It Sticks Out Half a Mile
Starring John Le Mesurier, Ian Lavender, Bill Pertwee and Vivienne Martin, the series served as a sequel to the television wartime sitcom Dad's Army, for which writers Harold Snoad and Michael Knowles had previously written radio adaptations.
Following the end of Dad's Army, writers Snoad and Knowles wrote a pilot episode starring Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier, reprising their roles of Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson from that series.
In consequence, Snoad and Knowles introduced Lavender and Pertwee, reprising their roles of Private Pike and Warden Hodges, and Vivienne Martin as secretary Miss Perkins, to produce a thirteen-episode series.
It Sticks Out Half a Mile serves as a sequel series to the television wartime sitcom Dad's Army, which followed a platoon of Home Guard soldiers during the Second World War.
The sequel series follows the lives of two of the members of the Home Guard platoon, the former Sergeant Arthur Wilson and Private Frank Pike, and their nemesis, the former Chief ARP Warden Hodges, three years after the war in 1948.
To achieve this goal, Hodges meets Frank Pike, now twenty-two and working at Woolworths, to convince him to enter a partnership to raise the needed funds.
[19] The pilot episode, titled "Loyal Support", starred Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier, reprising their roles of Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson respectively.
The episode followed Mainwaring, who, returning from Switzerland with his wife, arrives in Frambourne-on-Sea and approaches Swallow's Bank for a loan to purchase the town's decrepit pier.
The series was shelved, the existing pilot episode was left unbroadcast,[19][23][24] and the tape was wiped, but co-writer Snoad retained a copy which he later returned to the BBC.
[19] Snoad and Knowles thus convinced the BBC that the idea could still be viable, so a second pilot, titled "The Business Proposition", was recorded on 11 September 1982,[27] with Ian Lavender, Bill Pertwee and Vivienne Martin joining the cast.
[19][24][28] As part of their contracts with the BBC, Snoad and Knowles were obligated to write fifteen scripts for the series, even though two episodes were ultimately never recorded.
[34][35] The original pilot and the first three episodes of the series were released in September 2010, on a compact disc titled Classic BBC Radio Comedy: It Sticks Out Half a Mile.
[37] Reception for the series was mixed, with reviewers praising the performances of the central actors yet criticising the show's humour and its overall quality compared to Dad's Army.
According to Pertwee, large groups of people, many of whom were Dad's Army fans, lined up to attend the recording for the first episode of the series on 11 September 1982, a rare occurrence for radio programmes at that time.
Grimes wrote that Le Mesurier was "getting laughs that the dialogue did not by itself deserve", but observed that he was "mugging for the benefit of the studio audience" rather than for the general listening public.
Although praising the "worthy performances" of the lead characters, she criticised the "sad smut of the script" and wrote that the series "comes nowhere near to awakening that mixture of rueful nostalgia and ironic affection that Dad's Army did so well".
[3] In a 2021 article, Rhianna Evans from the British Comedy Guide wrote positively of the series, commenting that the central characters of Hodges, Pike and Wilson "all remain very recognisable" from their roles established in Dad's Army.
