Your name will also go on the list.
What is it? Don't tell him, Pike.
Pike.
It wasn't ever going to be a big part with people like
John Le Mesurier, Arthur Lowe, John Laurie and Clive Dunn.
"Hey, this is...ooh, this is frightening, but it's gonna be fun,"
and so emotions were going all over the place.
When we were doing it, I don't think any of us thought
that 40 years on it would still be around.
Did you know about this? Yes, I did sir, but I turned a blind eye to it.
Well, you'd no business to. I'm the only one with authority to turn blind eyes.
It went on a lot longer than the war actually, which was a surprise.
People always say to me, why do you think it was so successful?
It's very simple. It reminded, and brought home to the British people,
their finest hour.
And fire! I wouldn't do that if I were you, sir.
Why not?
The gentle wartime comedy Dad's Army has charmed millions of viewers
since its first transmission 40 years ago,
becoming one of the most popular series of all time.
Set in wartime Britain, its ensemble cast
featured many veterans of stage and screen,
created a template for future sitcoms
and established one of British TV's most successful writing partnerships.
I ask myself "Could I stand by and watch my wife being raped by a Nazi?"
"No", I said to myself, "I couldn't."
But you're not married.
I have a very vivid imagination.
You do get a portrait of England during the war,
um, not, obviously, the battlefields, but the home front.
I live with my dad. He's six foot three so don't you go getting any ideas.
Dad's Army became such a refreshing change
as far as sitcoms were concerned, because most of them
appeared to be in a house, husband and wife, 3.2 children,
there's the sofa, there's the kitchen scene
and then we'll do a sitcom round that,
whereas Dad's Army took it all away from that sort of situation.
Here you've got a team of people
who are desperately trying to do the right thing,
but failing for one reason or another,
and the public always like that.
Dad's Army was created by Jimmy Perry, a jobbing actor
whose childhood ambition was to be a star.
I was the youngest of six kids, and I was the sort of
kid that nowadays you'd say, for God's sake, get him out of here!
"Do you want me to do some impersonations?
"I do one of Charles Laughton, or I can do an impersonation of Shirley Temple."
Dreadful, dreadful boy I was.
But in 1939, Perry's dreams of stardom
were interrupted the day World War II broke out.
By May 1940, Britain was under serious threat of a German invasion
and War Secretary Anthony Eden issued a plea to mobilise a citizen's army.
The Local Defence Volunteers, or Home Guard, were formed.
Your loyal help will make and keep our country safe.
Right, let's go to it.
When the call came to defend Britain in her hour of need,
Perry joined The Home Guard, but two years later in 1944,
he was sent to Burma where he became a sergeant in The Royal Artillery.
After he was demobbed, he revived his dreams of stardom,
studying at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
before spending eight years hard slog doing weekly rep.
Jimmy ran a repertory company in Watford and he was
looking for an agent and he rang me up and said would I go and see him.
And I went down to see him and I thought he was terribly good.
I really thought he was a very good actor.
There I was trying to get jobs wherever I could, and I met Ann Croft,
or Ann Calendar as she was called in those days, a very vivacious woman.
She was a tough agent and she sort of asked me to
go on her books, and I thought, "Ooh good, she'll make me a star".
Stardom remained elusive, but Ann Calendar would play a key role
in bringing together one of the most successful
writing partnerships in television history.
She married actor David Croft in 1952.
Well, David and I met actually in a tour of Belle of New York,
which was a very old pre-war musical
which his mother had toured before the war.
And we got on terribly well, and David had not been long out of
the Army and he wanted desperately to get back into the business.
He sang beautifully, danced well and wasn't a bad actor at all.
I enjoyed being an actor but I wasn't a terribly good one.
I was better on television than I was in the theatre, I think.
Like Perry, as a child Croft had always been infatuated by showbusiness,
but realising his own acting limitations,
he decided to move from in front to behind the camera,
working with legends such as Bruce Forsyth, Peter Sellers,
Spike Milligan and Benny Hill.
I think if you say you're a director or a writer,
people say, "Let's have lunch",
and if you're an actor they say,
"The queue starts round the building at the back there..."
so I liked being invited to lunch!
