Joy, mingled with apprehension, is perhaps the safest reaction to the news that Dad's Army is going to be put on the stage. Joy, because, as every repeat screening confirms, successive series were built on as sure a formula as British television ever devised.
The theme of the Home Guard in action at a time when Britain was threatened blended nostalgia with a timeless evocation of people doing their best in impossible circumstances in a way which, while essentially comic, had also, deep down, a kind of nobility - even more impressive now in this me-first age.
To that, its creators created a cast matchlessly rich and memorable: the puffed-up, irascible, yet still endearing Captain Mainwaring, given the chance to strut the stage as he's always felt he deserves to do, and so often courting humiliation, like some kind of 20th century seaside Pooter; his world weary number two, who for all his public school education takes a subordinate role which fits him as ill as his uniform; the Boer War veteran corporal with his ramshackle tales of service but also with a conspicuous streak of stubborn courage; the spiv; the sceptical Scottish doomster who in private life is an undertaker. Every one of the principals - apart from perhaps a toothy Welshman introduced when James Beck, the actor who played the spiv, fell ill and died - remained for year after year a source of delight.
Having dreamed up these characters, David Croft and Jimmy Perry wrote them through the stories with unfaltering skill, furnished them with catchphrases which entered the language, and a line which was later acclaimed as the best in all TV comedy: when a German officer asks one soldier his name and Mainwaring orders: "Don't tell him, Pike."
It's because so many loved them so well that you can't help but feel apprehensive about a stage version. Who but Arthur Lowe can ever be Mainwaring; who but John le Mesurier, Sergeant Wilson? Can anyone, other than Clive Dunn (one of the few of the front line cast who is still alive) ever be Corporal Jones?
If this stage production works, it will end in laughter and love; if it simply becomes an exercise in recreating the unrecreatable, it is likely to end in tears.
