“Don’t tell him, Pike!”

Some people I know positively hate it, but at the end of this month the BBC’s Dad’s Army – still a staple of ‘repeat show’ channels the world over – will reach the milestone of passing the fiftieth anniversary of its first-ever broadcast – a distinction that few still-popular TV programmes or series can claim.

Here’s a link to a worthy piece by TV critic Mark Lawson marking the occasion that appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN

Having worked in television briefly myself I can testify with some authority to the totally random nature of popular acclaim and success.

On the one hand, the world is awash with highly-anticipated shows upon which someone somewhere has lavished untold amounts of money in assembling ‘top talent’ in every production job (from lead actors to producers, directors, cameramen, writers, to all the backroom staff, you name it), taken all the care imaginable in production, marketed the finished product with due panache – and then totally bombed into oblivion.

On the other hand, you can just as easily develop the very self-same day an embarrassingly-crappy, half-baked, throwaway, ‘back of an envelope’-hatched parlour game-type, mid-afternoon transmission slot-aimed, show costing barely a couple of thousand quid per episode and end up with a massive ratings-hit phenomenon that earns everyone involved (well, some of them) squillions.

There’s little rhyme or reason to any of it.

Okay, sometimes – e.g. by coming up with a scintillating idea and working with genuinely talented people – you can to a degree ‘hedge your bets’ (or stack the cards marginally in your favour) but, in the same manner in which legend has it that 95% of all new start-up businesses fail, the inevitability is that one only ever hears and/or reads about the few spectacular examples of success – rarely to never the overwhelming numerical majority of ‘hard luck’ failures.

Thinking back this morning to the late 1960s when it first hit the UK’s television screens, Dad’s Army could so easily have been just another also-ran.

We all know that hindsight gives even those of us with little imagination flashes of blinding clarity and vision, but somehow in the concept and gestation of the programme – deliberately or accidentally (and probably both) – David Croft and Jimmy Perry had tapped into some key creative and audience factors.

During the two decades that followed WW2, in moments of honourable self-awareness and modesty most Britons would have probably acknowledged that Britain hadn’t so much won WW2 as avoided defeat long enough for the USA to enter the fray and provide the dynamism, armaments industry, military weight of numbers and geo-political clout to overcome Hitler’s Germany.

However, what was undeniable, even amongst we 1960s young – who had heard as much from our parents if not grandparents – was the fact that during the dark days of 1940 and beyond there had been a defiant ‘up against the wall’, stoical, ‘we’re all in this together’ communal feeling in the country that brought out the best and noble in the population as it faced not just deprivation, danger and adversity but the all-pervading uncertainty of what the future might be going to bring.

Or, let me put it another way – even if seven decades of distance and detailed research within the archive documentation gradually released since 1945 has produced some revisionist takes on what was really happening – during WW2 and beyond on there was a widely-held general perception that the wartime Blitz mentality had demonstrated the British nation at its best.

That whatever economic disasters, financial crashes, unemployment marches, political movements and/or public unrest had been buffeting the nation, when the chips really came down in 1940 and Britain then had to face potential defeat, surrender and subjugation starkly in the face, a collective ‘something’ (allied to a sense of humour, not least to laugh at themselves and/or delight in gallows-banter) bound the population together in a common purpose – even if this was to prove only briefly.

I remember that – by the time Dad’s Army really began to hit its straps and find its place in the nation’s consciousness, probably around 1970 – both my grandmother and my parents’ trusty gardener (a former Home Guard member himself) had become devoted fans. To an extent this was partly because the characters were easily defined and the set-ups and gags and situations were both inventive and funny, but it was also undoubtedly because they were enraptured by the nostalgia aspect.

It was not just that they had known – or thought they had – the self-important pompous little bank manager, the black market spiv and the wet-behind-the-ears teenager types from their own wartime experiences. They also remembered first hand the complexities of food rationing coupons, the endless ‘making do’ and, of course, the innumerable vagaries of petty officialdom and how ordinary folk endured (or found ways around) all these.

Even those of us born ten years and more after WW2 ended could emphasise – and perhaps take pride in having some small connection – with the British wartime spirit.

Especially when our elders and betters were testifying that, whatever calamities Captain Mainwaring and his hapless Home Guard platoon were encountering each week upon the BBC, they were no more – and sometimes much less – than the ineptitude and absurdities that their real-life counterparts had got up to during WW2 itself.