In the early days of ITV, Croft made a meteoric rise through the ranks at
Associated Re-diffusion and Tyne Tees before going to the BBC in 1960
where he directed This Is Your Life.
In 1962, he produced his first sitcom, Hugh And I.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Perry was getting increasingly frustrated
by his lack of television success.
One day, I thought to myself,
"I can't go on like this", cos I was in so many rotten TV sitcoms
and I was getting terrible parts and I thought, "What will I do?"
So I thought, "I know...what...thinks...
"I will write a pilot, a sitcom, and give myself a good part in it."
Perry decided to draw on his own experiences in The Home Guard
and in 1967 wrote a comedy called The Fighting Tigers,
but the problem was who to give it to.
Funnily enough, David gave Jimmy a job as an actor.
So he was on set with him and I said,
"Why don't you give him the script, see if he thinks it's interesting."
I've been hammering myself into the ground for the past week
trying to find a house for you down Sydenham...
Jimmy had a typically small part in Beggar My Neighbour,
a series Croft produced.
He had a very snazzy sports car, a white one, and he was sort of
fussing around it and I thought "Now's my chance.
"I'll tell him, I'll tell him about the show I've written."
So I said...
It was just after lunch...
I said, "Excuse me."
He said, "Yeeees?"
I said, "I've written a pilot."
He said, "Oh, really?"
Full of enthusiasm(!)
And that evening David came home and said,
"Oh, one of your clients was on set and gave me the script
and, er, I think it's got a lot of promise."
And come the Monday, I thought, "Well, he's had the whole weekend to read it,
"for goodness sake, he must have made up his mind by now." Nothing!
I think the idea of a Home Guard situation comedy was a great idea,
and when you read a great idea like that you think,
why hasn't someone else done this already?
You rotten sod, he hasn't read it.
Anyhow, I sat there,
deciding whether to go to the BBC canteen and have egg and chips,
or just call it a day.
And suddenly the door burst open, marvellous, and David came in.
He said, "I've read the script.
"It's great. I like it."
But it wasn't just Croft who was a fan.
Michael Mills was Head of BBC's comedy and entertainment department,
and The Liver Birds,
Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em,
Steptoe and Son,
and Monty Python all happened on his watch.
Michael Mills loved it and realised that Jimmy hadn't written that sort
of thing before and I'd done a lot of work on television,
so he said, "Why don't you cooperate with him?"
And it's extraordinary.
I mean, I sometimes think
I must be the luckiest person in the world to have...this to have happened.
Now they were inside the BBC machine,
the writing duo of Perry and Croft needed more than luck
to get The Fighting Tigers on air.
There was one thing Michael Mills didn't like.
He said, "But I have decided that Fighting Tigers is a rotten title,
"so I have decided... I've decided..." He said to call it Dad's Army.
And he was the man, Michael Mills, who invented the title Dad's Army.
And I thought, "I don't care what he calls it as long as he does it!"
But even that simple compromise wasn't going to give the
newly-named Dad's Army an easy ride within the BBC.
I think some of the more senior people at the BBC were a bit worried about it
cos they thought we were taking the mickey out of England's finest hour.
But the thing was we never took the mickey out of it at all, and
the whole thing was that it was in praise of the British people
and the most terrible time in our history.
But it also made them look at it in a different way.
They looked at the funny, amusing side of the war,
which at the time, they wouldn't have thought was amusing in any way.
I think it just filled a little niche with them.
Next task was assembling the Home Guard platoon.
Perry was keen that the top job went to Arthur Lowe.
Lowe was best known as the shopkeeper Mr Swindley
in the archetypal working-class soap Coronation Street,
and played a similar role in its 1966 spin-off series Pardon The Expression.
Croft in particular had concerns that as an ITV face, Lowe may not
fit at the BBC, especially as the platoon captain
and pompous bank manager George Mainwaring.
I intend to mould those men out there into an aggressive fighting unit.
I'm going to lead them, command them, inspire them to be
ruthless killers, and I'm not going to get very far
if you're going to invite them to step this way, am I?
The great thing is David Croft had a lot of confidence in me
and he went through with it and we cast him.
And when we were rehearsing, Arthur was all over the place.
But we have one invaluable weapon in our armoury,
ingenuity and improvisation.
That's two.
Halfway through it and David looked at me and said,
"I'm not too happy about Arthur.
