this time, had indeed become something of a standard-bearer for the BBC’s flourishing Light Entertainment department, providing visible proof of its continuing commitment to the principle Bill Cotton, its head, liked to define as ‘the best possible entertainment by the best possible entertainers’.4
In June 1973, the programme, following five progressively successful series, was at its peak, and the next sequence of episodes that the team was set to record would contain some of the show’s finest and funniest moments. Two months later, however, James Beck, at the age of just 44, would be dead, the cast and crew would be plunged into mourning, and nothing to do with Dad’s Army would ever seem quite the same again.
Everyone had known that this particular summer was going to be extremely busy. There was not only a television series to record, but also, for the first time, a radio series,5 and no one was looking forward to it all more keenly than Jimmy Beck. He had not always been the most disciplined of actors – ‘he was sometimes quite naughty,’ Clive Dunn recalled, ‘and a few of his hangovers held up filming’6 – but he had never lacked ambition, and his career now seemed at the start of a sharp ascent. During the first half of 1973 alone, he had recorded two series for London Weekend Television of a new starring vehicle called Romany Jones,7 and co-starred alongside Arthur Lowe in the pilot of a new BBC1 situation-comedy entitled Bunclarke With An ‘E’ (adapted by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson from some of their old Tony Hancock scripts, featuring Lowe as the Hancock figure and Beck as the character associated with Sid James).8 Once he had completed his Dad’s Army duties, he was due to appear on Thames Television in a one-off play called The Village Concert. ‘I think that Jimmy was one of those actors who wanted to explore further afield all the time,’ reflected Bill Pertwee. ‘I’m pretty sure that he would have stayed with Dad’s, but he did have this drive, this quest, because he was a very good stage actor, and he wanted to keep proving himself.’9
His weakness, however, was alcohol. He had come to cherish the warm and relaxed domestic environment in East Sheen that he shared with his extremely supportive wife, Kay, and their three young children, but he continued to be fascinated by the night life, and susceptible to the drinking culture, of Soho, and his health, as a conseq
uence, had started to suffer. It was obvious to the other members of the cast that something was wrong when, on Friday, 13 July, Beck joined them at the Playhouse Theatre in order to record a couple of episodes for the radio version of Dad’s Army: ‘It was a very hot night,’ Ian Lavender remembered, ‘and Jimmy was sweating profusely – far more than the rest of us were. He was wearing a short-sleeved summer shirt outside his trousers, and it looked as if he’d got a football under his shirt.’10 This, it turned out, was the last time that Beck’s fellow actors would see him alive. The following afternoon, shortly after opening a local school fête in aid of Guide Dogs for the Blind, he felt a sudden and excruciating pain in his stomach; his wife took him straight home, summoned a doctor, and within the hour he was rushed to the intensive care unit of Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton, Surrey, where he slipped into a coma. ‘Doctors told me he has an organic disorder,’ Kay Beck told reporters. ‘The chemical balance of his body has been upset by something or other and the doctors have to try to put it right again. We have no idea what has caused it. The next 36 hours are vital. If he pulls through there will be hope again.’11
The news shook the Dad’s Army team to its core. Another episode of the television series – ‘Things That Go Bump in the Night’ – was due to be recorded on Sunday in front of a studio audience, and, as Beck featured in those sequences that had already been shot outside on location, Croft and Perry were left with no option but to redistribute his remaining lines and then hope that a combination of brisk editing and clever lighting would distract from the fact that Walker had failed to join the others inside. The following week of rehearsal was punctuated by regular, but increasingly depressing, updates on Beck’s condition, and then the time arrived to record ‘The Recruit’: the final episode in the current series, and the first without any footage of Beck. It featured a revised ‘line-up’ scene set in the church hall, which saw Mainwaring inspect Jones, and then Pike, and then the space where Walker ought to have been. A note, which is picked up from the floor, is sniffed by Wilson – ‘Unusual perfume: petrol’ – and then snatched by Mainwaring, who proceeds, in puzzled tones, to read it out:
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