Forgotten army remembers how to make us laugh

Jun 14 2010 by David Whetstone, The Journal

FOR a priceless legacy of laughter we all owe Jimmy Perry big time. DAVID WHETSTONE talks to the creator of Dad’s Army as the show returns to the North East stage.

AS Dad’s Army marches back into the Theatre Royal, it seems only right and proper to have a word with the man who devised the television sitcom on which the stage show is based.

Without Jimmy Perry, there would be no Dad’s Army and think how much poorer our lives would be.

The show made its TV debut in 1968 and at its peak attracted audiences of 18m to BBC1.

But it is still with us. Regular repeats have meant its audience of fans is constantly being replenished – even when most of its stars, sadly, are no longer with us.

Jimmy, who will be 87 next birthday, is as bright as a button and a true gent.

Casting his mind back, he says: “I somehow had a feeling it would catch on because it was true. It happened to me.

“But everybody had forgotten about the Home Guard. We are talking about more than 40 years ago.

“No one knew anything about it. I was working at the time in Westminster and I went to the local library and said, ‘Have you got any books on the Home Guard?’ The girl said, ‘What’s that then?’

“I finally got a couple of pamphlets from the Imperial War Museum. Really, though, everybody had forgotten about it.”

Jimmy joined the Watford Home Guard as a teenager, rather like Private Pike in the TV series.

A lot of people still forget, he says, that the Home Guard included not just those too old to join the armed forces but teenagers awaiting their call up.

It has been said that Pike (played on TV by Ian Lavender) was based on Jimmy.

He doesn’t go quite that far but says that his mother, like Pike’s, had strong reservations about her son going off to war.

“I didn’t join the Home Guard until it had been going for 18 months because my mother wouldn’t let me. She’d lost a brother in the First World War.”

Once in, Jimmy found himself among the kind of characters brought to life on TV by Arthur Lowe and company. “Shopkeepers, teachers, all different professions,” he recalls. “There was a picture restorer who had a shop on Watford High Street.”

There was also the manager of a local building society branch who became the unwitting inspiration for one Captain Mainwaring.

By this time the Home Guard volunteers had dispensed with broom handles and were armed with proper weapons.

“President Roosevelt sent over shiploads of rifles used by the American Army in the First World War,” recalls Jimmy.

“I had a Thompson submachine gun which was amazing.

“Yes, we were very well armed and also we had a lot of very clever people. A lot of the men I served with had been in the Spanish Civil War and they were intellectuals.”

Soon enough Jimmy was called up into the Royal Artillery.

He joined the RA Concert Party and was sent to Burma to entertain the troops in some very adverse conditions, singing and doing impressions. The actor Charles Laughton was a speciality.

These experiences were to find expression years later in another sitcom by Jimmy and his eventual writing partner, David Croft, the popular It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum.

In fact, Jimmy can’t resist a little diversion, recalling the time he and his profusely sweating colleagues turned up to perform for a squad of Gurkhas whose English didn’t extend far beyond parade ground orders.