"I hope WE haven't made a mistake."
Arthur was this pompous little man, and Arthur was a pompous little man,
until you got to know him and he let you in,
and you realised that he knew he was a pompous little man.
He played it and he burst his own bubble,
whereas in the show we all burst his bubble.
I don't want to take up too much of your time,
after all, you're a very important man.
Oh, I wouldn't say I was all that important.
Would you, Wilson?
But from a rocky beginning, Lowe became an iconic character.
No, I don't think so.
Mainwaring's pompous self-regard was punctured at every turn by his
second in command, the laidback, middle-class Sergeant Wilson.
Michael Mills was very keen to get John Le Mesurier in the show,
and of course when you have somebody like Michael Mills as the boss,
you do take a bit of notice of what he says.
Le Mesurier's first major film role was in the 1948 mystery Death In The Hand.
But in a career spanning 40 years, he'd appeared in countless comedies
working for the Bolting Brothers,
and in television alongside the king of sitcom, Tony Hancock.
The character of Sergeant Wilson was in safe hands.
He was amazing.
He said to me the very first day of rehearsal, he said,
"Er, Jimmy, can I have a word with you?
"How do you want me to play this part?"
Well, having seen him in hundreds of films,
I said, "Well, you know, um,
"just, er...just ordinary,
"be yourself." In other words, we knew how superb he was.
Does that mean you're bagging it, sir?
No, it doesn't mean I'm bagging it, not all of it, anyway.
In that case I bags it.
Oh, I'm afraid you can't do that cos I bagged it first.
But you said you didn't want it,
and anyway you didn't use the word bag, you see, so it doesn't count.
Now don't start any of that public school cheating with me.
By casting Lowe as the higher-ranking officer,
Croft and Perry tapped into the age-old British obsession with class,
which provided a rich vein of conflict and humour.
The BBC themselves thought that Arthur should be the sergeant
because he had been a sergeant, actually,
during the wartime years out in the Middle East,
and John should be the captain.
But they did it the other way round,
which was a touch of genius, of course, 'cause then you had this class thing.
The first thing to do is appoint
a properly appointed commander. A what, sir?
Appoint a properly appointed commander...
That's me,
all right? All right.
You will be my second in command.
Oh, thank you very much indeed, sir, thank you.
And we rubbed in every possible situation between the laidback,
honourable Sergeant Wilson and Arthur's part.
I sent a letter to GHQ asking for instructions in case of an invasion.
I told them that I held a commission and
that I'd served in the last conflict.
Somewhere in the Orkneys, wasn't it, sir?
I was a commissioned officer, Wilson,
and I served in France during the whole of 1919.
Yes, but the war ended in 1918, I thought, sir.
Well, somebody had to clear up the mess. Oh, yes, of course.
I think it was very fortunate that we tumbled
on that particular aspect because, er,
it added marvellously to John Le Mesurier and Arthur Lowe's character.
Arthur was a terrible snob.
John Le Mesurier was...
of that class, as it were, and Mainwaring was always jealous of him.
Where were you during the war?
Marne, Gallipoli, Passchendaele. I was a sergeant in the RS.
Oh, never mind that now.
At 48, Clive Dunn was one of the youngest members
of the Dad's Army cast, and the only one required to look older.
He specialised in character acting, particularly eccentric geriatrics.
Oi, General!
Oh-hoy! Wa-ha-ha!
But just as the Home Guard was made up of men from all walks of life and
ages, as the local butcher,
75-year-old Jones was the platoon's befuddled have-a-go hero.
And I thought, you know, "This is a bit old hat."
But then I found that John Le Mesurier
had been asked to play the sergeant.
I thought, well, that's very different because John Le Mesurier's such a gent.
Jonesy, whatever you were going to do, I'm sure you shouldn't.
Eventually, John Le Mesurier said, "I'll do it if you do it",
so I phoned up and said, "All right, I'll do it", and he did the same.
Whenever anybody had to fall in the river
it was always going to be Clive, myself or Bill Pertwee.
Clive cos it's funny for an old man to fall in the water,
and Bill Pertwee and I 'cause we were relatively young...
not expandable, but we were relatively young
and stood a chance of getting out of the water under our own steam.
