John Clegg, actor best-known as the pianist Gunner Graham in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – obituary
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 the Second World War, 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. “I’ll never forget a certain sergeant-major who used to make my life a misery because I’d been to public school and had a posh accent,” he recalled.
Clegg 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.
But the sitcom has weathered less well than others from Perry and Croft through 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 bearer (porter).
In 2014, Ofcom, the 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 one-man 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 took it around the country. He later staged another show, Brushes of Comets’ Hair (1993), about Kipling’s early adult years in Britain.
John Walter Laurence Clegg was born at Murree, in the Punjab, on July 9 1934 to Barbara (née Bell), a teacher, and John Clegg (sometimes known by his middle name, Ambrose), a major in the Hampshire Regiment.
When he was 18 months old, the family moved to Lowestoft, Suffolk, before settling in 1937 in the Hampshire village of Shawford, where his mother wrote village plays and pantomimes. From the age of four he progressed from playing pixies to the back ends of donkeys, then baddies.
Clegg attended the Pilgrims’ School, Winchester, and Canford School, near Bournemouth, before National Service, first as a private in the Wiltshire Regiment in Hong Kong, then as a second lieutenant in the Royal Hampshire Regiment.
While training at Rada from 1954 to 1957), a highlight was playing Colonel Pickering in its production of Pygmalion, with Glenda Jackson as Eliza Doolittle. The Stage praised him for “the subtleties of the characterisation” while recognising her as “fresh and charming”.
On graduation, he joined the company at Watford’s Palace Theatre, run by Jimmy Perry and his wife, Gilda, before the writer’s Dad’s Army success.
In 1959 he married another member of the company, Mavis Pugh – 20 years his junior – in 1959. She went on to play Lady Lavender in the Perry-Croft sitcom You Rang, M’Lord? and made a guest appearance in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum as an ATS commander.
On stage, in the farce One for the Pot, Clegg took over the role of Hickory Wood – taken by Brian Rix at the Whitehall Theatre – 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 deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.
John Clegg, born July 9 1934, died August 2 2024