Not sure about Toby Jones as Captain Mainwaring. I’m not convinced he has the face for that permanent look of puffed-up exasperation. Bill Nighy as Sergeant Wilson feels right: they share the same faded elegance. I can see Nighy matching John Le Mesurier’s patient forbearance sigh for sigh. Sir Michael Gambon as Private Godfrey? Far too grand, I’d have thought.
Such is the fate of the remake, destined to be compared in every particular with the original. So it will be with the coming film version of Dad’s Army, announced this week. For the true fan, no remake can ever match up to the remembered – sometimes hazily remembered – perfection of the real thing. It’s like trying to re-enact a childhood day out. Far better to leave it intact, as a cherished memory.
Except a new Dad’s Army starts with an advantage allowed few other remakes. It taps into a part of the British psyche that throbs as vibrantly as ever – a fact demonstrated anew with Thursday’s byelection results. The landslide victory for Ukip’s Douglas Carswell in Clacton – at last delivering the party its long-desired Westminster breakthrough – as well as Ukip running Labour a breathtakingly close second in Heywood and Middleton, was the proof.
I am speaking, of course, of that part of the British folk memory reserved for the second world war. I have written before of 1940 as the creation myth of modern Britain, that defining moment when the country stood alone to fight Nazi Germany. What is curious is that for so long this myth was distilled and advanced not through a great monument or ceremony, a symphony or grand sculpture, but through a modest, if brilliant, sitcom about a bunch of old boys huffing and puffing their way through drills, parades and the occasional false alarm.
From 1968 to 1977, and through decades of repeats ever since, Dad’s Army became the chief depiction of Britain’s wartime experience. While actual 1940s anthems are long forgotten, Who do you think you’re kidding, Mr Hitler? lives on, one more legacy of the TV show. Britons who would struggle to name a single regiment that fought the decisive battles of that conflict can instantly identify the gentle amateurs of the Home Guard.
Perhaps that’s down to what we think of as a classic British trait: self-deprecation. While the Americans revere what they call the Greatest Generation through heroic Spielberg epics, we made our homage via a baleful Scottish undertaker, a hysterical local butcher, and a young subordinate forever dismissed as a “stupid boy”. The Americans had Private Ryan; we had Private Pike.
Of course Britain had its war movies – The Dam Busters and The Bridge on the River Kwai – but it settled on Dad’s Army as its standard form of remembrance. It was as if – and perhaps this too is especially British – a period of intense pain and sacrifice could only be talked around, and even then only through a joke. Too awkward to be confronted directly, it was best laughed off.
It’s equally possible that Dad’s Army was not really about the war at all. Perhaps its real subject was its own period, three decades later: postwar Britain. Thwarted, frustrated Captain Mainwaring, a man with aspirations for greatness constantly forced to confront his own impotence – what was he, if not the embodiment of 1970s Britain? For Mainwaring still had the trappings of power – his uniform and his rank – but he presided over a shambles.
Indeed, it was here that the comedy resided. For Mainwaring is the prime example of an archetype that became a reliable staple of British TV humour, especially in that period of postwar decline: the disappointed, deluded British male, constantly falling short of his fantasies of greatness. Harold Steptoe, Basil Fawlty, Del Boy Trotter, David Brent – Mainwaring is the commanding officer of them all. And each one of those characters spoke to a Britain that had once known greatness and had seen it slip away.
Enter Nigel Farage. With his pint and his froggy grin, the Ukip leader could almost be a creation of TV comedy. Like Mainwaring, he too has big dreams, leading a ragtag army of oddballs who regularly put a spoke in his wheel. Where he differs from the tragic heroes of British sitcoms past is self-awareness. Unlike them, Farage does at least seem conscious of his own lurches into absurdity.
But Mainwaring is his spiritual forebear, all the same. Farage sees the world the way the Home Guard volunteers of fictitious Walmington-on-Sea saw it: plucky little England against the world. Those opening Dad’s Army titles, showing this sceptre’d isle beating back the invading arrows of the continent, could be an animated version of the Ukip manifesto. The essential message: keep away, Europe, we’re better off alone.
But while Frazer, Jones and Pike strove to fend off the Nazis, Farage longs to keep out migrants, meddling EU bureaucrats and, in his latest musings, those with HIV. Still, the connection is strong. For the foundation stone of British Euroscepticism is the last war, particularly that memory of standing alone against the Nazi menace.
For the nostalgists of Ukip and their fellow travellers in the Conservative party, this will forever remain Britain’s finest hour. This is the imagined nirvana to which they yearn to return: that day when Britain stood solo – a proud nation answerable to no one but itself.
This may not explain what moved the people of Clacton-on-Sea – a neighbour perhaps of its fellow, if make-believe, south-eastern coastal town of Walmington-on-Sea – to vote for Ukip in such huge numbers. Besides the obvious concern over immigration, those voters were doubtless motivated too by a deep alienation from the three establishment parties, which they deem interchangeable and identically distant. Nevertheless they were drawn to a party, and a leader, whose politics remain anchored in the era that ended 70 years ago.
Sometimes it seems that the grip that the second world war exerts on our collective imagination is about to fade. A telling instance came during the Scottish independence campaign, when George Galloway – fighting for no – made his final appeal to an arena packed with thousands of first-time, teenage voters. He urged them to ask their grandparents about the war they had fought against fascism, alongside their Welsh and English comrades. For all his oratorical force, Galloway’s appeal fell flat. To that young audience, it meant little or nothing.
Elsewhere, though, the memory of wartime lingers. Farage’s onward march, like the return of Captain Mainwaring, demonstrates it. We may like to laugh at it, but it is deep in our marrow. We will not cast it off easily.
