Dad's Army never fades away

Britain's Home Guard made the Northern Alliance look over-equipped. In its early days, some bands of brothers armed themselves with pepper. One group possessed blunderbusses and cutlasses with which to ward off Nazi paratroopers from their patch of Essex. A Shropshire detachment found itself oiling rusty carbines dating from the Crimean War, while colleagues in Lancashire were making do with spears.

Even in its own time, the Home Guard had enormous comic possibilities. The Local Defence Volunteers, as the organisation was originally named, was rapidly nicknamed "Look, Duck and Vanish" or "Last Desperate Venture".

Wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill wisely rebranded the enterprise with the much more appealing title of the Home Guard. The rest is history - and now television history.

Dad's Army, a book by Graham McCann, just published in Britain, is an intriguing read even if you are not the show's greatest fan. It was superbly crafted, but it was not Pete and Dud. It is described as "satirical", but it merely cocks the odd snoot.

Its appeal lies in the way it became part of the mythology of its subject matter. The Dad's Army phenomenon is wider than its 80 episodes, and this work is more than a showbiz yarn. The book pays homage to the great catchlines ("They don't like it up 'em") and punchlines ("Don't tell him, Pike!").

Dad's Army marched into the schedules in 1968, and it sounded the last post in 1977. Even the theme tune was retro. WhileWho do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler? sounded like a Second World War ditty, it came from the same pen as the scripts.

What made them sound totally 1940 was the mouth from which they were sung: it belonged to Bud Flanagan, of the wartime crooning duo Flanagan and Allen. Backing came from the musicians of the Coldstream Guards, who don't get that many gigs on peak-time television.

The Changing of the Guard led to the conception of Dad's Army. Jimmy Perry was an actor wishing to write a series with a decent part for himself. Watching the ceremony outside Buckingham Palace, he remembered having long ago seen a Home Guard parade on the same hallowed spot. Could this be the theme for a sitcom?

At 15, he had been in the Home Guard himself. David Croft, the BBC director who became his co-writer, had been an air-raid warden. The cast they recruited had clocked up a fair amount of military expertise. Arnold Ridley (Private Godfrey) had been invalided out of the Army twice, in 1917 (the Somme) and 1940 (Dunkirk).

Arthur Lowe was, like his pompous Captain Mainwaring, in his own way a leader of men. When the stage show was stopped by a bomb scare, it was Lowe who shepherded the cast to the nearest pub until the all-clear.

John Le Mesurier did his Sergeant Wilson as a reprise of his own time in the (real) Army. At the first read-through, John Laurie (Frazer "We're doomed") thought the whole concept was disaster-bound.

It was, of course, enormously successful. Even its third repeats were pulling in 10 million viewers. Its chief failure was for creator and co-writer Perry. He had conceived the spiv Walker as a showcase for his own talents, but he didn't get the part.

- INDEPENDENT

* Dad's Army is still screening in New Zealand - TV One, weekdays, 9 am.