John Le Mesurier

Radio Times review

"He's used to being unpopular... he's a bank manager." A nice gag; funny then, topical now. It opens this 1977 episode, a surprising little rite-of-passage tale in which a proud-as-punch Mainwaring gets a staff car, and Pike borrows it for his date with Hodges' flirty niece Sylvia.

It's a chance to see other sides of Walmington (a café serving brightly coloured pop) and its characters (Pike with a girlfriend; Wilson giving him a men-of-the-world chat). It's heady stuff for dear old Dad's Army, but comfort yourself with more traditional fare, such as Mainwaring being needled by Wilson's public-school ways (sadly, John Le Mesurier looks noticeably gaunt) and some prolonged, panto-style musical chairs in the staff car.

Radio Times review

Some Home Guard admin elicits the expected peevishness from Mainwaring in this late-era episode. The Captain reveals his written character assessment of his sergeant to the man himself: "Your general bearing is very slack." Wilson's disparaging laughter at all the red-tape nonsense sounds so genuine that you wonder whether something tickled John Le Mesurier during recording.

It leads to a platoon recruitment drive that requires a face to go on the accompanying poster, but whose should it be? "We should all vote in a secret ballet," suggests Jones. Among other delights are Godfrey's mortified expression at the suggestion that he's being rude, and some top-drawer doddering from Harold Bennett as Mr Blewitt.

Radio Times review

This nigh-on perfect episode is The Arthur Lowe Show in all but name. A training weekend for the platoon enables Lowe to run through his sublime Mainwarisms: the "throat-clutching choke", the £skewed cap and glasses£, and the rare but wonderful £trying desperately not to appear drunk£. (Almost as funny is Sergeant Wilson's teddy-bear hiding - an Embarrassment Masterclass from John Le Mesurier.)

It all comes about as a result of Captain "What! What!" Square and a bunch of whisky-swilling officers leading Mainwaring astray, to the scowling disenchantment of Frazer and co. And it takes a genuine crisis to restore him in the eyes of his men...

'Fallen Idol' is delicious to the last drop, when an "Iris Out" homage to the silent era provides the show's best-ever sign-off.

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".

The assault-course scrapes and don't-like-it-up-'ems were all very well, but there was nothing like a bit of life-or-death to vary the pace and bring out the best in the cast. When an air raid leaves Mainwaring and Wilson cradling an unexploded bomb in the bank vault, the rest of the platoon run about like headless chickens. Walmington's well-oiled machine soon cranks up a gear, however: Frazer's fishing skills come to the fore, Pike keeps away the riff-raff; Godfrey rustles up some coffee.

Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier sell their sweaty predicament like the seasoned pros they were, and the former's "Oh come on, Wilson, cheer up" brings quite a lump to the throat.

A thoroughly charming, warm-hearted comedy about the relationship that formed on the set of Dad's Army between John Le Mesurier and Arthur Lowe. They were like chalk and cheese, personally and politically, but bonded in what would remain a lifelong friendship.

Here's a play about the friendship that grew between the two lead actors in Dad's Army, John Le Mesurier (played by Anton Lesser) and Arthur Lowe (Robert Daws), which began on the TV series and lasted all their lives. Playwright Roy Smiles switches between the letters the pair exchanged in the 1980s, remembering how they got to know each other making the show, and afterwards, showing why such different people remained such pals. Maybe part of it was the integrity of the David Croft and Jimmy Perry scripts which, 40 years on, still shine.

On at the same time as Very Important People was this new documentary about the life of Dad's Army star John Le Mesurier.

In terms of the show's content, it should be pointed out that there's nothing really new or groundbreaking, so if you're a devotee of Le Mesurier then chances are that there will be nothing surprising.

However, if you mainly know him simply as Sgt. Wilson, his appearances alongside Tony Hancock, or his troubled personal life then there's probably some things that might have been new to you. For starters there's the issue of how prolific he was in terms of the number of films he starred in. He did over 100, often just doing a quick cameo role.

One thing that I learnt about him that I never knew previously was that he won a BAFTA award. Not for anything comedic, but for drama, playing in a one-off programme called Traitor by Dennis Potter.

So, for someone mostly unfamiliar with Le Mesurier's background there is much to learn, but if you are an aficionado of his work then this programme's probably not of much use to you.

Review: John Le Mesurier: It's All Been Rather Lovely

John Le Mesurier never did anything as vulgar as showing his feelings, but he was always remarkably English.

Those recalling Robert Bathurst's portrayal of John Le Mesurier in BBC4's Hattie might have thought him too good to be true. Au contraire. No one - from Clive Dunn and Ian Lavender to Michael Palin and JLM's third wife - has a bad word to say about a man who endured repeated cuckolding, perpetual career disappointments and terminal illness with a half-smile and drifted through life with an ineffably British sense of opaque understatement and vague melancholy. Much time is understandably spent on Dad's Army, but this doc also serves as a frustrating 'what might have been' for an underrated actor who ambled through a stop-start career with the same unknowable civility as he did his life. He's the man for whom 'keep calm and carry on' might have been invented.