by The obituary pages often honor the last men and women who made a significant contribution to the war effort between 1939 and 1945. Those heroes who were there must now fight and make room for the soldiers who died. less military: Private Pike of Dad’s Army.
Ian Lavender, who played Pike, was the last surviving member of the Home Guard who diligently defended Britain’s shores against the German invasion in Walmington-on-Sea. In 1968 he was only 20 years old when he was cast, with freshness, in a new BBC sitcom, the young man in a group of fighters, two of whom were born in the 19th century.th century (John Laurie and Arnold Ridley). Most had died by the early 1980s, with only Clive Dunn remaining until 2012. As Lavender was the youngest member, he was left to continue talking about the show as a treasure trove of memories. He accepted with grace that Dad’s Army was the only thing anyone wanted to ask him about. Including me when I met him in 2006.
“How can you be upset that people still want to talk about it?” he said. “Go up to a young actor and say, ‘Here’s a script, it’s going to run over 10 years, so it’ll keep you well employed, plenty to do in between, reruns for the rest of your life, he will create work for you but he will stop with other work.’ Show me the actor who says, ‘I don’t want to know about that, I don’t want to be successful’.”
Private Pike was a unique position. While many who watched Dad’s Army remembered the war, younger viewers – the ones who thought up the Sixties revolution – had only one character anywhere close to their own age. And he was far from an impressive specimen. The mollycoddled bank clerk immortalized Captain Mainwaring, his pompous bank manager, as “Stupid boy”. With his weak chest he escaped conscription, being marched far from the front lines in North Africa or Normandy among men too old to take part in the First World War, let alone the Second World War.
Through Pike, a gang show about class and age also emerged. There was humor but also pathos in Pike’s relentless naivety, which was also Lavender’s first. “I almost did a strike in the first set by moving furniture on the set,” he said. “I thought I was helpful.” Wet behind the ears, Pike had no idea that his overprotective mother continued with Sergeant Wilson, though he didn’t stop tapping on the dot.
“By the time we finish supper,” he said, “it’s always so late, you don’t leave our house until after I go to bed and then you’re back early for breakfast before I’m wake up But what I can’t understand is that I don’t hear you leave at night and I don’t hear you come back in.”
“Well I let myself in and out quietly,” Wilson said.
“You don’t do anything else quietly!”
Many of the older cast members had done serious and famous work by the time they were cast in Dad’s Army. Lavender began with noble aims to tear up the stage. “When I was a student sitting in those sliding seats at the Old Vic to see Olivier in Love for Love and Othello, it was everyone’s ambition to work at the National. We all wanted to be stars, we knew in our hearts that Olivier had to die at some point. I would come out of the Bristol Old Vic School play of the ‘juve’ guides – Florizel and Romeo. Dad’s Army was going to be six TVs, a fun way to spend the summer.”
The success of the show put a stop to his dream of playing Hamlet. Instead he learned another trade from Arthur Lowe. “Art was a colorful little man and what he stands for,” he said. “ But he knew it was so good and he played it, and then in the end he would let you in on the joke. Towards the end of that first series he took me to one side and said, ‘Don’t worry if there aren’t many lines. They will come. In the meantime, get yourself a funny outfit and stand by me’.”
Lavender began wearing a blue kilt and scarf, as a tribute to his home club, Aston Villa, and David Croft and Jimmy Perry began writing about him as a mummy’s boy wrapped in it. Pike would become the base of one of the most indelible gags in British sitcom. As a starting point, “Don’t tell him, Pike” worked because Pike was drawn in such detail in the sixth series that every contour of his character was known: his prudence, his petulance, his cowardice, but also his vulnerability. The joke works so well because it was pretty clear that the Germans would make a pie of Pike in particular.
It would be time to work on Lavender. The hair went as white as all his old colleagues, the midriff grew distended. Beyond Dad’s Army, the work came in: The Glums, 240 episodes of EastEnders, even big musical theater in the shape of Into the Woods and Caroline, or Change. It was in sentimental tribute to Dad’s Army that Victoria Wood gave him a cameo in her last play, That Day We Sang. He took the advice of working comedian Roy Kinnear. “His philosophy was ‘Take the next job’. It didn’t matter what it was. As a result of Dad’s Army there was always one. Almost always.”
It was the best on British television, and it feels both fruitful and significant that its last star is now gone. Lavender herself got used to saying goodbye to her colleagues.
“My friends were 50 and 40 years older than me,” he told me. “It was strange to be so close to people and lose them so quickly. There was obviously sadness but I couldn’t help but feel cheated. I remember one night at dinner John Laurie said, ‘Look at us around this table!’ And he went around the whole cast and described us. He got all of us.”
“Arthur Lowe, tenor number two. John Le Mesurier, dilettante. Jimmy Beck, a leading man from a dubious representative in York. Arnold Ridley, failed playwright, failed film producer, failed director, failed actor. Ian Lavender, wet behind the ears, did nothing. Clive Dunn spent his life from day one in a prisoner of war camp playing an old man and now there is no need for the wig. And here I was who played every part in Shakespeare except Henry VIII and that was only because I was thin. I’ve got a reputation for doing this crap!”
They all did, and no one was more grateful than the lowest soldier of Dad’s Army.
