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David Croft 1944.
Born in Sandbanks, Poole, in 1922,
David John Andrew Sharland was born
into a showbiz family, making his acting
debut at the age of seven under the stage
name David Croft. After a few weeks
with the Home Guard, he was judged to
be too young so served as an ARP warden
before his inevitable call-up, joining the
army as a private in 1942. After service in North Africa with the Royal Artillery, he was invalided home with rheumatic fever and, on recovery, sent for officer training. Commissioned into the Dorset Regiment on 16th December 1944, Croft was posted to India and Singapore before being demobilised as a major in 1947.
For the next 20 years, Croft enjoyed a varied career in show business as an actor, singer, scriptwriter, lyricist and producer with the BBC. However, when he teamed up with fellow actor Jimmy Perry, his career took off. Perry had drafted a script for a comedy about the Home Guard entitled The Fighting Tigers and, using Croft’s actual experience with the force, rewrote it as Dad’s Army, a gentle view of the British class system and eccentricity which first aired in 1968. The officious ARP Warden, Mr Hodges, was based on one of Croft’s wartime acquaintances. The initial reactions from the public were unfavourable but, as a BBC employee, Croft was able to suppress a report recommending the scrapping of the show and, by 1970, he and Perry had won the Writers’ Guild Award for the Best British Comedy Script. Dad’s Army ran for 81 episodes, is still repeated today, and is consistently voted one of the best-loved British comedy series of all time.
Croft and Perry went on to write 56 episodes of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, based on his experiences with a forces entertainment troupe in the Far East. His work producing summer shows at Butlins gave him the inspiration for 58 episodes of the holiday camp comedy Hi-de-Hi! And he also co-wrote 26 episodes of the stately home comedy You Rang, M’Lord? Croft also teamed up with Jeremy Lloyd to write 69 episodes of the Department Store comedy Are You Being Served? And six series of the French Resistance spoof, ‘Allo ‘Allo! He prided himself that, despite the innuendos, his comedies were essentially family viewing. Awarded the OBE for services to television, David Croft died in 2011.
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