Despite its clumsy plots and pleb-tugging party pieces, the legacy of Dad’s Army is pretty much deserved. Worth it for the chilling end-credits sequence, where the terrified characters appear to be marching into battle for real. The deliciously complex tension between Captain Mainwaring and Sgt Wilson is hilarious...but it’s moving too, and they don’t need the gimmick of a poppy field to achieve it. Funniest scene involved Wilson asking if he can take ‘that great big gun’ off the table, to which Mainwaring thundered ‘That great big gun? You sound like a Nancy boy!’. Try and avoid the episodes with Wendy Richard in them.
1.
The programme’s opening theme music (sung by Bud Flanegan) omits a couple of lines from the original recording for reasons of time. The edit is quite audible - here is the latter section of the lyrics, with the cut section presented in square brackets:
Mr Brown goes off to town on the eight
twenty-one
But he comes home each evening and he’s ready
with his gun.
So [watch out Mr Hitler,
you have met your match in us -
If you think you can crush
us,
We’re afraid you’ve missed the
bus
’Cause]who do you think you are kidding, Mr
Hitler
If you think old England’s done?
2.
James Beck, who played Private Walker, died on 6/8/73, shortly after the sixth series of Dad’s Army was completed. He had, however, been taken ill prior to the recording of ‘Things That Go Bump In The Night’, the penultimate episode. This episode (recorded on 15/7/73 for transmission on 5/12/73) contains location footage of Beck, but the actor was to ill to attend the studio recording. However, this lack of inconsistency only became a problem with the following episode, ‘The Recruit’ (recorded on 22/7/73 for transmission on 12/12/73), where last-minute script changes were hastily made during rehearsals for the evening’s recording. In the end, a sign was placed where Walker normally stood in the parade ground, announcing that he had ‘Gone To The Smoke’. The audience accepted this, allowing Beck’s pancreas to burst without continuity being affected.
3.
In 1998, BBC2 began a 30th anniversary repeat-run of the first series. Originally transmitted from 31/7/68 - 11/9/68, this series had - with the exception of the first two episodes - remained unseen on British TV since 1969. As such, there was much work to be done in preparing the crackly episodes for transmission. Producer Charles Garland was responsible for restoring the shows, and worked from digital copies of the episodes, held on half-inch D3 tape:
"In the case of the first series, we made new prints from the telecine recording. These were made by filming a monitor when the show was first transmitted, so the film remains - a primitive process, not carried out on all programmes at the time. We then subjected that to several processes to improve the quality. These were D-Vasc (a process where the sound track is separated from the picture track, as the sound causes an interference if it ‘bleeds’ into the adjoining picture track) and wet-gate, which regularises the picture quality by ‘filling in the holes’ in the picture. I then use the new copy of the improved tape and take out various scratches and ‘drop-outs’ where the picture has a fault, and generally attempt to improve the quality prior to transmission. Finally, I do a new sound dub, to ensure that the words are clear, and equal in volume. It is a long process, and thus obviously quite expensive."
Garland also mentions that he takes out any ‘obvious errors’ from the show before this process begins: whether, by this, he means the tightening up of lax vision-mixing is unclear.
4.
The entire second series of Dad’s Army (broadcast 1/3/69 - 5/4/69, four of which were repeated later the same year) was wiped by the BBC in the 1970s. Apart from one show (the fourth episode, ‘Sgt Wilson’s Little Secret’, which was discovered in Australia), copies of these shows have never been found. On 9/9/98, David Croft appeared on Dad’s Army - Where Are You?, a short appeal (again produced by Charles Garland) which alerted viewers to the situation, and asked if anyone had taped the episodes using early versions of video-recorders: the Phillips NV-1500, the Sony AV-3670, and the smaller Sony AV-3420. The search has so far proved unfruitful, but it’s reassuring to know that they make the effort...
[NOTE (1): The five missing shows are: ‘Operation Kilt’, ‘The Battle Of Godfrey’s Cottage’, ‘The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Walker’, ‘A Stripe For Frazer’ and ‘Under Fire’. All six scripts were published as Dad’s Army: The Lost Episodes (BBC Worldwide, 1998).]
[NOTE (2): ‘Room At The Bottom’ (Series 3, Show 6, broadcast 16/10/69) was a colour episode, recorded mainly on studio VT, but the only copy which survives is a black and white telerecording. Fortunately, this is the only colour episode to have suffered this fate. Tellingly, it has remained (along with ‘Sgt Wilson’s Little Secret’ and the whole of Series 1) absent from all BBC1 prime-time repeats, and was repeated on BBC2 last year for the first time since 1970. It is rumoured that BBC1 has a pleb-pleasing policy against repeating black and white comedy shows in prime-time slots; indeed, the last time it did so was with the Hancock/Hancock’s Half Hour repeats in 1985.]
