The Daily Telegraph - 19.08.2019

S

ometimes, the past is so

seductive that we feel

compelled to bring it back

into being. In the early

1900s, the classicist Arthur

Evans went to Crete and

used concrete and guesswork to raise

the lost city of Knossos. In 1945, the

academic Jan Zachwatowicz rebuilt

Warsaw’s Old Town, employing old

photographs as his guides. This year,

Gold, the free-to-view TV channel,

embarked upon its own version of

these projects. Using a platoon of

experienced actors, a painstaking

recreation of a Forties Anglican church

hall and scripts by Jimmy Perry and

David Croft, it has filled a regrettable

gap in our nation’s archive.

Three 1968 episodes of the much-

loved sitcom Dad’s Army were junked

by the BBC in the Seventies when the

preservation of monochrome

television was considered a senseless

abuse of shelf space. But now, thanks

to Gold, they exist as plausible modern

reproductions. In The Loneliness of the

Long Distance Walker, Mathew Horne

plays Walmington-on-Sea’s favourite

spiv, unexpectedly called up to fight.

In A Stripe for Frazer, promotion

induces megalomania in the platoon’s

resident apocalyptic Scotsman (now

played by David Hayman). In Under

Fire, the new cast tackle a fire in the

church hall. (Here, they had more than

a script to guide them – Perry and

Croft recycled the sequence in a later

episode, Uninvited Guests.)

The cultural archaeology is

impeccable. As Captain Mainwaring,

Kevin McNally abides by Arthur

Lowe’s decision not to separate his

teeth unless absolutely necessary. The

new Sergeant Wilson, Robert

Bathurst, has made a forensic study of

John Le Mesurier’s habit of rubbing

his face while focusing on the middle

distance. The producers have even

replicated a version of the closing titles

appropriate to the 1968 series, filming

the actors against a back-projected

battlefield, rather than recreating the

more familiar on-location version that

made its debut in 1969.

The original run of Dad’s Army

The sitcom that refuses to stay in the past

As three long-lost

‘Dad’s Army’ episodes

are remade, Matthew

Sweet scrutinises our

enduring love for this

very British creation

Royal beast tamed by

the piano whisperer

‘I

almost feel the piano is even more

excited than we are,” said Stephen

Hough on Radio 4. Insofar as an

inanimate assembly of wood and metal

can get excited, this was justified. It

was the piano’s big day. Queen

Victoria’s spangly gold Erard had been

let out of its padded cell in

Buckingham Palace and set free in the

Royal Albert Hall to perform with an

orchestra for the very first time in its

163-year history.

It sounded as you might expect of a

creature that had been locked indoors

for that long: a touch overawed,

hoarse, feral. With the wrong pianist it

might have gone horribly wrong. But

in Hough you have one of the great

piano whisperers. Riding the piano’s

gruff sound thrillingly in the outer

movements of Mendelssohn’s First

Piano Concerto, Hough managed to

still it beautifully for the slow

movement, where he lingered and

dawdled, revelling in the instrument’s

woody tones. Given that the piano was

a tool of love, a device on which

Victoria and Albert would woo each

other in private, it sounded even

happier in the hypnotic intimacy of

Hough’s solo encore, Chopin’s

Nocturne Op 9 No 2.

Prom 40

Queen Victoria’s

Playlist

Royal Albert Hall, London, SW7

★★★★★

By Igor Toronyi-Lalic

In good hands: Stephen Hough gives Queen Victoria’s Erard piano its orchestral début

UKTV; BBC

CHRIS CHRISTODOULOU

Watch this concert for 30 days on the

BBC iPlayer, and listen for 30 days on

BBC Sounds

turn global conflict into comedy. A

compromise was reached. Perry

agreed to give the first episode a

present-day prologue, which would

establish a more respectful note and

turn the series into a flashback. But

like many executive attempts to

reduce ambiguity, it generated more.

The prologue takes us to a black-tie

dinner in 1968. The cast are not as we

remember them. Pike is a middle-aged

pipe-smoker with a luxuriant

moustache. Frazer has grown a goatee

beard. A hearing aid dangles at his

collar. Walker has lost his spiv’s

moustache and gained an enormous

cigar. All are seated below a giant

Union Jack.

Captain Mainwaring gets up to

speak. And there is a kind of genius in

the words that Perry wrote for him.

“When I was first invited to be guest of

honour tonight at the launching of

Walmington-on-Sea’s ‘I’m Backing

Britain’ campaign, I accepted without

hesitation. After all, I have always

backed Britain. I got into the habit of it

in 1940, but then we all backed

Britain.”

Dad’s Army now serves double

helpings of nostalgia – both for the war

years and the time in which it was

produced. But we forget the fragility

of Britain’s status as that first episode

was transmitted. In 1968, the Anglo-

American relationship was cool,

thanks to Harold Wilson’s devaluation

of sterling and refusal to support the

war in Vietnam. Relations with

Britain’s former colonies had not been

warmed by the 1968 Commonwealth

Immigrants Bill, legislation in breach

of the European Convention on

Human Rights. The weakness of the

economy was proverbial. “It ought to

be shaming for British people, with

our history, to let our country be the

sick man of Europe,” declared an

editorial in The Times of December

1968.

