Comic writer whose TV masterpiece was Dad’s Army, among a host of other hit series including Are You Being Served? and ’Allo ’Allo
David Croft was one of television’s most prolific comedy creators who co-wrote and also brought to the screen a wide-ranging run of enduring hits, the jewel in the crown being Dad’s Army. In a career spanning more than 25 years he went on to devise or co-devise the comedy series It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, ’Allo, ’Allo, Are You Being Served?, Grace and Favour, Hi-de-Hi, and You Rang, M’Lord?. The humour throughout was unashamedly broad and they all consistently registered high in the ratings for the BBC.
At its peak after a slow start, Dad’s Army, which starred Arthur Lowe as the pompous Captain Mainwaring, commanding officer of the wartime Home Guard squad of village misfits, was attracting a weekly audience of 18 million in the 1970s. The show won new generations of devotees when it was rebroadcast in every successive decade. The BBC hierarchy was initially nervous of the show’s subject matter. The fear was that viewers might prove hostile to the idea of mocking, however gently, Britain’s “finest hour”; but Croft and his co-writer Jimmy Perry persuasively argued that as Britain was never actually invaded by Hitler’s armies, the fun was harmless. This proved to be the case in the eyes of viewers. They revelled in the delightful eccentricities of the characters at mythical Walmington-on-Sea; the show collected a variety of awards over the years.
Some protests were later to be aired over another of Croft’s wartime comedies, ’Allo, ’Allo, written with Jeremy Lloyd, which poked fun at the French Resistance and depicted the German Gestapo as inoffensive figures of ridicule. However, apart from Second World War purists who failed to see the joke, the objections receded once the show’s popularity was established.
Croft was a dedicated collaborator who wrote with two main partners: Jimmy Perry (Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi and You Rang, M’Lord?) and Jeremy Lloyd (Are You Being Served?, Grace and Favour and ’Allo, ’Allo). Once the scripts were written, though, he went alone to the studio to produce and/or direct each episode. His shows made stars of a number of appreciative actors and actresses. Among them Su Pollard, Ruth Madoc, Gordon Kaye, Vicki Michelle, Paul Shane and Simon Cadell.
He had his flops, although he preferred to call them non-successes. A show he wrote for Australian television called Bird in the Bush failed there and was never screened in Britain; and the futuristic Come Back Mrs Noah, set in 2050, vanished in space after only six episodes.
Croft, after early years as a performer, became a shadowy back-room figure who preferred to work behind the scenes in contrast to his co-authors who, as actors, continued to appear occasionally as well as write. His full head of silver-grey hair and cheerful round face half obscured by heavy-rimmed glasses, were rarely seen by viewers. Their first glimpse of him might well have been in a newspaper photograph when he went with Jimmy Perry to Buckingham Palace in 1978 to collect their respective OBEs.
Yet his roots were steeped in the theatre. Both his parents were actors. His mother was Anne Croft, a star of musical comedy and revue, and his father was Reginald Sharland, a radio actor in Hollywood. He was destined for a career in showbusiness and wanted nothing else from the age of 4 when he accidentally wandered onstage at a theatre where his mother was topping the bill.
David Croft was born David John Sharland in 1922 in Sandbanks, Dorset, and was educated at St John’s Wood preparatory school, North London, and then Rugby. He made his first broadcast at the age of 16 in a show called Charing Cross Road, and at 17 landed his first film role as Perkins in Goodbye, Mr Chips — which he regarded as the beginning, middle and end of his film career. He joined the Army in 1942. After graduating from Sandhurst he served in the Royal Artillery in England and North Africa and then India and Singapore, rising to the rank of major before he was demobilised in 1946. He continued as a performer in the early postwar years, acting in repertory in touring productions. He also appeared in the West End including a revival of Wild Violets at the Stoll Theatre.
However, he became more interested in the creative side of the profession and began writing lyrics for such early television series as Don’t Spare the Horses, Turn it Up, and Face the Music. He was then still making the occasional television appearance in the shows Bal Creole and Whirligig. In the same period he collaborated with Ted Kavanagh, the creator of the wartime wireless hit It’s That Man Again that starred Tommy Handley, in scripting It’s a Small World.
Croft also wrote and directed for the theatre. He produced a number of revues for Butlins Holiday Camps as well as writing a succession of pantomimes for the London Palladium and the Howard and Wyndham company before returning full time to television. He once said he wrote so many pantos that in the end he had to “kick the habit like a drug”.
His astonishing achievements in comedy, recognised as one of the toughest spheres of showbusiness, began in 1967. Jimmy Perry was appearing in the BBC comedy series Hugh and I which Croft was directing. Perry approached him with an idea for a comedy about the Home Guard, calling it Fighting Tigers. Croft loved the idea but hated the title. He changed it to Dad’s Army and they began writing the pilot for the first series.
Dad’s Army wasn’t an immediate hit and the reviews were mixed. It took a while before audiences began to appreciate the characters such as John Le Mesurier’s lugubrious Sergeant Wilson and Clive Dunn’s panicky “They don’t like it up ’em” Lance-Corporal Jones.
Croft once explained that he made it a policy never to simply write funny lines. The humour, he said, grew out of the characters so that whatever they said became funny in itself. With the rising success of Dad’s Army Croft and Perry were to gain complete control from scripting to casting and direction. They also wrote the one feature film spin-off which was made in 1971. Over the years Dad’s Army was sold widely abroad to Holland, Sweden, Belgium, New Zealand, Australia, Yugoslavia, Zambia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Croft’s successful comedy career continued virtually unabated, he and Perry going on to write It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, about concert-party entertainers in wartime India; the holiday camp hit Hi-de-Hi, and the period country- mansion romp You Rang, M’Lord?
He linked up with his other co-writer Jeremy Lloyd to create the department store comedies Are You Being Served? and Grace and Favour, following up with ’Allo, ’Allo.
A later success was Oh Doctor Beeching!, created and written with Richard Spendlove, which was set in a rural railway station under threat of the Beeching axe. It ran on the BBC for two series between 1995 and 1997. It was Croft’s last major work for the BBC.
In 2003 he was given a lifetime achievement award at the British Comedy Awards. In 1981 he had received the Desmond Davis award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for his outstanding contribution to the industry.
Croft retired in 1997 to his country home, Honington Hall in Suffolk. He also had a home in Portugal, where he died.
He is survived by his wife, Ann, and seven children.
David Croft, OBE, television producer, director and comedy writer, was born on September 7, 1922. He died on September 27, 2011, aged 89
