FILM

Ian Lavender is among the guests for this year’s Slapstick festival – and that’s all the excuse Robin Askew needs to talk to him about his most famous role: Private Pike in long-running BBC sitcom ‘Dad’s Army’.

“Bear in mind,” says Ian Lavender, “Clive [Dunn], Bill [Pertwee] and myself were the ones who weren't old. The rest of them were well into their 60s and 70s. They were old, they were tired at the end of a day's work and, quite honestly, didn't want idiots in the bar coming up and saying, 'Oh, Mr Lowe, Mr Lowe, would you come and talk to my wife and daughter please?' When you're in hotels away from home, you have to eat there and necessarily they are public places. Bill Pertwee, myself and John Le Mesurier were having dinner one night in the hotel restaurant. We were actually eating. We weren't looking at the menu or talking afterwards. This guy got up from his table, brought the menu over and said, 'Oh, Mr. Le Mesurier, I know I shouldn't disturb you while you're eating…' 'Well, fucking don't then! If you know you shouldn't, don't!'"

Regardless of the pretext for any interview, it's inevitable that Ian Lavender will be asked to talk about 'Dad's Army'. Jimmy Perry and David Croft's classic Home Guard comedy ran for nine series (80 episodes) between 1968 and 1977, regularly pulling 18 million viewers, and remains a staple of the BBC schedules to this day. ("Is it on this week? Can I afford to eat?" quips Lavender, scanning the TV listings. "Oh yes: Saturday night, 6.30, BBC2.") In 1996, the redoubtable old geezers famously pulled three million more viewers than a near-naked Pamela Anderson when the repeats were scheduled opposite the new series of 'Baywatch'. And as recently as 2004, 'Dad's Army' was voted Britain's fourth greatest sitcom, ahead of 'Fawlty Towers'. Now 64, the affable former 'stupid boy', aka Private Pike, who was the youngest member of the cast at 22, is happy to reminisce and quick to clarify that the restaurant outburst described above was a rare aberration. But even before the modern age of celebrity, all the public attention became quite surreal, with none of the rewards demanded by today's slebs. "If we'd made them 10 years later, we'd all be millionaires," he says wistfully. "Really – we used to open supermarkets for a case of wine. But now you'd be on the celebrity roundabout to sell your show. We weren't required to do that. We made the show and got on with our lives, which was really rather nice."

So does he still get recognised? "Yes, amazingly – even with a beard, although I've shaved it off now."

Do people shout, 'Stupid boy!' and 'Don't tell him, Pike!'? "I'm afraid so."

And you take it all in good humour? "I try to, yes. Why get pissed off about such things? You shouldn't have done the show if you're going to get pissed off. All right then, 'Here's a nine series show. Essentially it'll make sure you work for the rest of your life and it's going to be seen by 18-20 million people at a time. Do you want it?' Show me the actor who'd say no. If 10 million people watch you one night in a single show, for the same 10 million people to see you in a 1,000 seat theatre doing a play which you think is the best thing you've ever done, it would take 10 years. So why be surprised and upset if people recognise you from a television show? It would be different if people came up to me and said, 'You were in 'Dad's Army', weren't you? That was crap.'"

Lavender is the latest star recruited by eagle-eyed Bristol Silents supremo Chris Daniels to join an ever-expanding family of enthusiasts paying tribute to the (mostly) silent comedy legends of yesteryear at the city's fabulous annual Slapstick festival. It was his appearance on ‘Celebrity Mastermind’ in 2008, where he chose Buster Keaton as his specialist subject, that alerted the Slapstickers. (Inevitably, when John Humphrys asked for his name, fellow contestant Rick Wakeman bellowed: "Don't tell him, Pike!") "My mother took me to see 'The General' at Saturday morning pictures when I was around 10," he explains of his Keaton obsession. "For 10 years, that was the only film of his that I'd seen. This was long before the time of DVDs, so I just started reading about him and got hooked on the man more than anything."

He always looks forward to returning to Bristol, having trained as an actor at the Old Vic in the mid-60s when Patrick Stewart was in the company. "They were probably the happiest two years of my life. I say that even with my wife sitting beside me. I still think it's one of the first things that should be drummed into young people: 'Listen, this is the last two or three years that you can learn for the sake of learning and make a lot of mistakes, because when you leave here the mistakes start to count.' You can make the most disastrous mistakes, and enjoy making them."