I told you not to look at my feet!
Most of my work was quite, sort of...
was really sort of physical, and lots of stunts.
I'm waiting to chop off his wotsits!
'Hanging over a bridge upside down
and the bridge went down hanging over and things like that.
'There were some quite tricky things to do.'
Mr Mainwaring!
What is it? That tonic wine's absolutely marvellous.
He was terribly enthusiastic as a character.
Whenever there was anything that he could volunteer for, he would do so.
Permission to speak, sir. Yes.
I'd like to volunteer to be GLSS trainer, beach worker and two loaders.
Well, thank you very much, Corporal. That's the entire crew.
In a show that was festooned with catchphrases,
it was the character of Jones that probably had the most memorable one.
They don't like the cold stew, you see, sir.
They don't like it up 'em you see, sir. They don't...
Get him a chair.
I never wanted to say that.
For me it was, as an old actor,
I thought it was rather a rude thing to say.
However, I said it of course,
and having decided to say it, I said it with full go, you know.
"They don't like it up 'em, sir, they don't like it up 'em."
At a time when they should have been thinking about retirement,
World War I veterans Arnold Ridley and John Laurie
were next to be conscripted into the Dad's Army platoon.
John Laurie played most of the great Shakespearean roles
before reaching a wider audience
in Alfred's Hitchcock's famous film version of The 39 Steps,
which kickstarted his successful cinema career.
He was into his 70s when Croft offered him
the role of Private Fraser in Dad's Army.
And I said, "David, John Laurie's a very big film name,
"a very big film character actor,
"what are we going to do?"
He said, "Well, he'll just have to take his chance."
I don't do a lot of business with the orphanage.
Oh, except for providing the orphans...
Laurie was cast as the regional stereotype of the dour Scot
and as a counterpoint to the over-enthusiastic Jonesy.
Jonesy, come on, you're too old, too old.. Here, come on...
That's very nice that is, eight against one!
No, it's only seven. I'm not feeling very well.
And he said to me, "You know, James,
"I've made over 100 films
"and I was at The Old Vic with Lillian Bayliss.
"I've played all the great roles, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson,
"and I had to wait to the age of 73 to become famous playing in this crap!"
That's what he said!
Good evening. Good eve...
The other veteran was Arnold Ridley,
who was cast as Private Godfrey, the bumbling innocent in the platoon.
Ridley was best known for his celebrated 1923 stage play,
The Ghost Train.
In later years, he appeared as Dowie Hood in The Archers on Radio 4,
but it was as the elderly Godfrey
that he would gain the greatest recognition.
Now our job is to get across this river
either by means of the bridge or by any other means.
Captain Mainwaring, I'm rather anxious not to do any swimming.
He wasn't all that fit and I think I said, "If you play this,
"I can't save you from having to run a bit.
"Do you think you'll manage it?" He said, "Well, I'll do my best."
Get 'em up, Godfrey.
He was wounded appallingly in the First World War.
He had a terrible scar the whole length of his arm, a bayonet wound.
There wasn't a day that he woke up when he wasn't in pain after that.
He was a gentle soul.
His character, rather like Arnold, was always slower than anybody else.
Also on top of that of course there was also the fact
that he desperately needed to spend a penny.
Godfrey, have you got the inclination?
I'm perfectly all right at the moment.
Cast as Private Frank Pike, the youngest platoon member,
known ever more as 'Stupid Boy',
was Ian Lavender. Fresh from drama school,
and like Jimmy Perry, a client of Ann Calendar.
But just before we went off Ann took me out to lunch and said,
"I think I ought to tell you that David Croft is my husband."
It was a bit of a shock
and my face must have paled over and the jaw dropped.
And she said, "Yes, that's why we didn't tell you.
"You got the job because David wants you,
"and don't forget, he can always write you out."
I think Ian found it quite intimidating, undoubtedly.
At the same time he was adopted very early on by Arthur,
who looked after him and said,
"Stand next to me and you're bound to be in shot", sort of thing.
I was frightened of the thought of working with all these people.
Hey, I've got an idea.
Well, why shouldn't I have one?
And I was going to be working with them, oh, heavens, and
supposedly on a par with them and it couldn't possibly be on a par,
I've just come out of drama school!
