Dad’s Army (15)

EVEN in an age when film development is a conspicuously lazy process, and the same old stories are trundled out time after time, the idea of reawakening Dad’s Army from its much-deserved slumber seems particularly odd. Is popularity alone a reason to dust off a TV show from the archive? If properly applied to this national treasure, the answer to that question should have been a resounding “no”. And yet here it is.

The original 30-minute BBC sitcom about a group of Home Guards during the Second World War played for nine seasons in the 1960s and 1970s. At the height of its fame it had 18m viewers; the characters and the actors who played them are part of British TV folklore.

But in the 1960s a great many more people had direct memories of the Second World War, than do today. And the show’s gentle and straightforward humour was more in vogue. To watch the show today still raises chuckles, but bringing it to the big screen is another matter.

Anyone adapting Dad’s Army has a tough decision. Preserve the material in aspic and you have an anachronism on your hands; revamp it, and you risk losing the original’s charm. Director Oliver Parker and writer Hamish McColl have effectively opted for the first option, and the result is every bit as one might have predicted.

Parker’s shrewdest move, the carrot in this project, is his cast, an ensemble that includes Toby Jones (Captain Mainwaring), Bill Nighy (Sergeant Wilson), Tom Courtney (Corporal Jones) and Michael Gambon (Private Godfrey); anyone who remembers the show fondly would wish to see how these inestimable thesps take on the hallowed mantle of Arthur Lowe and company. Beyond that, it’s hard to visualise an audience.

The one previous Dad’s Army film, in 1971, lazily regurgitated the story of the guard’s formation. McColl has at least made an effort to flesh out the storyline for a feature. We’re now towards the end of the war, with D-Day imminent, and the Home Guard is given a tangible task – to patrol a phoney army base and help to distract the Nazis from the real location of the invasion forces.

McColl also introduces some women into the mix, the wives and girlfriends never seen on TV, as well as the formidable Rose Winters (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a Nazi spy who arrives in Walmington-on-Sea in the guise of a journalist keen to write about the Home Guard – whose members become doolally at her presence.

As Zeta-Jones works overtime to create sexual frisson with every man around her, there’s more sauciness to the comedy than I remember, with people declaring, “You’ve just slipped her a sausage” and “Barbara loves a four-ball”. It feels more appropriate to Carry On than Dad’s Army; all we’re missing is the nudge-nudge, wink-wink. And it’s not funny at all, merely lame.

With the script in such antiquated mode, the actors meekly throw in the towel (a disheartening sight), with one exception. You might say that Jones was born to play Mainwaring. As with Arthur Lowe, it’s wonderful to watch the banker’s haughty self-regard pricked at every turn; and while Jones tackles the part with less bluster than Lowe, he brings more pathos – and some wonderful moments of physical comedy.

Buoyed by Jones towards a half-decent finale, it’s fitting that the last words should be Mainwaring’s.

“It was touch and go old friend, but we got there in the end.”

The star deserves the sentiment, but it’s still tempting to say: “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Parker?”

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