A visit to Bristol isn't complete for the Lavenders without some nostalgic "mooching around" to visit his old haunts, including the Clifton flat he rented for £6 a week in a building that recently sold for £2.75m. So was the city swinging when he left in 1967? "Well, we had a nice time." He sounds rather nonplussed. "Liverpool was the city of youth. Bristol was where slightly better things happened, to be an intellectual snob about it. Because you had the Arts Centre, two theatres working – let alone the Hippodrome. You'd got poetry and music and theatre. It was a lively city with a terrific university as well. We were getting the benefits of all of that up at Pembroke Road. You could sit and have a cigarette on the Downs. It couldn't be better really, could it?"

After his Old Vic training, it was back to London and… oh dear, we seem to have returned to the subject of 'Dad's Army'. When asked for his theory about the show's enduring popularity, he's eager to correct a misquotation. "A few years ago, there was a quote emblazoned all over the papers: 'Ian Lavender is sad 'Dad's Army' is repeated.’ That wasn't quite what I said. I said it was sad there was a need for it to be repeated. Because they don't make programmes like it any more. I don't mean, [crotchety old git voice] 'They don't make 'em like that any more.' They just don't make programmes for the whole family. Everything is niche marketed. 'If you don't like the swearing, you can watch something else.' Well, we were always taught that it was a good idea to get as many people as possible to watch the play that you're in, the television programme you're in or the radio programme you're in. What's the point of making it if you don't want to get out to people? I don't think everything should be anodyne, but hang on a minute – there isn't one single family comedy being made."

Fair point, but 'Dad's Army' actually managed to get away with quite a lot, in a subtle kind of way, for a late 60s family teatime show. Let's make sure I'm not misinterpreting anything. The vicar was gay, right? "Yes."

'Uncle' Arthur is really Frank Pike's father? "Yes."

And Mrs Fox seemed to put it about a bit? "Yes."

Hmm… promiscuity, bastardy and homosexuality in the clergy. And that's before you begin to consider the class politics that ran through Croft and Perry's scripts, occasionally erupting into open warfare between Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson. Lavender points out that the dual meaning of the 'uncle' reference has been lost over the years. Back then, family friends were often referred to as 'uncle' this and 'auntie' that. But also, "there were an awful lot of 'uncles' who came and stayed in houses during the war." He laughs and shares a memory. "In the road where I lived as a kid, there was a woman who swore blind that her husband got weekend leave from the North African desert."

Asked who he was closest to among the 'Dad's Army' cast, Lavender doesn't hesitate in naming the veteran John Laurie (dour Scottish undertaker Private Fraser). To the outsider, he seems rather a forbidding character. "Oh he could be, yeah. He was an irascible old man. But he had a right to be. He was 73, he was tired, he'd done two wars and he didn't suffer fools gladly. Why should he? If somebody pissed him off, he told them. He didn't give a shit about upsetting somebody if they deserved upsetting. But he wasn't nasty. He was an utterly, utterly charming man. I more or less became his unofficial chauffeur when we worked together, just to listen to his stories. They were absolutely wonderful. We're talking about somebody who left Dumfries when he was 16 to go into the war.

"Then there's Arnold Ridley, who's done everything. He didn’t wake up a day in his life since the First World War without being in pain. He was bayoneted twice and still suffered the pain from those two horrific injuries every day. And yet here was this charming, lovely, slightly vague old man with a fund of stories. There was me, wet behind the ears, trying not to let my jaw go slack. And, of course, I'd sit in Eric Morecambe's dressing room listening to his stories too, because we recorded on the same night. This doesn’t happen to 22-year-old actors very often. If necessary, I would have paid them to be allowed to do the job."

Most of them have gone now, of course, and Lavender's suffered some ill-health. "I've had a couple of scares, yes. It's pretty good now. I've had cancer and I've had a heart attack. I'm very lucky to be here. I'm very glad to be here."

But given that the Beeb pushed the boat out for the show's 40th anniversary back in 2008, it would be impolite not to cling on another seven years for the 50th. "I would be as old as John Laurie was when he started!" he splutters.

There's your selling point for the big reunion. "What reunion?"

Well, er, you basically. "Yes, me! Clive's 90. Bill's well into his eighties. Frank Williams is well into his seventies. And I'm well into my sixties. I get my pension next month…"

'CELEBRATING BUSTER KEATON' WITH IAN LAVENDER WAS AT BRISTOL OLD VIC ON SAT 29 JAN. IAN ALSO TOOK PART IN THE SLAPSTICK SILENT COMEDY GALA AT COLSTON HALL ON FRI 28 JAN. FFI: WWW.SLAPSTICK.ORG.UK 
 

Copyright Robin Askew 2011

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