Arthur Lowe

Paul Ritter stars as frustrated thesp Jimmy Perry, while Richard Dormer is David Croft, a jaded comedy producer feeling pushed out by the BBC. When Perry comes to Croft with his script for a sitcom tentatively titled The Fighting Tigers, the two men begin a battle against "the enemy within" to get it made by the BBC. The dialogue may be on the broad side, but the acting and direction are splendid. Ritter and Dormer are grippingly good, while John Sessions makes for an astonishing Arthur Lowe.

Paul Ritter stars as frustrated thesp Jimmy Perry, while Richard Dormer is David Croft, a jaded comedy producer feeling pushed out by the BBC. When Perry comes to Croft with his script for a sitcom tentatively titled The Fighting Tigers, the two men begin a battle against "the enemy within" to get it made by the BBC. The dialogue may be on the broad side, but the acting and direction are splendid. Ritter and Dormer are grippingly good, while John Sessions makes for an astonishing Arthur Lowe.

Review: We're Doomed! The Dad's Army Story

Jewel in the crown is John Sessions, so unrecognisable as Arthur Lowe you'd think they'd somehow defrosted the Captain Mainwaring star from suspended animation.

Radio Times review

Walmington's spats with the rival platoon in Eastgate are always great, pratfalling fun, and a training exercise in which Mainwaring's marauders have to plant a bomb in a windmill is certainly played full tilt. But we open in the pub, where that tedious old walrus Captain Square - all beer and bluster - is holding court. And, in his first appearance in Dad's Army, Robert Raglan (as a sergeant, but he'll later become "the Colonel") throws a priceless glance at the barman as Square bores for Britain.

Arthur Lowe trumps that look with one that was to become a trademark (glasses removed, cheeks puffed out with exasperation), after Frazer gives a typically windy speech.

It's the story where Jones branches out, Frazer has an overinflated opinion of himself, sheep wear helmets and the Verger finds a novel use for a cemetery urn. Utterly, beautifully bonkers.

Arthur Lowe's son on growing up with Capt Mainwaring

Stephen Lowe reveals his father's battle with narcolepsy and why the wife of the Dad's Army actor missed his funeral.

Radio Times review

The show goes a bit Swallows and Amazons this week (Arthur Lowe meets Arthur Ransome, if you will) in a largely lake-based adventure. The platoon's fieldcraft training is capsized by the arrival of the Vicar, Verger and Hodges with the sea scouts and, later, three Germans who have bailed out of their aircraft and float helplessly in a dinghy.

If the story is all a bit loose and lacking urgency, there's still pleasure in predicting what's going to happen when (a certain someone ending up in the water, for example), and listen out for Wilson's somewhat out-of-character spikiness to Captain Mainwaring: "I don't think even you can walk on the water."

Note the day-for-night filming, and the mismatch between videotaped studio recordings and the filmed location scenes, both of which root it firmly in the 70s. And the cast must have loved the outdoor shoots, because it was always sunny!

This week's "who knew?" is Hodges' ability to speak German, having been a guard in a prisoner of war camp during the previous conflict.

Radio Times review

"Over the years that I've come to know the members of this platoon, I've grown quite fond of them, but I can't help feeling sometimes that I'm in charge of a bunch of idiots." It's not often that Captain Mainwaring is quite so scathing about his platoon, but he's prompted by a classic piece of long-windedness from leering loon Private Frazer. It's a towering moment in the midst of some lightweight field-exercise shenanigans, but you'll enjoy the effete expression from Wilson tanning his face while his captain blethers on, and another brief but heavenly example of under-the-influence acting from Arthur Lowe.

Fans of 70s comedy will enjoy the sight of Dave Allen stooge Michael Sharvell-Martin as the Lieutenant.

Pictures: Catherine Zeta-Jones and Toby Jones

It seems pompous bank manager George Mainwaring, originally portrayed by Arthur Lowe in the sitcom, is finally going to act the hero and get his moment of glory since actor Toby Jones was pictured hauling Zeta-Jones out of the water.

A new film of Dad's Army is to be made, which is a brave move on the part of all involved. Few TV programmes are so inextricably associated with the people who played the main characters rather than with plot or place. To imagine someone other than Arthur Lowe playing Captain Mainwaring is hard, though Bill Nighy stepping into John Le Mesurier's shoes as Sergeant Wilson is less difficult to envisage. Jimmy Perry, whose co-author David Croft died three years ago, said he was letting the film-makers "get on with it". But in the mid-Seventies, the show was a national institution, with audiences sometimes in excess of 18 million. A sympathetic reworking of the original will be a considerable achievement given the special place that Dad's Army has in the nation's heart. As Corporal Jones might have said (and presumably will say again): "Don't panic".

It's rare that Mainwaring is so shocked he loses the power of both speech and motion, but that's what happens in Room at the Bottom. It's the one where he loses his commission - twice. Wilson, of course, relishes delivering the news to him, and practises in front of a mirror.

Writers Perry and Croft are on top form here. A letter-writing sequence allows us to hear what the men are thinking - and it's all beautifully in character. But this is Arthur Lowe's episode through and through; after some initial embarrassment, Mainwaring's nobler qualities come to the fore. One speech even draws an emotional nose-blow from Godfrey. Fantastic pay-off, too.

Incidentally, we rarely learn in Dad's Army what point the war has reached, but one announcement by the Verger anchors the action precisely.