It was terrifying, but they were lovely.
Ian Lavender who played Private Pike,
he was based around Jimmy Perry to a degree,
because a lot of what had happened to him
in terms of being looked after by his mother and mollycoddled,
was what had happened also to Jimmy.
Frank!
It's your bedtime.
I can't come now, Mum, I'm blowing up a tank.
Yes, dear, well you'll just have to blow it up tomorrow!
Arthur, I'm surprised at you.
After all, you know what time he goes to bed.
Go along, Frank.
Yes, go along Frank, go along. Mum...
Perry came to me and he said,
"Of course, you're playing me, you know,"
which wasn't a lot of help.
Thanks Jim, yeah that really helped me at that point, Jim.
Now I know I'm playing the writer.
He was a feed, what we say, he fed some stuff in to get laughs
from John Le Mesurier, Uncle Arthur...
and had that marvellous thing where Captain Mainwaring says,
"Why does that boy keep calling you Uncle Arthur?"
Take this man's name, sergeant. What's your name, lad?
Well, you should know by now.
You've been a friend of my mum's since before I was born.
Well, see it doesn't happen again.
And I didn't ask David until after we'd finished,
and it was on that last night,
that last recording, and I said, "Right, now I'm going to ask you.
"Was he my father?" He said, "Of course he was, yes!"
But I didn't ask till then.
As I say, I didn't need to know,
no need to know, and it was, I liked that innocence.
Anything there you fancy?
Not the least bit innocent was Private Walker,
the wartime spiv or black marketer played by James Beck.
I tell you what, 10 quid and it's yours.
Despite the determination of the author.
I'm going to be quite outspoken about this because what's it matter.
They're all dead now, I'm not feeling so good myself!
No, I'm all right!
I wrote the part of Walker the spiv for myself,
and it was a very good part, in fact it was a very, very good part.
And David said, "I'm sorry, Jimmy.
"You can't play it."
I don't think writers should actually perform in a show
because all the other actors would think
they were taking the best part for themselves.
At the time I was furious.
After working with him on Beggar My Neighbour, Croft had no intention of
looking beyond Beck, the original loveable Cockney geezer.
But Perry still harboured ambitions to be in the show.
Oh, by the way ladies, hang on. I've er, I've got your elastic 'ere. Ohhh!
Don't want 'em falling down on the job, do we?
I used to stand behind the camera or stand in the rehearsal room
and I thought, "I could play that part better."
I wanted to play all the parts.
I thought, "That's rotten. I would have done that better."
And I just used to sit there and sulk.
But quite frankly, they were right.
It would have been a disaster.
Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler
If you think we're on the run
With the cast finally in place,
the pilot was recorded on 15th April, 1967.
When we showed it to a target audience, one or two people said
"Oh, do we have to have this wretched war stuff again,
haven't we had enough about the war?"
The whole lot condemned the show,
except for one anorak, I hate to use that,
but he said, "Well, I liked it.
"I think it's very funny, I think it's gonna be a hit."
And I sat there. I thought, it's all over.
They're bound to find out about it.
Then I shall have to devise some reason for them not to find out.
And David Croft put the report at the bottom of his out-tray
and it stayed there and nobody saw it.
He's a clever sod, so it went through.
This sleight of hand worthy of Private Walker paid off and in
July 1968, the first series of Dad's Army stepped into the firing line.
The critical acclaim wasn't there at all on the first series.
One or two said that they thought it had got a nice future,
but didn't say it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen in their lives.
It wasn't an instant success.
Some critics were very, very snooty about it.
After the first series the BBC had their doubts
as to whether they wanted to carry on with it.
As time went on,
the penny suddenly dropped
and people thought it was marvellous.
And it just grew and grew and grew
until people almost didn't remember when it wasn't there anyway.
It's always been there, hasn't it? Oh, no, it's only four years old.
But it was slow growing, and I don't think it was really until
probably four years that we realised
that we actually were in or had got a hit.
Fall into three ranks.
Slowly but surely the audience had responded
to the revolutionary idea of the ensemble sitcom.
So we'll fall in these two ranks, Sir.
Like a box of chocolates everyone had a favourite,
a character from the magnificent seven that they grew to love.
The whole idea's doomed, doomed from the start.
