John Clegg Actor best-known as ‘La-Di-Da’ Gunner Graham in BBC’s ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’
John Clegg, the actor who has died aged 90, won a legion of fans in the BBC sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum as the balding, bespectacled Royal Artillery concert party pianist ‘La-Di-Da’ Gunner Graham.
Among those fictional soldier-performers serving in India during the final months of World War II, he was the university-educated “boffin” who continually rubs the bombastic Sergeant Major Williams (played by Windsor Davies) up the wrong way.
The character was nicknamed Paderewski after the Polish pianist — who, as the country’s prime minister, signed the Treaty of Versailles — although Clegg himself did not play the instrument in real life.
For Jimmy Perry and David Croft, who created the programme after their success with Dad’s Army ,it harked back to their own wartime days — both in the Royal Artillery, with Perry in a concert party.
It was also nostalgic for Clegg, who was born to English parents in British India during the 1930s. His father was an army major serving at a hill station in the Punjab (now in Pakistan). Later, National Service prepared Clegg for what he would experience on screen.
He appeared in all eight series of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-81) alongside Melvyn Hayes as Bombardier ‘Gloria’ Beaumont, the effeminate drag performer; Don Estelle as Gunner ‘Lofty’ Sugden, the lead singer; Kenneth MacDonald as Gunner ‘Nobby’ Clark, the whistler; Donald Hewlett as Lieutenant-Colonel Reynolds; and Michael Knowles as the bungling Captain Ashwood. George Layton played Bombardier ‘Solly’ Solomons, the leading man, for the first two series.
However, the sitcom has weathered less well than others from Perry and Croft, with its now unacceptable language, including Windsor Davies referring to his charges as a “bunch of poofs”, and Michael Bates darkening his skin to play Rangi Ram, the concert party’s Indian porter. In 2014, Ofcom, the British television regulator, referred to the programme as one of those “1970s and 1980s sitcoms with racist and offensive content”.
Clegg’s love of India and fascination with Rudyard Kipling, whose work was inspired by the country in which both of them were born, led him to compile and perform a oneman show, The Eye of the Sun, based on Kipling’s poems, stories and anecdotes and performed in character. It won a Fringe First award at the 1981 Edinburgh Festival before he toured it around Britain.
John Walter Laurence Clegg was born at Murree, in the Punjab, on July 9, 1934, to Barbara, a teacher, and John Clegg, a major in the Hampshire Regiment. When he was 18 months old, the family moved to Lowestoft, Suffolk, before settling in the Hampshire village of Shawford.
While training at Rada, a highlight was playing Colonel Pickering in its production of Pygmalion, with Glenda Jackson as Eliza Doolittle.
On graduation, he joined the company at Watford’s Palace Theatre, run by Jimmy Perry and his wife before the writer’s Dad’s Army success.
In 1959, Clegg married company member Mavis Pugh.
On stage, in the farce One for the Pot, Clegg took over the role of Hickory Wood for a 1964 tour.
Clegg’s long television career as a character actor, usually in one-off parts, began as a detective in Dixon of Dock Green in 1961 and included sitcom roles as a vicar in Father, Dear Father (1972), a taxi driver in Lollipop (1972), a wireless operator in Dad’s Army (1972), two customers in Are You Being Served? (1974 and 1975) and vicars in Spooner’s Patch (1979) and Keep It in the Family (1981). He also played Mr Franklyn, a solicitor, in 1990 episodes of You Rang, M’Lord?
Mavis Pugh died in 2006. The son of John Clegg’s cousin Nicky is the former UK deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.