Not necessarily, a lot of TV shows have later been adapted to radio, including:
Yes Minister
Steptoe and Son
One Foot In The Grave
Fawlty Towers
Last of the Summer Wine

The latter two however were using the TV soundtrack with added narration by Manuel and Clegg respectively. The others were new recordings.

Dad’s Army had a very popular radio series with 67 episodes over three series. The great thing about these are they recored most of the TV scripts again, adapted for radio audience, and so all the lost shows were adapted (except the 1968 Christmas Night With The Stars episode but thankfuly a great recording of that episode’s soundtrack emerged 18 months back). Many of the radio shows differ with new angles and twists put into the plots, some combining two TV episodes into one radio plot to cut out stuff too visual for radio. Sadly there are downsides, Jimmy Beck only made a handful before he fell ill and died. He was very quickly replaced by the first guy they could find as there were in a recording phase when he took ill and Graham Stark plays Walker for a few episodes, and he was dire. A pity because he was in the radio version of the lost The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker.

Later Larry Martyn was cast to take over the role of Walker and he was perfect. Larry had already appeared in the TV series many tiems as various parts, and he was not only a fine mimic of Jimmy Beck but was actually one of Jimmy’s best mates in real life. They had worked together in the theatre, and Jimmy and his wife and Larry and his wife lived in the same street. They used to be drinking buddies and were very close. Jimmy’s widow Kay told me that when Jimmy was ill and dying, Larry was at his bedside every day. So to step into the famous shoes of your best mate must have been hard and challenging but he pulled it off wonderfully. Larry was such a success that when later episodes that never had Walker in were adapted for radio, Walker was written in for Larry to be included.

Another sad thing was the BBC Radio producers and heirachy were very anal about who they hired and they liked to keep radio in-house using their own rep actors, so some of the lesser cast were recast. Janet Davies who was just brilliant as Mavis Pike was dumped and older, battleaxy Pearl Hackney was cast, ruining the character for me. The lovely Pam Cundell was dropped in favour of over-acting Mollie Sugden. And Eric Longworth who played the hilarious Town Clerk Claude Gordon was dropped and a whole different Town Clerk, Mr Upton, was stangely created. No-one seems to like Julian Orchard in this role. And the Welsh Private Cheeseman never made it to radio as Walker carried on as the ‘seventh man’.

If you’ve never heard the radio version it plays regularly on BBC7 which you can listen to online, and you can buy BBC CD sets of it too. Well worth it and recommended to all fans to listen in.

Walker calls him Taffy, just to raise his Scottish heckles.

I agree Spock that Michael Bates was in a league of his own as an actor. Marvellous. he was also the only actual Indian in the cast, having been born there to British Army parents, whereas Dino Shafeek was from Bangladesh and Babar Bhatti was from Pakistan. Michael learned to speak Urdu before he could speak English as his native carers taught him, and he also spoke fluent Hindi. He used both languages in the show. Jimmy Perry had had the idea to do IAHHM for a long time before it finally got into production in 1973, because he and David could not find an Indian actor wo could play a lead role, then Jimmy was on set of a show one day and during a break he heard Michael speaking Urdu to someone and the magic casting was made. Michael had actually served in the Gurkhas and with the Chindits in WWII by the way, so a very interesting man. I think perhaps some of the war stories he told as Blamire in Last of the Summer Wine may have been his own. It took me years to work out that Blamire and Rangi were the same actor!

[QUOTE=duxfordhawk;1756309]

Firstly a big thank you to yourself and the person who recorded the “Lost” episodes of “It ain’t half hot mum” as without them the DVD collection would be a lot weaker and series one just would not work without them.
I have also wondered what contractual edits were made to the series, any ideas?.
Talking of edited series, I made the huge mistake of passing my Videos of “Only fools and horses” to the charity shop only to find the dvds are badly edited with so much missing. Now I can not get the originals boo hoo.

As to James Beck , Private Walker was my favourite character in “Dads Army” and I never really got into the show so much after he passed away, although it was still a fine fine show.

It is my pleasure to have been responsible for the finding and return of such funny and such important epiosdes. You’re right that the whole premise of the supposed father-son relationship between BSM Williams and Parky are explained in the episode It’s A Wise Child, and the reasons why such an inept fool as Parky being in a fairly professional Concert Party are also explained in these episodes.

No-one knows how the original tapes were lost, for anything to be wiped they had to have the signature of the Producer who had the last say, and David never gave that, so they disappeared through either an accident or theft. However there were copies on film that were circulating around the world’s broadcasters for broadcast well into the 1980’s and the two episodes in question were screened in Australia by ABC-TV. David Baker recorded them, off air, in 1985 or around then. He had no idea as no-one who’d have watched the series did in Aussie then, that they were already lost in Britain. It turned out that he kept the tape on his shelf and watched it occasionally and it had no significance for him whatsoever except just another TV series.

