'It's a pleasure to bring them to life': how cartoonists saved Dad's Army

In the infant era of television, not everything was preserved. The greatest loss to posterity is, by common consent, about half of Not Only…But Also, starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, as well as almost 100 episodes of Doctor Who. It’s less well known that five episodes of Dad’s Army sank seemingly without trace.

Perhaps this feels less of a loss when most of the 80 episodes – written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft and recorded between 1968 and 1977 – survive. But completist fans now have the chance to make good the loss. Those five episodes are to be shown this month on Gold, and then released on DVD. The twist is that, while viewers will hear the voices of Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier as Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson, they won’t see their faces. Instead, the episodes come in the form of charming black-and-white animations.

An episode of Dad’s Army was first animated in 2016. An audio recording of A Stripe for Frazer, in which Private Frazer auditions to become a lance corporal, was discovered in 2008. The BBC put it out as an audio release in 2015, then commissioned Charles Norton as director/producer and a team led by comic-book artist Martin Geraghty to animate it, not for broadcast but for release on BBC Store, a short-lived precursor of BritBox.

Despite wanting to work on the other episodes, for several years the team was waylaid by animating five of those missing episodes of Doctor Who. A year ago they received the green light to return to Walmington-on-Sea and finish the missing set.

Three of the missing episodes are from the show’s second series, broadcast in 1969. The other two are shorter Christmas specials from 1968 and 1970. How they came to be lost then found provides a fascinating if alarming insight into television’s nascent years.

“It wasn’t part of the BBC’s remit to maintain and archive all of its programmes,” explains Norton. “There would be a mastertape broadcast on BBC One. A copy would have been made onto black-and-white film used to broadcast the show overseas. After a few years the mastertape would be erased and used to record new programmes at which point the only surviving copy was the film recording. After colour TV came in, they became less marketable and in the mid-1970s the BBC had a big clearout.”

However, the five episodes have survived in the form of home-recorded audio. It wasn’t unusual for viewers to aim a microphone at their TV set and preserve their favourite shows for future enjoyment. That’s the case for three of the shows. The audio for the other two exists because in 1973 many early episodes were re-recorded with the original cast for broadcast on Radio 4.

To render them as animations, each episode was first storyboarded by Norton. Depending on their length, episodes required between 180 and 290 storyboards. He handed these over to Geraghty who drew, in pencil, all of the characters on a lightbox in various angles and positions, with a variety of facial expressions. These templates were then digitally scanned and sent out to a team of 28 animators working all over the world. The finishing touches were supplied by a compositor based in Iowa who married up the figures with the background sets, adding lighting and shadow and even putting a tint on Mainwaring’s specs.

The whole process took six months. A powerhouse producer of animations such as Disney or Pixar would take far longer and spend much more, but would produce something less true to the original. “Because we’re not working on 3D models with a huge budget we cut our cloth accordingly,” says Geraghty. “My overriding drive when we do these projects is to bring them to an audience that probably wouldn’t engage with them in audio.”

Even more than Steptoe and Son or Only Fools and Horses, Dad’s Army is the most canonical British sitcom of all. One of the secrets of its durability is the nostalgia for the war built into its fabric: from the start it was already carefully dated. But the characters remain timeless archetypes of the British class structure. Pompous, pettifogging Captain Mainwaring was towered over by the socially superior but ineffectual Sergeant Wilson. Under them was doddery Lance Corporal Jones in a troop which included the crotchety Private Frazer, spivvy Private Walker, rickety Private Godfrey and the weedy Private Pike.

Rarely have they ever slipped from view. There was a feature film in 1971 and a West End stage play-cum-revue which I remember seeing as a starstruck 11-year-old in 1976. In 2000, Victoria Wood fronted a documentary hymning Dad’s Army’s praises shortly after completing her own much-loved gang show, dinnerladies. In 2015 came We’re Doomed: The Dad’s Army Story, a BBC drama starring John Sessions, Julian Sands and Mark Heap which told of the difficult birth of a national treasure. The following year brought a splashy if misconceived feature film with Toby Jones, Bill Nighy and Tom Courtenay (and, for modernising purposes, Catherine Zeta-Jones). In 2019 three of the missing episodes were re-shot with Kevin McNally, Robert Bathurst and Kevin Eldon, also for UKTV’s Gold channel.

All of these reconstituted ensembles were considerately cast to evoke a sense of the original actors. But in the end there is no substitute for the real thing. “A huge part of what made Dad’s Army successful was the original cast,” says Norton, who made a point of avoiding the recast versions. “You’re always going to have an uphill battle trying to make it work without that cast.”

The one exception he had to make was for one of the episodes re-recorded in 1973, when James Beck was too ill to play Private Walker (and died soon afterwards). He was understudied by an actor with a quite different voice. This was doubly unfortunate as the episode in question, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker, was all about Walker getting his call-up papers and the efforts of Mainwaring and Wilson to get him back to Walmington-on-Sea so he can continue supplying them with black-market whisky and tobacco. In the animated version, Norton cast the actor David Benson (who has Noël Coward, Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams in his vocal repertoire) to do a pitch-perfect impersonation.

The animations are built on the idea that the voices are so deeply in the national marrow that viewers bring their own knowledge of Lowe’s pebbly stares, Le Mesurier’s discreetly tweaking facial muscles and Dunn’s antic blinks.

“John Le Mesurier and Arthur Lowe are masters of understatement,” says Geraghty. “By the very nature of what we’re doing, we can’t get across every tick and every mannerism. But because they’re so lived in and so instantly recognisable and brilliantly cast, they’re easier to draw, far easier to create a caricature of. Each character is so distinct, each actor has such a good look. It’s such a pleasure to be able to bring them to life.”

Dad’s Army: The Animations starts at 8pm on 6 November on Gold; Dad’s Army: The Missing Episodes is out on DVD on 27 November