Dad's Army became the prototype for many '70s and '80s sitcoms,
and the template for Croft and Perry's future work.
One little boy, I said to him one day, I said,
"Why do you like Dad's Army so much?"
And he said to me, "'Cause it's funny and not rude".
Out of the mouths of babes.
And he's right. Cos I suppose they see them as their father or
their grandfather, a lot of bumbling old men who get it right in the end.
The comedy in Dad's Army was a winning mixture of wit and slapstick.
But another key to its success was that in reality,
most of the scenarios, although seemingly ridiculous,
were actual events that occurred in the Home Guard.
What's that supposed to be, boy?
Well, you said if you had nothing else
we could tie a carving knife to a broom handle.
I didn't say keep the brush on the end of it!
You should have said! I don't want any insubordination.
Knives on the end of broomsticks,
and dustbin covers to shield yourself from grenades,
and things like that, were absolutely truthful.
There was an enormous amount of reality behind the farce.
I mean the Home Guard were quite a crazy lot,
but they were very sincere in the fact
that they were going to guard the country, you know.
There was no question about it.
All over the country, men came forward who were prepared to fight.
At first they had no soldiers' uniforms and no guns to fight with,
but that didn't worry them.
They drilled with broomsticks and nobody thought it was funny.
If David and Jimmy had written episodes about some of the
things we actually just saw on film from The Imperial War Museum
we would have been laughed off the screen.
And there was this thing. It was like a huge cotton reel
and it was bowling along on the beach,
and I remember saying to David Croft, "What on earth made you think of that?
"I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous."
He said, "I didn't." He said, "It was the Ministry of Defence."
We could kill with our pipes.
We can make them all sneeze with our pepper.
And after all, even the Hun is a very poor fighter
with his head buried in a handkerchief.
Don't forget, in Dad's Army they always won in the end
and people like Arthur Lowe may have been a pompous bank manager
but he was as brave as a lion.
So come on Adolf, we're ready for you!
THEY CHEER
On screen, Mainwaring ran a tight ship
commanding a disciplined band of soldiers, albeit to comedic effect.
But behind the scenes, life amongst the cast was a lot more chaotic.
Sometimes they used to mutter.
They'd get in a little bunch and mutter and look at David and me.
HE MUMBLES
I said, "David, they're plotting, they're plotting against us!"
There's always somebody ready to interfere, isn't there.
There were occasions when...
possibly one or two of them might have been a bit difficult.
Arthur Lowe was not particularly good at learning his lines.
He used to have all sort of excuses to go off
and have a quick look at the script
and for some reason he would never want to take the script home.
David Croft said, "I'll tell you what. Arthur, I'm going to leave
"a script here in the drawer, and give you one to take home."
And Arthur said, "One to take home?"
"I wouldn't have that rubbish in my house."
Yeah, we'd moan about Arthur not learning his lines,
but that's the way he worked, and if the result
wasn't great then you've got room for complaint,
but the result was quite wonderful, so you stood and
learned your lines with Arthur on the rehearsal room floor.
What do you think of this?
Well, it's awful.
From an actor's point of view, he had the most difficult part to play
because he was the guy that we all had to bounce off.
FRAZER LAUGHS CONTINUOUSLY
You don't create something like Mainwaring just on the off chance him
knowing half the lines, no, no, no, not at all.
Watch it, Wilson.
You might snap your girdle!
In 1972, Dad's Army achieved its highest ratings ever,
with over 18.5 million watching the episode Brain Versus Brawn.
Croft branched out with writer Jeremy Lloyd
to create Are You Being Served, another team comedy
featuring Wendy Richards as shop assistant Miss Brahms.
In 1974, the radio version of Dad's Army began.
The show was riding high but tragedy was about to strike the cast.
When Jimmy passed away it came as a terrible to shock to everyone.
Where's Walker? Oh, he asked me to leave a note in his place.
Professionally they handled it absolutely wonderfully,
because Jimmy was ill and in hospital that day.
The prognosis hadn't got to us by that time, not by any means.
Had to go up to the smoke for a few days to do a deal.
I think I can swing it for a grand
but I shall have to drop the geezer a pony.
It was a very skilful and very slick...
..non-use of a character for one episode as...
everybody hoped it was.