In the meantime in the late 1990’s through my Dad’s Army Appreciation Society NZ Branch magazine “Platoon Attention!” I started a campaign to try to find the five missing Dad’s Army episodes (in fact it was seven missing when I began). As well as appealling for them I also tacked on the two IAHHM episodes as a bit of an afterthought. These pleas also went up on our website. It was on the website that David stumbled onto that he realised he might just have the missing episodes. He contacted me and then sent the tape to me and I confirmed they were the missing ones. He hadn’t been certain as when he recorded them he’d cut the beginnings off both. I got it copied and sent it to David Croft, whom i’d already rang up with the great news. He passed it onto the BBC and that was it. Then about a year or two later it came out on DVD, to my huge surprise as i didn’t think they’d be of the right quality. Sadly the DVD does not explain why they are in such a state, which there are trhee factos – 1) they are off home video and have been duplicated from such; 2) David missed the beginnings of them; and worst of all 3) ABC-TV took it upon itself to slice around 6-7 minutes out of each episode so they could cram in more adverts. This practice used to go on regularly with BBC-made material and even ITV stuff here in NZ and across Australia. The practice was stopped here in NZ and programmes are given a longer slot to fit in adverts and the complete programme.

David Croft very kindly sent me photocopies of the original scripts in his collection so I could see what it missing in the gaps and there’s a fair bit. The stories still run ok in the two existing episodes but there was a lot more in the orioginls so I live in hope that the full versions may someday turn up.

In the meatime five episodes of Dad’s Army remain missing:
– A Stripe For Frazer (the BBC now has an audio recording of the soundtrack)
– The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker
– Under Fire
– 1968 Christmas Night With The Stars Episode (the BBC now has an audio recording of the soundtrack)
– 1970 Christmas Night With The Stars episode “The Choir Practice”

As for “contractual cuts” to the IAHHM series on DVD? Well i can say apart from the cuts to the ‘lost nd found’ episodes made by ABC-TV there are no known cuts at all on the Series One DVD. I don’t have any other modern series DVD’s at all. I have some of the Video Collection that the BBC put out in the early 2000’s which cover Series One and Two, and again no known cuts. All the rst of the series I have on video from my own recording off television, most of which won’t have been cut to my knowledge as NZ had stopped trimming shows for more adverts by the time i recorded them, not too many years ago.

I could watch and tolerate The Office, it’s ok and was ‘novel’ at the time. I actually liked Extras, it was great how they got some really big stars playing themselves in a poor light.

Absolutely Fabulous is anti-comedy. There was never anything appealing or funny about it for me.

The only good thing about Keeping Up Appearances for me was Onslow and the fact he always wore a Fulton Hogan hat – which for those who do not know, is a company here in NZ that makes roads and does construction work.

Roy Clarke wrote some real gems, early Last of the Summer Wine (before it became the elephants graveyard for old English actors) was superb. Cleggy is one of my all time favourite people in the world. First of the Summer Wine was even better in my opinion. I have a recording of the first thing he ever wrote that was made, a great radio show called The Events At Black Tor. In the cast was Jimmy Beck from Dad’s Army as a hard core Yorkshire police Sgt. It is a murder mystery set in rural Yorkshire in the late 1960’s, when it was made. A bit like Heartbeat but much more cutting edge, with murders and supernatural happenings. It’s simply brilliant. I was told the BBC no longer have the show in their archives, but have a later remake from the 1970’s. My recording is perfect so I offered them a copy and heard nothing back (not the first time, I have tried to offer them lots of lost radio material and no-one has ever responded – yet when I found the two lost It Ain’t Half Hot Mum episodes and returned them via David Croft, they released them on DVD, without any acknowledgement or thanks of any sort to me at all for finding them or to the guy who had recorded and saved them! Flipping gits. David and Jimmy were over the moon however and that counts for a lot more to me. I also rediscovered the lost US version of Dad’s Army which also made them very happy.)

Kev, I thnk I’d much rather become like Foggy, Clegg and Compo, roaming about at leisure without a care in the world into old age, and finding adventures an fun along the way.

Duxfordhawk said:

For me John Sullivan, Croft/Perry and Lloyd and Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are the benchmarks of great comedy writing and all created timeless shows and characters.

Agreed. I would add in David Renwick (One Foot in the Grave, etc), Roy Clarke (many great comedies and some poor ones) and Galton and Simpson (Steptoe and Son) to that list.

There are of course many comedies which people acclaim as classics and billiant which i simply cannot stand, and they include:
The Vicar of Dibley
Keeping Up Appearances
Waiting For God

Some replies to the above:

paul178 said:

I wonder what the PC brigade would make of the episode when they were dressed as Nazi’s

Nothing I hope. There is nothing in it whatsoever, and it’s less harmless than most people we see on the TV dressed as Nazi’s (such as Prince Harry).

SpockXL319 said:

I’m 18 and no recent sitcom can really hold a candle to the Croft & Perry era.

Quite right, not a lot of today’s TV can come close to this series and a few others from the golden age.

Duxfordhawk said:

For me the genius of “Dads Army” and other David Croft/ Jimmy Perry or David Croft/ Jeremy Lloyd shows was to use such a big cast and have so many characters to follow, I think this is part of why these shows still feel fresh to watch now.

I agree they can upset the PC brigade, and I admit wincing a few times watching “It ain’t half hot mum”, But these shows still stand the test of time and the skill of the writing still shines through.

