‘Don’t tell him, Pike’: inside the funniest Dad’s Army episode ever made

The comic brilliance of Dad’s Army has reached way beyond Walmington-on-Sea. The actor Philip Madoc – from the classic episode, The Deadly Attachment – was once camel trekking across the Mongolian Desert when someone asked him, “Are you the man who played the U-boat captain in Dad’s Army?”

Madoc was more than a U-boat captain. He was the set-up man for Dad’s Army’s most quoted, most replayed gag: “Don’t tell him, Pike!”

That classic moment – which first aired 50 years ago – has endured, perhaps, because it neatly sums up the inherent joke of Dad’s Army: the pretensions of Captain Mainwaring – the trumped-up fusspot played by Arthur Lowe – undone by someone who’s further down the pecking order.

“Don’t tell him, Pike!” is now ubiquitous in British comedy history. Indeed, as we march towards Christmas, it’s guaranteed to feature in the usual round-ups of classic comedy moments, alongside Del Boy falling through the bar and Morecambe and Wise’s breakfast dance. The line was so funny that Ian Lavender – who played Private Pike, perched on a ladder for that particular scene – had to bite on the inside of his cheek to stop himself laughing and falling off the ladder. He bit so hard that his mouth bled.

The idea for Dad’s Army struck Jimmy Perry – then an actor and theatre manager – as he walked through St. James’s Park in the summer of 1967. In the distance, Perry could hear the band playing for the changing of the guard. It brought back memories of his time in the Home Guard in Watford. He had joined aged just 15 and – unbeknownst to him then – later became the inspiration for Private Pike, the scarf-wrapped mummy’s boy.

“My mother was always fearful of me being out at night and catching a cold, but I loved it,” Perry later said. Captain Mainwaring’s much-repeated putdown of Pike – “You stupid boy” – also came from real life. It’s what Perry’s father would call him when he said wanted to be an actor or comic.

At the time, Perry was looking for a good script idea – mostly so he could write himself a decent part (he’d originally intended to play the show’s spiv, Walker, ultimately played by James Beck). Doing some initial research, Perry discovered that nobody in the 1960s remembered the Home Guard.

On May 14 1940, Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, called for men to sign up for what was then called the Local Defence Volunteers – preparing for what Brits then thought was an inevitable German invasion. It was Churchill himself, a staunch supporter of the initiative, who coined the “Home Guard” name. Dad’s Army – though incompetently farcical – does characterise the keenness of the real home guard. Within 24 hours of Eden’s address, 250,000 men had enlisted. Within two months they were up to 1,400,000.

The very first episode of Dad’s Army accurately detailed how unprepared the War Office was for the huge turnout: no uniforms, not enough application forms, and no weapons – just packets of pepper to throw into the eyes of invading Nazis. The madcap manoeuvres of Dad’s Army – usually involving Clive Dunn’s Lance Corporal Jones in a precarious, don’t-panic predicament – also had some basis in truth. Members of the Home Guard practiced throwing potatoes in lieu of hand grenades; some were trained to roller skate as “despatch racers”; others – while waiting for proper weapons – armed themselves with antique cutlasses and blunderbusses. Jimmy Perry was issued cheese wire for decapitating Nazi sentries.

The Home Guard made a genuine and vital contribution to civil defence, though stories of Dad’s Army-style blunders were rife. One Birmingham battalion almost went to war with a local allotment holders association over a ruined row of onions. A Berkshire battalion found itself trying to decipher a dot-dash code from what they thought was a flag, but was actually a cow swishing its tail. Norman Longmate, author of the book The Real Dad’s Army, joined the Sussex Battalion aged 17 and maintained that the sitcom was “remarkably accurate in its portrayal of life in the Home Guard”.

After landing a bit part in a BBC sitcom, Perry managed to get his script – then called The Fighting Tigers – into the hands of the producer, David Croft (who served as an air raid warden during the Second World War). They rewrote the script together, beginning a partnership that lasted 30-plus years. As well as co-writing 80 episodes of Dad’s Army, the duo created and wrote It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi!, and You Rang M’Lord?.

The series was championed by the BBC’s then-Head of Comedy, Michael Mills, also instrumental in Up Pompeii and Some Mothers Do Ave Em. It was Mills who suggested the name Dad’s Army, as well as naming the sitcom’s coastal town, Walmington-on-Sea. Mills also ruled that Perry couldn’t play the part of Walker. “I always resented it,” Perry told Graham McCann, author of a 2002 book about Dad’s Army. But Perry, talking on the 2004 series, Britain’s Best Sitcom, admitted that in hindsight it probably wasn’t a good idea for him to play the spiv. “Because they were tough buggers, you know,” Perry said.

Looking back now at Dad’s Army, it’s hard to imagine a modern BBC sitcom beginning with pointy, dancing swastikas. But it was a time when Nazis could be cast as daft comedy figures (which David Croft did again with ‘Allo ‘Allo, in which the Gestapo become campy, randy panto villains). But the opening titles to Dad’s Army were almost much darker. Perry and Croft had originally wanted to feature archival footage of Nazi troops and fleeing refugees. 