And it wasn't.
PS, here's a couple of oncers for yourself.
How dare he try to bribe me.
You would never have expected him to go before the others, and it
left them all devastated, you know, because again,
because they were all such a team and so close.
It was a very upsetting time.
I never replaced him because his character was so set
that anybody else taking it over would have been wrong.
You know, it was very, very sad indeed
and it didn't do the series a lot of good.
'A lot of us thought, that's it,
we can't get over this, we can't lose one like that.
'And I was very surprised'
when the next series was mooted,
when it was going to be, that it was going to happen, because it was,
oh, I thought an inestimable loss.
Despite this frontline casualty, series seven went ahead in 1974,
and to prove that lightning could strike twice, the same year Croft
and Perry launched It Ain't Half Hot Mum,
another series based on Jimmy's wartime experiences.
In '75, the platoon toured theatres with the Dad's Army stage show.
They kept the home fires burning for another 54 radio episodes
and two more television series.
But in 1977, the platoon flag was lowered for good.
We just about got the last episode made,
because the writing was on the wall.
They were old, they were getting ill,
but they still kept on.
David and Jimmy were going to disband the company,
but the BBC wanted them to do more,
and David and Jimmy said, no, that's enough.
But there is only so much juice to be squeezed out of an orange,
so when it comes to the end and you think it's been a big success,
you don't breathe a sigh of relief,
but you think, that was a job well done.
We'd done enough and I'm glad we finished when we did.
THEY CHEER
But rather than disband the platoon,
the 80th episode of Dad's Army finished on a high
with the marriage of Jonesy to long-term love, Mrs Fox.
And there is a war on, you know.
It was all tears and tears and trying not to cry really, because
all the gang, the men, had been together for a long time, you see.
Well, I mean look at you.
What good would you be against real soldiers?
Oh, dear,
they'd walk straight through you.
This is the terrible thing.
We will never see their like again.
Here's to your future health.
Yes, here's to you Jonesy.
Good luck to you.
How they got through it I don't know.
It was so moving.
It was really unbelievable and we were all very, very sad.
I know one thing. They're not walking straight through me.
Nor me.
I'll be beside you, Jonesy.
We'll all be beside you, Jonesy.
We'll stick together, you can rely on that.
Each year we thought that was going to be the last series we did,
and then we did another one and
another one, and I never, I mean as far as I'm concerned
they could have gone on running it year after year.
And we're not alone. There are thousands of us all over England.
And Scotland. And Scotland.
All over Great Britain in fact.
Men who'll stand together when their country needs them.
Excuse me, Sir. Don't you think it might be a nice idea
if we were to pay our tribute to them?
And then suddenly it's almost like we all drop out of character
for the toast to the Home Guard.
To Britain's Home Guard.
ALL: To Britain's Home Guard.
Perry and Croft were awarded the OBE in 1978
and continued their collaboration with the holiday camp show Hi-De-Hi!
In 1982, Croft and Jeremy Lloyd got together again to create Allo, Allo!
But after six years Croft resumed writing with Perry on You Rang M'Lord?
In 2003, they were presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
2008 sees Dad's Army back on the stage
with an entirely new cast and celebrating its 40th anniversary.
Don't mention the war? Not blooming likely.
The reaction always was one of affection, gentle.
"Do you know the whole family watched that?" and that sort,
rather than say "that's the funniest thing I've seen in my life."
But it was the golden age of television as far as I'm concerned.
Will you be round later, Arthur, for your usual?
Maybe it's its name, maybe it's as I've said before,
it's something that us British have got to be proud of.
Stand by everybody, stand by.
'And it was an amazing time.'
Every time it ever comes on somebody will stop you, "I saw it last night.
"I saw Dad's Army. Oh, isn't it funny."
And so it's the most wonderful tribute to David and Jimmy.
Even these days people come up to me in the street
and say, "Hello, how's Captain Mainwaring?
"How are you getting on, Jonesy?" and all different things like that,
and so obviously to people that have been watching the programme for years,
it was very real and they felt they knew these people so well.
I'm rather enjoying this!
We were just doing our job, all of us,
and we never thought that we'd end up being national treasures.
Oh, never mind that, there's a war on.
Where's my helmet? Come on, at the double.