Clive Dunn in Dad's Army: stoicism, charm and furtive sausages - The Guardian (blog)

What was most adorable about Corporal Jones, the character the late Clive Dunn immortalised in Dad's Army during the late 1960s and early 1970s, was that he turned left when everybody else turned right. Or right when they turned left. He was out of joint with existence. He was Camus' Meursault with a dash of Mr Magoo.

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
But he was more than that. Dunn ventriloquised one of the sweetest characters to ever grace a sitcom. Jones was a storyteller more digressive than Ronnie Corbett: "You're going into the realms of absurdity now," weekly complained his commanding officer Captain Mainwaring as Jones outlined an insane plot to waylay the Hun or crazily embroidered his part in some venerable altercation with Boers.

Jones was a man destined to hang up his butcher's apron one day and thereby renounce his role as one of the most powerful men in Walmington-on-Sea (remember those lines of ration-book holders outside his shop queuing for a pound of scrag or a few slides of spam, their very survival dependent on his glad eye?).

Reading this on mobile? Click here to viewHe was a man who had the good taste to fancy Mrs Fox – that dowager Venus in furs, that south-coast fun-bundle, that fox in fox's clothing – slipping some furtive sausages her way to get into her affections and, fingers crossed, further. He was old but, unlike Private Godfrey, he hadn't mislaid his mojo.

Jones was in many ways a role model, particularly for the likes of me as I head inexorably towards life's third age and no doubt a council-run Home for the Bewildered. He was always baffled by the world, but nonetheless his customary stance was bewildered readiness for action. He wasn't a cultured man, but he implicitly grasped the essential codes of Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. There is no point whining about what is beyond your control, one must remain upbeat in adversity or confusion, and the only fitting approach to a darkening world is one of cheeriness and, quite possibly, bafflement.

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
Jones was the existential flipside to John Laurie's Private Frazer, who forever grumbled about the platoon's fate ("We're doomed! Doomed!"). Jones was the principled antidote to Private Walker's incessant scamming, the brave old hand to Private Pike's infantile wimpiness, and the ordinary stiff who deferred to the two mad poshos (Wilson and Mainwaring) who ran Walmington's risible war effort. He was the only member of the platoon, so far as I can remember, who had seen active service, but that experience hardly seemed much use against those unpleasant Nazis ("Such smart uniforms, sir," said Wilson of the ruthless foe; "Blind obedience, Wilson, blind obedience," countered Mainwaring).

No doubt being in a real wartime platoon of reservists wasn't half so much fun as it seemed in David Croft and Jimmy Perry's Dad's Army, but realism is always trumped by charm when it is done so gently as Clive Dunn did it.

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view
True, Jones's reminiscences of the Boer war and bayoneting the "fuzzy wuzzies" ("They don't like it up 'em sir") belong not so much to a kinder era as a more disgustingly racist one. However, that shame, along with Clive Dunn's later revolting capitalisation on his charming old duffer persona during the glum novelty hit single Grandad, notwithstanding, should not tarnish the truth that he created an unlikely hero.

Truly we shall never see his like again. Mainly because he is pointing in the opposite direction from us, as always.