‘Cold Feet’ star Robert Bathurst has branded the ‘Dad’s Army’ movie "creatively bankrupt" because it wasn’t written by the sitcom’s creators David Croft and Jimmy Perry.
The 62-year-old actor has taken on the role of Sergeant Wilson – originally played by John Le Mesurier in the beloved BBC comedy series which ran from 1968 to 1977 – in the three recreations of lost ‘Dad’s Army’ episodes for TV channel Gold.
Whereas he believes these three remakes have value because they are completing the set of stories penned by the show’s creators Croft and Perry, Robert insists the 2016 film – which starred Catherine Zeta-Jones and Toby Jones amongst a stellar cast – flopped because it was pastiche.
In an interview on the Series Linked podcast, Robert said: "There’s been previous outings not written by Croft and Perry. I thought they were sort of creatively bankrupt."
Robert admits he "wrestled" with the idea of playing Sergeant Wilson because the remakes are "fraught with danger" and may not be well-received by fans of the World War II sitcom which starred Arthur Lowe as Captain George Mainwaring in charge of the Home Guard.
However, he ultimately decided to accept the role because the producers were going to stay completely faithful to Croft and Perry’s original scripts and by making the trio of episodes it meant that the series would finally be complete following the loss of ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Walker’, ‘A Stripe for Frazer’ and ‘Under Fire’ from the BBC archive.
Robert – who is most famous for portraying David Marsden in ITV drama ‘Cold Feet’ – said: "It’s fraught with potential dangers because, I mean, who wants to see other people do ‘Dad’s Army’, apart from Arnold Ridley, and Arthur Lowe, and John Le Mesurier, and everybody like that? I wrestled with it, until I realised that it was all about the lost episodes. Those three have never been discovered, and here we are now having remade those and so ‘Dad’s Army’ fans can see all 80 shows, all 80 scripts, but not all with the same people, sadly."
The ‘Dad’s Army’ remakes boast a cast made up of a host of major names with Kevin McNally portraying Captain Mainwaring, Bernard Cribbins as Private Godfrey, Kevin Eldon as Lance Corporal Jones, Mathew Horne as Private Walker, David Hayman as Private Frazer and Tom Rosenthal as Pike and they will air from Sunday August 25 on Gold.
Robert Bathurst says Dad’s Army film was ‘creatively bankrupt’