The ensemble cast was a trademark of the Croft/Perry/Lloyd writing style, and they were masters at it. Something that Stuart McGugan said to me was how Jimmy and David had the right idea to win a big audience by writing in characters from all over Britain – the Londoner, the Scot, the Welsh character, the northerners, etc. Everyone in Britain could relate to someone in the ensemble in any of the shows. Many successful comedy writers these days used Perry and Croft as the benchmark that they try to aspire to. Their writing style has been studied by scholars and writers alike and compared with Dickens and Shakespeare. Not bad I suppose.

I don’t find anything in it Ain’t Half Hot Mum disturbing apart from when the Sgt Major picks on poor wee Lofty. It is not just superb comedy but it is also documantary. Did you know that it’s a true story, Jimmy Perry himself was in that very concert party at Deolali and most of the characters are drawn from real people he knew and worked with. The way the Sgt Major treated the Indians, the soldiers and everyone else was wholly accurate only Jimmy told me the real one was a lot more foul mouthed and sadistic (or ‘statistic’ as BSM Williams would say). At the time when it first aired the cast were overwhelmed with support from the Indian community, who were overjoyed to be seeing Indian faces and language on TV regularly for the first time in Britain. In later years some dickheads have called it racist – the show is not racist, it is highlighting the racism of the British Empire’s past, and is completely accurate. Jimmy and David were both in India in WWII and they were very careful to ensure that the Indian characters, despite a few well deserved kicks up the jacksie, always won out in the situations over the Sgt major and were not painted in the show to be oppressed.

Tornado64 wrote:

there’s some terrific new commedy not going out is quick witted and hilarious

only fools and horses
the vicar of dibley obviously you have to ignore the terribly un funny dawn french but the supporting cast are hillarious
green green grass
pheonix nights
max and paddys road to nowhere
allo allo
absolutely fabulous

Half of those shows you list are from the 1980’s and 1990’s, hardly new. The other half I have never heard of. And The Vicar of Dibley is wholly unfunny in my opinion.

Some actual recent (within the last ten years) British comedies that I think are brilliant gems are:
– Benidorm
– The Inbetweeners
– Peep Show
– Teachers
– Qi
– The IT Crowd
– Black Books

dads army is meareley looked on as comfort commedy something we grew up with from a simpler time as good as it was there are still modern ones that are as good if not better

Maybe by you older folk, but there are continually new generations of new fans who pick up on Dad’s Army and get hooked and for those people, the great-grandchildren of the original audience, who have grown up in a completely different world and have no real idea of what WWII was compared with that first audience in 1968-1977, it still holds that magic of a series they love. That is something very special. There are not many comedies in the world that get better rating figures 45 years later than it did when it first aired.

Tarkey asked:

How many of the Dad’s Army actors are still with us?

As mentioned earlier in the thread, Clive, Bill, Ian and also Frank Williams (the Vicar) and Pamela Cundell (Mrs Fox) are the regular actors still alive. Philip Madoc – the famous U-Boat captain – is still with us. Michael Knowles who played parts in the show regularly and also co-adapted the series for radio is alive (though his long time double-act partner Donald Hwelett passed away this week 🙁 )

Moggy, you’re right about the immaculate timing, the affectations of the characters, and the interplay between characters. I absolutely love too to watch the scenes where John laurie drifts into his spooky self and tells stories of the past, his eyes bulging and rolling like catherine wheels and his voice so distinct. I personally think he is Scotland’s greatest actor, not just because of my personal admiration for him but because of his massive achievements in a long career – appearing in some of Britain’s most critically acclaimed films and usually stealling the scenes in them; recording poetry with some of the finest orators that Britain has produced; playing every major male role in Shakespeares plays, alongside Olivier (whom Laurie taught how to act Shakespeare properly after the critics slated Olivier’s attempts!!) and Gielgud and Richardson and the other top actors of his time; touring the world in plays for the British Council to countries like Australia, Europe, the USSR (first ever such tour) and the USA; personally contributing to the saving and revival of the Scottish Border Ballads; being heavily responsible for reviving Scottish poet William McGonnagal and being the first actor to do his work justice rather than mock it; appearing on television over 6 decades; stage for longer; making over 100 films; being one of the BBC’s main voice actors through the war years for dramas and documentaries; serving in the First World War where he was lucky to survive; serving in the Home Guard in WWII, appearing in the first talking film made by Hitchcock and later appearing in his masterpiece The 39 Steps; the list goes on and on. So it is no wonder he turned to Jimmy Perry and said, “And to think, all this, and I’ll get remembered for this crap!” about Dad’s Army. He told Jimmy perry after their first rehearsal in 1968 that the show would never work and it was rubbish. A few series later when they hit the top of the TV ratings he told Jimmy, “I never doubted it for a single minute, lad.” This is one of the many real life things written into the show. The characters seem so real because they are, the actors became the characters and vice versa.

Sadly, there is no doubting whatsoever, we shall never see their likes again, that wonderful cast.

Gosh that re-enactor really does look like Oddball in that second photo.