Dad’s Army Radio Show at The British Library | Review
Dad’s Army is still one of the absolute joys of the television world. Over 9 series, and 80 episodes, we followed the ups and downs of a group of, on the whole, elderly men in a quiet seaside town, ready to put their lives on the line in defence of their country.
First transmitted in between 1968 and 1977, the show is regularly repeated on BBC2 on a Saturday night, and still pulls in 2 or 3 million viewers. The highly successful radio spin-off gets regular airings on BBC Radio 4 Extra. With such an iconic show, it might be thought to leave it alone. You can’t improve on perfection – and I’m sure the makers of the recent disastrous movie would concur. However, two men felt there was something more that could be done and last night I was lucky enough to see a performance of the Dad’s Army Radio Show at the British Library.
The first thing to say is that Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s writing is still as fresh today as it ever was. The three episodes that make up this performance – “When You’ve Got to Go”, My Brother And I’ and ‘Never Too Old” have been beautifully adapted for radio by David Benson and Jack Lane and are performed by them as though it was a radio production.
Now the first question you may have is, where’s the rest of the cast? And I have to admit that was my first thought when looking at the programme. I thought maybe the guys had re-written each episode as a simple two-handler between Mainwaring and Wilson. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Thanks to the truly wonderful vocal talents of both actors, Mainwaring and Wilson were there, but so were Jones, Frazer, Godfrey, Pike, Warden Hodges, the Vicar, the Verger, Mrs Pike and so on. Dressed only in WWII battle dress uniforms, David and Jack give vocally perfect renditions of the characters we know and love. But they also do more. They bring the character’s personality out in the movement and posture. Wilson, lugubrious and laid back, Mainwaring stiff and unbending, Jones, always on the edge of panic, Fraser, triumphant when he thinks he can get one up on another character, etc.
This is difficult enough at the best of times, but there are moments when the script calls for one of the actors to be playing both parts of a conversation, and it is a real pleasure to see them pull this trick off. This is particularly true in the second episode “My Brother and I” where, just as Arthur Lowe did in the original television show, Jack Lane plays George Mainwaring and his permanently sizzled and highly disreputable brother Barry.
One of the real strengths of Dad’s Army is that, in a time when many of the values that are intrinsic to the storyline – nationalism, the bulldog spirit, standing alone against a common enemy – are not those that abound today, it still feels ‘right’. In the comedy are human stories, and the show is ultimately based on reality. Hoards of just about able-bodied men prepared to sacrifice everything and be the final line of resistance at a time when invasion from a larger, much better-equipped army was not just an idea but an actual possibility. Probably the reason why “Never Too Old’ is so poignant and still raises a tear in my eye whenever I see it again.
At the viewing I attended we were lucky enough to have a guest in the audience – Frank Williams, who played the Reverend Timothy Farthing in the original show. At the end, Frank summed it up perfectly by saying that his eyesight wasn’t what it used to be and leaning back, listening to the voices, he expected to see a large cast of old familiar faces on the stage. What he, I and the rest of the audience did see were two superlative actors who had just given us a truly superb performance and ensured that Dad’s Army will continue to thrill and entertain the next generation, as it did for mine.
Review by Terry Eastham for London Theatre 1
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