Slapstick pays tribute to the late Ian Lavender

One of the disadvantages of running a festival devoted to classic comedy is that your guests tend to be of an age that means they’re not likely to be around much longer.

The late Barry Cryer, for example, used to joke that he’d stopped buying green bananas. But the death of Dad’s Army star Ian Lavender has hit Bristol’s Slapstick festival particularly hard.

In a statement, festival director Chris Daniels said: “Everyone involved with Slapstick has been deeply saddened to learn of the death of Ian Lavender – a long-standing patron of the festival, regular visitor and valued contributor of programming ideas.

“We have very happy memories of his many appearances at Slapstick, not only to share stories from the making of Dad’s Army but also hosting events celebrating his comedy heroes of the silent film era. And he gave our audiences some truly unforgettable moments – for instance, leading a singalong of the Dad’s Army theme accompanied by the late and equally lamented Neil Innes and persuading his close friend and neighbour, rock god Rick Wakeman, to play a live accompaniment to a Laurel & Hardy classic.”

Lavender had plenty of local connections, having trained as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic in the mid 60s when Patrick Stewart was in the company. “They were probably the happiest two years of my life,” he told me back in 2011.

“I still think it’s one of the first things that should be drummed into young people: ‘Listen, this is the last two or three years that you can learn for the sake of learning and make a lot of mistakes, because when you leave here the mistakes start to count.’ You can make the most disastrous mistakes, and enjoy making them.”

A visit to Bristol wasn’t complete for Lavender without some nostalgic “mooching around” to visit his old haunts, including the Clifton flat he rented for £6 a week in a building that eventually sold for £2.75m. So was the city swinging when he left in 1967?

“Well, we had a nice time.” He sounded rather nonplussed. “Liverpool was the city of youth. Bristol was where slightly better things happened, to be an intellectual snob about it. Because you had the Arts Centre, two theatres working – let alone the Hippodrome.

“You’d got poetry and music and theatre. It was a lively city with a terrific university as well. We were getting the benefits of all of that up at Pembroke Road. You could sit and have a cigarette on the Downs. It couldn’t be better really, could it?”

When asked for his theory about the Dad’s Army‘s enduring popularity (in 1996, the show famously pulled three million more viewers than a near-naked Pamela Anderson when the repeats were scheduled opposite the new series of Baywatch), he was eager to correct a misquotation.

“A few years ago, there was a quote emblazoned all over the papers: ‘Ian Lavender is sad Dad’s Army is repeated’. That wasn’t quite what I said. I said it was sad there was a need for it to be repeated. Because they don’t make programmes like it any more.

“I don’t mean, [crotchety old git voice] ‘They don’t make ’em like that any more.’ They just don’t make programmes for the whole family. Everything is niche marketed. ‘If you don’t like the swearing, you can watch something else.’ Well we were always taught that it was a good idea to get as many people as possible to watch the play that you’re in, the television programme you’re in or the radio programme you’re in.

What’s the point of making it if you don’t want to get out to people? I don’t think everything should be anodyne, but hang on a minute – there isn’t one single family comedy being made.”

Fair point, but Dad’s Army actually managed to get away with quite a lot, in a subtle kind of way, for a late sixties family teatime show. Let’s make sure I’m not misinterpreting anything. The vicar was gay, right? “Yes.”

‘Uncle’ Arthur is really Frank Pike’s father? “Yes.”

And Mrs Fox seemed to put it about a bit? “Yes.”

Hmm…promiscuity, illegitimacy and homosexuality in the clergy. And that’s before you begin to consider the class politics that ran through Croft and Perry’s scripts, occasionally erupting into open warfare between Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson.

Lavender pointed out that the dual meaning of the ‘uncle’ reference has been lost over the years. Back then, family friends were often referred to as ‘uncle’ this and ‘auntie’ that. But also, “there were an awful lot of ‘uncles’ who came and stayed in houses during the war.”

He laughed and shared a memory. “In the road where I lived as a kid, there was a woman who swore blind that her husband got weekend leave from the North African desert.”

Both sorely missed: Barry Cryer and Ian Lavender at the Slapstick Festival in 2017 – photo: David Betteridge

Asked who he was closest to among the Dad’s Army cast, Lavender didn’t hesitate in naming the veteran John Laurie (dour Scottish undertaker Private Fraser). To the outsider, he seems rather a forbidding character.

“Oh he could be, yeah. He was an irascible old man. But he had a right to be. He was 73, he was tired, he’d done two wars and he didn’t suffer fools gladly. Why should he? If somebody pissed him off, he told them. He didn’t give a shit about upsetting somebody if they deserved upsetting.

“But he wasn’t nasty. He was an utterly, utterly charming man. I more or less became his unofficial chauffeur when we worked together, just to listen to his stories. They were absolutely wonderful. We’re talking about somebody who left Dumfries when he was 16 to go into the war.

“Then there’s Arnold Ridley, who’d done everything. He didn’t wake up a day in his life since the First World War without being in pain. He was bayoneted twice and still suffered the pain from those two horrific injuries every day. And yet here was this charming, lovely, slightly vague old man with a fund of stories.

“There was me, wet behind the ears, trying not to let my jaw go slack. And of course I’d sit in Eric Morecambe’s dressing room listening to his stories too, because we recorded on the same night. This doesn’t happen to 22-year-old actors very often. If necessary, I would have paid them to be allowed to do the job.”

Read more: Comedy horror, Sir Michael Palin and a former Doctor Who take centre stage at Slapstick 2024

Main photo: Ian Lavender at the Slapstick Festival in 2017. Photograph by David Betteridge