You there are certain moments in your life. You remember, as milestones when one such moment in mind was receiving a phone call in the summer of 1968, from BBC producer David Croft, offering me two lines as an air raid warden in a new television series called dad's army.

Until then, I had been involved mainly in radio summer shows and cabaret, but suddenly I find myself in the company of A delightfully warm group of film television and stage actors, all of us being in on the start of what was to become one of the great Television programs, this country has produced dad's army, became beloved by the viewing public and was eventually adapted into a long-running radio series of stage musical, including an appearance in a Royal Command Performance and the presence of Her Majesty the Queen at the London Palladium and a full-length Feature film made by Columbia Pictures. This is not just the story of a successful television series of 80 episodes that were made over nine years, but also a story about the families and friends of those actors who became legends in their own lifetime. The idea of presenting a program about the Home Guard was conceived by Jimmy Perry, who had been a member of this Corps in his teens before he enlisted in the army one day in the late 60s, when he was working As an actor in the theatre.

He cast his mind back to those days in the home guard and thought that the subject might be presented on television. After all, nobody had done it before. Perhaps nobody had thought about it before or if they had.

The idea probably seemed ridiculous. Who would be interested in a television program about a group of a generally senior citizens trying to look like soldiers, guarding their country with pitchforks broomsticks and any other Items of domestic hardware? They could lay their hands on, but wasn't it the exceptional optimism of those loyal countrymen that might prove to be the catalyst of the television public to latch onto the original concept of the Home Guard. Local defense volunteers, as they were first called, had been deadly serious.

Even though their weapons were primitive by 1940, we'd been driven out of France in the Low Countries and the British needed not only material Rearmament, but also a psychological uplift. Winston Churchill, who was now Prime Minister in charge of a coalition government, told the British people that they would fight on the beaches and never surrender when Anton Eden made his historic speech in June 1940, calling for men under and over the age of active service. In the Armed Forces to form a local defense Corps, there was an immediate response from every eligible male in the country, Houses, pubs, village halls and the like became the headquarters of Britain's new fighting force.

It says a great deal for the sincerity of the men. Are their involvement in the war effort that the British people felt that they cursed epz in their beds at night with the boys are bit most of them old boys watching over them? It was with these thoughts that Jimmy Perry returned home one day in the late 60s and contacted producer director David Croft, for whom he had worked on a Few television programs and asked if it would be possible to create a series about the Home Guard. Perhaps Jimmy had remembered a very funny radio comedian called Rob Wilton very much a captain Mannering who, in the 1940s at caricature at the Home Guard with his joke that began the day I joined the home garden.

It's amazing, she said what are you run bro? I said I'm one of those. What do you do? A more? I said I've got to stop it Liz army from Alumnus. Is it would just you? I said? Oh no.

No! This mean Charlie Evans now. Well, it's seven or eight of his altogether. She said you know this fella, it's lasted, of course not, she said.

Well, how will you know if it's him if he lands? I said what I better tell him me: I'd haven't died. Although the BBC programme makers had commissioned Jimmy and Davey to write an initial half a dozen scripts about their home guard, there was still some doubt in their minds that a comedy programme Based on this subject would prove successful. The then head of variety was Bill.

Cotton. Son of bandleader Billy, cotton of wakey-wakey Fame dad's army, turned out to be a wonderful surprise to Bill. When David Croft first told him he wanted to do a comedy about the home guard bill said he was out of his head.

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