Dad's Army

Think you've hit the nail on the head, Ivor. I heard the series when originally broadcast and recall thinking the balance of characters didn't quite work so hearing the repeats hasn't been a priority, though I did happen to hear the original Arthur Lowe pilot the other day and enjoyed it. I liked the time taken to reestablish the relationship between Mainwaring and Wilson: character rather than plot.

Wonder how much rewriting went on, how many scripts had been written before the decision to go with John Le Mesurier as the central character?

This may also stray into thesis territory, but my feeling is that just about all sitcoms need a dreamer and doer, a Don Quixote and a Sancho Panza, to work. Basil and Sybil, Harold and Albert, Hancock and Sid etc. And Mainwaring and a Wilson was a perfect example of that.

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Thank you for pointing me to that link; good to read that the writers had the blessing of Lowe's widow for continuing and it's to everyone's credit that finding simply another actor to play Mainwaring was obviously out of the question. The series is certainly worth listening to even if it is overlaid, as that website says, by a sense of sadness at what might have been. It does show, I think, that characters come before the gags in sitcom.

I suppose this is veering slightly off topic but quite apart from ISOHAM, had Arthur Lowe lived, I would have loved to have seen a radio version of one of the last TV sitcoms he did, AJ Wentworth BA.

This was about a hopelessly out of touch schoolmaster with Harry Andrews, the headmaster, as the Sancho Panza figure. It came out of a series of articles in Punch by HF Ellis and had, as far as I remember, a somewhat muted reception in that one and only TV series - maybe because the fun of reading the pieces was seeing the gap between how Wentworth viewed himself (the articles were supposedly written by him) and how others viewed him, as suggested by clues inadvertantly provided in the writing. Andrews was well cast as the head practically cracking up at Wentworth's accident-prone foolishness (a sort of prep school Larry David without the swearing, if that makes any sense) but masking his amusement from his hapless employee. Adapted by Basil Boothroyd, it was very much Gerald C. Potter territory. If only...

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Yes, according to the British Sitcom Guide the series was screened posthumously. I don't remember being particularly struck by his performance but it's difficult to recall at this distance.

There appears to have been a radio version of the second book of Ellis's Wentworth pieces, The Papers of AJ Wentworth BA, in 2005, directed by Elizabeth Freestone, but I can't seem to find full details - anybody know anything about it?

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Sorry, I meant AJ Wentworth BA (Retired) for that 2005 radio series. Googling a bit more, I see it was adapted by Emma Kennedy and starred (rather young for the part, I'd have thought) ... Chris Langham. This presumably means it's unlikely to be repeated.