Jimmy Perry
James Perry was an English scriptwriter and actor. He devised and co-wrote the BBC sitcoms Dad's Army, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi! and You Rang, M'Lord?, all with David Croft. Perry co-wrote the theme tune of Dad's Army, "Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr. Hitler?" along with Derek Taverner, for which Perry received an Ivor Novello Award from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors in 1971.
Early life
Perry was born in Barnes, Surrey on 20 September 1923. His father, Arthur, was an antiques dealer, whose shop was in South Kensington, London. He was a founder of the British Antique Dealers' Association. His son was educated at two independent schools, Colet Court and St Paul's School, which at the time were both based in Hammersmith in West London.The teenaged Perry partly served as the model for the mummy's boy character Private Pike in Dad's Army. In a 2013 interview with Neil Clark for The Daily Telegraph, he said his own mother "didn't go so far as making me wear a scarf, but she came pretty near". A regular visitor to the cinemas and the theatres in Hammersmith, his school report said: "We fear for his future". He left school aged 14. In an exchange with his father Perry commented, "I don't need any qualifications. I'm going to be a famous film star or a great comedian", to which his father responded with the phrase "you stupid boy".
After leaving school, he was sent to Clark's college to learn shorthand, typing and bookkeeping. He truanted, spending the whole of one summer reading Tarzan books on Barnes Common, rather than attending class. He worked in his father's antique shop and the carpet department of Waring & Gillow, before training as the maker of scientific instruments and working in a factory making naval telescopes. With the outbreak of the Second World War, his family moved to Watford just outside London, his father taking over the shop of an uncle.
In Watford, he served in the Home Guard, which he joined in 1940, and became involved in amateur dramatics.
Delaying call up at the insistence of his mother, he joined the First Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment of the Royal Artillery at Oswestry in 1943, and the camp concert party. The following year, he was sent to Bombay in India, and then Burma, being promoted in rank from gunner to bombardier in the process. He was active in the concert party at the Deolali base of the Royal Artillery, and later in Combined Services Entertainment. Demobbed and back in the UK, he trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on a serviceman's scholarship, where his contemporaries included Joan Collins, Lionel Jeffries and Robert Shaw. He spent his holiday period working as a Redcoat in Butlin's Holiday Camps.
Initially working in repertory and West End musicals from 1950 after graduating from RADA, during the period 1956–1965, Perry was actor-manager at the Watford Palace Theatre, in collaboration with his wife, Gilda. Ruth Llewellyn, later Ruth Madoc, and best known for her role as Gladys Pugh in Hi-de-Hi, was one of the performers who appeared there during this time. The company included Glenda Jackson, along with many actors that would later join him in his comedy writing career including Michael Knowles, Colin Bean, John Clegg, and Mavis Pugh.
After leaving Watford Palace Theatre in 1965, when Watford council took over the theatre, Perry joined Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop as an actor working at its base, the Theatre Royal Stratford East. He remained with the company for two years.
Comedy writer
''Dad's Army'' (1968–1977)
Inspired after seeing a television showing of the Will Hay comedy Oh, Mr Porter!, he decided to use Hay's comedy device of "the pompous man in charge, old man and young boy", for his own project. Meanwhile, Perry was also gaining work in television bit parts. He was sent by his agent, Ann Callender, to be cast in an episode of a sitcom starring Reg Varney entitled Beggar My Neighbour which was being produced by Callender's husband, David Croft.Perry showed Croft an outline for a sitcom derived from his experiences in the Home Guard, then entitled The Fighting Tigers, which resulted in the producer taking the idea to Michael Mills, then the BBC Head of Comedy. With David Croft now involved with writing the scripts, as Perry had no writing experience at the time, the first series was commissioned under the new title of Dad's Army, which was suggested by Mills. Perry, credited with the original idea for Dad's Army, conceived the sitcom with the role of Walker in mind for himself, but Croft and Mills successfully dissuaded him. As well as the character of Private Pike, modelled on himself, an elderly man he had known in the Home Guard had served with Lord Kitchener and became the basis for Corporal Jones. Perry also composed the opening tune for Dad's Army, "Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?". It won the Ivor Novello Award for Best TV Signature Tune in 1971.
The series did though have doubters within the BBC who feared mocking the Home Guard would not be well received. Perry recalled in 1997 that the BBC "did audience research on it before it went out. They showed the first episode to audiences for three whole days, and 99 per cent of people loathed it. They said, 'That bald-headed old man doesn't even know his lines'." Despite the doubts, the first episode was screened on 31 July 1968, with Perry making a cameo appearance as the entertainer Charlie Cheeseman in the sixth episode, "Shooting Pains". At its peak, the show had ratings of 18 million. It ran for nine years, from 1968 to 1977, and led to two film versions, a stage show and a radio version.
In the 2013 Telegraph interview, Perry said: "It amazes me. I think it's because it's the thing that all British people savour: we were on our own at that time and we didn't turn away. Dad's Army reminds us of our finest hour."
Michael Palin, remembered how Dad's Army seemed to take over the BBC in the late 1960s and early 1970s saying 'when we were preparing the first Monty Python series, the BBC Light Entertainment wardrobe department had begun more and more to resemble an army barracks... the culprit was Dad's Army."
''The Gnomes of Dulwich'' (1969)
Shortly after Dad's Army began, Perry wrote The Gnomes of Dulwich, which starred Hugh Lloyd and Terry Scott, who had previously appeared together in Hugh and I. Perry had always been very interested in gnomes; he originally intended it to be a short sketch for The Morecambe & Wise Show but it was his wife who persuaded him that there was a whole series in it. In 2009, Perry said the series two leads "were two gnomes who would sit by a pond and commented on life, race, religion – everything."It lasted for one series of six episodes, and although Perry claimed the series was quite well received, it did not warrant a second series. However, the critics largely did not approve, one saying "I found the script banal and beyond reason", with another simply saying "what a load o of rubbish". All six episodes are missing from the BBC Archives, and are presumed lost; only a few stills and audio fragments survive.