Paul Fox, the controller of BBC One, put a stop to it – a decision that rankled Perry and Croft. As detailed in McCann’s book, some BBC top brass thought that Fox had an aversion to all things German – even German-made cars. Fox was Jewish and had served in the parachute regiment during the war. Fox’s stance – as one former BBC man told McCann – was: “If you think the war was funny, there are a lot of people around that don’t.”

Ian Lavender, talking to The Guardian in 2018, said the cast was unaware of any behind-the-scenes controversy. There was dissention within the ranks, however. Arthur Lowe, as it was later revealed, was unimpressed with the scripts and refused to take them home. “Oh, I’m not having that rubbish in my house!” he would say. John Le Mesurier, who played second-in-command Sergeant Wilson, told drinkers at the Television Centre bar that the show was – as Private Fraser might say – doomed. “It’s a disaster, my dear boy,” Le Mesurier told one friend. Preview screenings also went badly – test audiences didn’t like the Second World War setting. Fortunately, the BBC ignored them.

Dad’s Army debuted on July 31 1968. It became a ratings hit and peaked in 1972 with 18.6 million viewers. Repeats were still drawing 6 million well into the 1990s. Dad’s Army seems to have enjoyed more terrestrial repeats than even the Trotter brothers or Eric and Ernie. For anyone born since the show’s original run, Mainwaring’s men guarded not only Walmington-on-Sea, but weekend teatimes and any 30-minute slot going spare. Actor Frank Williams – who played the show’s resident vicar – said he was making more money from Dad’s Army repeats in 2017 than when the series was being made.

The Deadly Attachment aired on October 31, 1973 – the first episode of the sixth series. In the story, Mainwaring is charged with looking after a U-boat crew that have been fished out of the sea. “Face to face with the enemy at last,” says Mainwaring. Jones is absolutely spoiling to bayonet a German.

The episode begins with Mainwaring briefing the men on how to spot Nazi paratroopers – which turns into a debate about how to tell the difference between a Nazi parachutist disguised as a nun, and an actual nun who happens to be parachuting. The answer, decides Mainwaring, is to look at their legs. Godfrey suggests looking at a nun’s legs might be impolite. “You’ll just have to force yourself, Godfrey,” says Mainwaring, “this is war.” (It echoes real invasion anxieties – the Home Office had warned Britons that German paratroopers might land disguised as policemen or ARP wardens.)

The central class war is between Mainwaring and the lackadaisical Sgt Wilson. Mainwaring may be the bank manager and captain, but he’ll never be part of the old boys’ club like the public school-educated Wilson. When the Nazi prisoners arrive, Mainwaring is determined to maintain authority despite not speaking German – “They’ll know by the tone of my voice that I’m in charge,” he tells Wilson. “They recognise authority when they see it” – but he swiftly loses a battle of wits with the belligerent U-boat captain. 

After a childish argument about who’ll win the war, Philip Madoc’s U-boat captain begins making a list of Home Guard men who he’ll bring to account once the Germans win the war. Pike sings a song – “Whistle while you work, Hitler is a twerp!” – putting himself in the Nazi bad books. “Your name vill also go on the list! Vot is it?” demands the captain. “Don’t tell him, Pike!” orders Mainwaring.

Despite a week of rehearsals, Ian Lavender asked David Croft not to put the camera on him after Lowe delivered the line – Lavender was sure he’d burst out laughing. As funny as it is, the real comedy gold is Mainwaring’s reaction – blustering disbelief at his blunder – while Pike asks Sgt Wilson, his “Uncle Arthur”, if he can have a “nice word” with the U-boat captain about getting his name scrubbed from the list. 

The following scene isn’t as well-repeated but it’s just as hilarious, as Walker takes the U-boat crew’s fish and chip order. “Right, who wants vinegar?” The Nazi captain, it seems, is fussy about his fish. “I vant plaice… und I don’t want any nasty, soggy chips. I want mine crisp und light brown.” Mainwaring can’t believe the barefaced cheek of it. “If I say you’ll eat soggy chops, you’ll eat soggy chips!”

The Germans make an escape attempt by tying a string around Jones’s waist, attached to a grenade that dangles down Jones’s trousers. A behind-the-scenes detail makes it doubly amusing: the grenade was supposed to be down Mainwaring’s trousers, but Arthur Lowe “wasn’t having any of it”, said David Croft. Lowe was extremely particular about his trousers – in fact, he had it written into his contract that he would not have to remove his trousers at any time on Dad’s Army.

There was a poignancy to The Deadly Attachment. It was the first episode to be broadcast after the death of James Beck, who played Walker, aged just 44. The Walker character was replaced from series seven onwards by comedy Welshman Private Cheeseman, played by Talfryn Thomas. It’s fair to say that the best Dad’s Army episodes are the ones that have the original line-up.

Five decades on, the magic of Dad’s Army is in capturing a very British heroism. As Jimmy Perry once wrote: “To be alive at that time was to experience the British people at their best and at perhaps the greatest moment in their history.”