Dad's Army
 The
Walmington-On-Sea platoon of the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV)
- more commonly known as the Home Guard - is commanded by pompous
bank manager Captain Mainwaring.
Mainwaring is incompetent at both these jobs but still feels he
will single-handedly lead Britain to victory in WWII.
He is
assisted (both at the bank and in the Home Guard) by Sergeant
Wilson ("would you mind awfully sort of falling in to three
lovely lines, chaps?").
Notable characters among the lower ranks are Lance Corporal
Jones (the local butcher and Boer War veteran), Private Frazer (a mad
and dour Scottish
undertaker), Private Godfrey, (a fancy-free but incontinent old man who lived
with his sisters Dolly and Sissy and was never known to venture
far from a public convenience), Private Pike (a mummies boy
excused from the real army due to his unusual blood type) and
Private Walker (black market wide-boy about town).
 Completing the
line-up were Bill Pertwee as Hodges, the prickly Air Raid Warden
(and greengrocer in Civvy Street),
and Frank Williams as the rather effeminate Vicar.
Dad's Army was the brainchild of David Croft and
actor/writer Jimmy Perry (who had served in the Home Guard at
Watford). At first the BBC turned down the series - the program
controller at the time, Paul Fox, felt that you couldn't take the
mickey out of England's finest hour.
Several of the cast had also had experience in the army, but
only veteran Scottish actor John Laurie (who played undertaker
Jock Frazer - "we're doomed!") had served in the Home
Guard).
Arthur Lowe (Captain Mainwaring) had been a Sergeant-Major in
the Second World War while John Le Mesurier had served in the
Royal Armoured Corps.
Unsure how to portray Sgt Wilson (aka Uncle
Arthur), he thought: "Why not just be myself, use an
extension of my own personality and behave rather as I had done in
the army?. So I always left a button or two undone and had the
sleeve of my battle-dress blouse slightly turned up. I spoke
softly, issued commands as if they were invitations and generally
assumed a benign air of helplessness".
Wilson's relationship with Private Pike's mother was also
subject of much conjecture.
 Clive Dunn
(Jonesy - "Don't panic, Mr Mainwaring!"
"Permission to worry you, Mr Mainwaring?") had an
unexpected hit record in the late sixties with a song called Granddad.
The B side was a nifty little ditty called I play the Spoons
- "I tap them here, I tap them there . . ."
A Dad's Army feature film was released in 1971 and
several years after the last episode of Dad's Army was
transmitted, John Le Mesurier, Ian Lavender and Bill Pertwee
reprised their Dad's Army roles for a BBC radio sitcom
called It Sticks Out Half A Mile. Sadly, no archive
recordings of this particular program are thought to exist.
Two long-lost episodes of the series were unearthed in 2000
following an appeal by BBC archivists for missing TV programs. The
BBC had been anxious to trace five missing episodes out of the 80
that were made.
The two episodes, Manoeuvres and Operation
Kilt, from 1969, turned up in a pile of rusting film cans
handed into the BBC by a man who wished to remain anonymous.
The
episodes were among 19 film cans pulled out of a skip at Elstree
film studios in Hertfordshire in the 1970s
TRIVIA NOTES
Walmington-on-Sea, the imaginary south-coast town "not
far from Eastbourne" was loosely based on Bexhill
(although the series was filmed at Thetford in Norfolk).
The "Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?"
theme song, which sounds so authentically wartime (largely
thanks to the unmistakable voice of Bud Flanagan), was
actually written and recorded in 1967/1968 especially for the
series by Jimmy Perry.
Rear Guard, a US version of Dad's Army
screened in America by ABC on 10 August 1976, but failed to
make it past the pilot stage. As the United States was never
seriously in danger of military invasion, a premise depicting
the old codgers' last stand was probably never going to be
appreciated as it was in the UK.
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