Dad's Army by Graham McCann

Author:Graham McCann [Graham McCann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007389421
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2001-04-19T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER XI

Shepperton

PIKE Mum was ever so surprised when I told her I was going to be a film star.

FRAZER Rubbish!

DAD’S ARMY1

Film is a collaborative business: bend over.

DAVID MAMET2

In the summer of 1970, the cast took a short break from the small screen in order to prepare for an appearance on the big one: Dad’s Army, after completing three successful series on television, was set to be made into a movie. It was considered to be more or less de rigueur, in those days, for a British situation-comedy to attempt this hazardous transition – during the first three years of the decade alone, the likes of Up Pompeii!, On the Buses, Please, Sir!, Steptoe and Son, Father, Dear Father, Bless This House and even Love Thy Neighbour, aided and abetted by an ailing and risk-aversive British film industry desperate to tap into television’s mass audience, would all spawn at least one cinematic spin-off – and neither Croft nor Perry had felt inclined to fly in the face of such a fashion.

The man responsible for getting the project into production was a 34-year-old Dublin-born film-maker called Norman Cohen. He had already directed one situation-comedy spin-off – the workmanlike Till Death Us Do Part (1969) – and his search for another had brought him into contact with Croft and Perry. ‘He offered us a £500 advance to let him find a way to get the movie off the ground,’ Croft recalled. ‘We knew he was quite an entrepreneur, and he was certainly good at that sort of thing, so we told him to go ahead.’3 Armed with Croft and Perry’s synopsis, Cohen proceeded to sound out a number of potential investors, and eventually, after suffering several setbacks, he managed (with the assistance of his agent, Greg Smith) to secure a deal with a US-based producer, John R. Sloan, and a Hollywood studio, Columbia Pictures.

Croft and Perry were delighted: now, freed from the kind of constraints that came with television’s modest budgets and short spans of time, they could craft the sort of 90-minute screenplay that would allow them to tell a richer, more intricate story, at a more delicately modulated pace, against the backdrop of a fully-visible town peopled by innumerable extras. Cohen – who was duly set to direct – was similarly enthusiastic, announcing that he expected the movie to be ‘clean, harmless fun’, with ‘a lot of visual humour’ which he aimed to achieve without the use of ‘gimmicks or tricksy camera work’: ‘The natural humour is in the playing, and it’s in my job as director to bring it out and make it work on the big screen.’4 His first encounter with the cast, however, was not a great success. ‘He came to see us at Television Centre,’ recalled Ian Lavender, ‘and he admitted that he’d never seen a single episode. I don’t know if he was winding us up or not, but we all thought, “What?”’5 It was not long before news of Columbia’s plans to ‘improve’ certain aspects of the production arrived to further dampen people’s spirits.

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