The Tories’ preferred cure, as

prescribed by the party’s 1966

manifesto – “Restore respect for

Britain and lead her into Europe” –

would remain unadministered until

1973. In that moment, the Wilson
      government had given its approval to
      “I’m Backing Britain” – an initiative
      that encouraged UK workers to
      improve the economy by doing unpaid
      overtime. It was short-lived, much
      derided, and faded away after the
      press baron Robert Maxwell attempted
      to hijack it with his own “Buy British”
      campaign. (The promotional T-shirts
      turned out to be made in Portugal.)
      But British comedy now memorialises
      it – in the final shot of Carry On Up the
      Khyber (1968), where the slogan
      flutters over the fictional Indian state
      of Khalabar, and in the first scene of
      Perry and Croft’s greatest sitcom.
      From then to now, Dad’s Army
      marches on. Future historians trying
      to reconstruct its progress through
      British culture will have their work cut
      out for them. But it would be quite
      legitimate to ask: who did we think we
      were kidding?

Magnificent seven:

the new cast of

Dad’s Army; left,

Arthur Lowe and

Philip Madoc in the

original series in

1973

‘The biggest

surprise,

though, is the

promiscuous

afterlife

Dad’s Army

now enjoys

in our

political

conversation’

Arts

concluded in 1977, with Mainwaring

and his men breaking the fourth wall

to toast Britain’s Home Guard with

champagne. But the series won’t stay

in the past. It is more accessible now

than when it was in production.

Repeats retain a commanding position

in the BBC Two schedule. The radio

version performs endless duty on

Radio 4 Extra. A two-man touring

stage adaptation begins a second

patrol in the autumn. Oliver Parker’s

starry 2016 film demonstrated that

Perry and Croft’s characters were

sufficiently strong to bear

interpretation by new actors.

Much as everyone adores Private

Godfrey, with his sweet smile and his

weak bladder, few in the Seventies

would have anticipated that Arnold

Ridley’s character would join King

Lear and Uncle Vanya in the repertoire

of Timothy West and Michael

Gambon. The biggest surprise,

though, is the promiscuous afterlife

Dad’s Army now enjoys in our political

conversation. Like the Keep Calm and

Carry On poster that became a locus of

British self-pity during the Gordon

Brown years, the age of Brexit has

requisitioned Dad’s Army as a

battleground. Last month the TV

producer Daisy Goodwin argued that

unending repeats of the show had

encouraged the British electorate to

over-romanticise the war and vote like

a fortress nation. Frans Timmermans,

the European Commission’s first

vice-president, used the sitcom to

characterise Theresa May’s Brexit

negotiators. “I thought, ‘Oh my God,

they haven’t got a plan,” he told the

BBC. “It’s like Lance Corporal Jones.

‘Don’t panic! Don’t panic!’ Running

around like idiots.” The sharpest part

of that remark? Timmermans’s

absolutely precise and correct

identification of the rank of Clive

Dunn’s character.

And yet, political arguments have

attended Dad’s Army since its

inception, when Jimmy Perry clashed

with the BBC executives who objected

to his mockery of the Home Guard.

“The whole object of this comedy

series,” protested Perry in a memo to

his bosses, “is to contrast the pathetic,

comic, but valorous nature of the

Home Guard, who believed at the time

that this [the Nazi hordes] was what

they were up against. It seems to me to

be not only right but essential that this

fact is brought home to the viewers.”

Perry was an inexperienced writer,

but he was also a veteran of Joan

Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop,

which, with Oh! What A Lovely War,

had written the rule book on how to

Dad’s Army: the Lost Episodes begins on

Gold at 8pm on Sunday.

The Prom was celebrating the

200th anniversary of Victoria’s birth.

But it also felt like a sly challenge to

that infamous slur on 19th-century

British music-making that this was a

“land without music”. The opening

gambit, however, felt risky. Arthur

Sullivan’s “patriotic ballet” Victoria

and Merrie England Suite (1897) is the

lightest of light music, the classical

equivalent of a Sherbet dip. Yet Adam

Fischer and the Orchestra of the Age

of Enlightenment showed how far a

bit of care and belief can go.

Tenderness and fervour

transformed the opening berceuse

into something quite glorious, almost

profound. And while no orchestra

could fully de-twee the Mistletoe

Dance, there were shades of Dvořák

elsewhere and moments where one

thought, this is no worse than Rossini.

The night’s real lesson was how

much more of a “land without music”

we would have been without the

Royal family. Bach’s St Matthew

Passion arrived here only thanks to

Albert. And if it wasn’t for the couple’s

friendship with Mendelssohn, would

he have performed as much in Britain?

Or hung around for long enough to

immortalise Fingal’s Cave?

Mendelssohn improvised for the

royals, duetted with them, arranged

songs for them. He was impressed by

their playing but, diplomatically, kept

shtum about Prince Albert’s own

compositional skills. We sampled five

of Albert’s neat little songs, and

Hough and tenor Alessandro Fisher

gave it their best shot. As befits

royal work, this was music that didn’t

even remotely want to get its hands

dirty.

It’s odd that the couple never

commissioned Mendelssohn. The

Scottish Symphony was dedicated to

Victoria, however, lucky woman. The

OAE’s performance was invigoratingly

blustery with salty horns, a woodwind

section barely out of the barnyard and

timp attacks that struck like

thunderbolts. Fischer let it all run

deliciously amok, and then led us out

of the mayhem into that glorious

golden sunburst of an ending like a

delirious shepherd.

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