GENIUS..

I was very sad to learn of the passing of David Croft who along with Jeremy Lloyd and Jimmy Perry was responsible for creating those wonderful comedy series such as Dad`s Army, Are You Being Served, It Aint `alf Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi and `Allo, Allo.

Wonderful characters, memorable settings, programmes beautifully directed, acted and produced and all relying on `simple` humour and extraordinary situations rather than the `comedy` of today that relies so much on rudeness, bad language and a lot of shouting.

Of course, the litany of characters across the spectrum of David Croft`s imagination is impressively large.  Captain Mainwaring, Gladys Pugh, Mr. Humphries, Corporal Jones, Rene, Michelle of the resistance....but surely the one that stretched the imagination to conceive and appreciate was the character of Officer Crabtree, played with utter conviction by the splendid Arthur Bostrom.

If you think about it, it truly takes a special kind of brain to dream up an Officer Crabtree.  Here we have a British agent behind enemy lines who decides that his best chance of survival is to impersonate a French gendarme.   But his French is very limited, so he resorts to a pidgin version of French spoken with an unconvincing accent.   Result - hilarity.

As a concept, of course, it`s quite mad but it`s compelling stuff and it works.  In a curious way, it reminded me of another ludicrous situation, but one which I suspect was entirely unintended.   That came about more than half a century ago, in the days before television became universally available and popular, when someone at the BBC decided it would be a winner to have a ventriloquist on the radio.   And so the vent, Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews were let loose on the radio - a madcap creation that allowed Brough`s lips to move quite freely because the radio audience couldn`t tell anyway.

Brough and Andrews were bizarre characters created as a result of good intentions being horribly misplaced, whereas David Croft`s characters are all the result of purposeful creative genius.   So thank you, David Croft.  You will be much missed but your legacy will live on.

Gid moaning indood !