Victims on parade
James Delmgpole
0 n my father's first day of National Service in the RAF, the corporal strode into the hut and screamed at the terrified recruits that if ever he came into their quarters again the person nearest the door should shout NCO present' and everyone must immediately stand to attention by their beds.
Ten minutes later the corporal reappeared. `NCO present!' shouted the person nearest the door, and everyone immediately stood to attention. Everyone apart from a young man at the far end of the room who was still lying on his bed, reading. The corporal stomped over to his bed, puce with rage. 'Airman, did you hear what I said about standing to attention when an NCO comes into the room?' At this point, the airman rose to his feet. 'Corporal,' he said, 'according to RAF regulations, I'm not obliged to stand until actually addressed by an NCO.'
The airman, it turned out, was an exRhodesian air-force officer who had been dismissed for crashing an aircraft and later forced to re-enlist when it turned out he had served only 12 months of his National Service. At least, those are the details my father remembers and, please, don't any of you send me one of those grouchy, killjoy letters 6 la Ludovic 'No your mother-in-law didn't sink the Bismarck, she was in the wrong hut at Bletchley' Kennedy grumbling I've got my facts all wrong. The point is that sadistic National Service NCOs didn't always have it their own way: every now and then a barrack-room lawyer would emerge from the lists to do battle on equal terms.
Ifs a shame that the 28 remaining victims in Lad's Army — ITV1's experiment to recreate the experience of National Service basic training — don't have a similar champion in their midst. The one who might have helped — a mouthy cockney boxer — decided he couldn't hack it any more in the second week and escaped under the fence. About the only other possibility — the posh-spoken, public school rugby teacher — had his resistance broken last week when he tried answering back and was forced to spend the rest of the day carrying a dustbin above his head.
As a result, I think the balance is slightly too far in the NCOs' favour. Whenever they're off duty, they make no bones about it being just a game for TV. The poor kids who've agreed to play the recruits, on the other hand, have been all but brainwashed into thinking that they've been caught in a Fifties time warp. When they pass out in a week's time. I shouldn't be surprised if some of them aren't rather shocked not to be sent straight off to fight in Korea.
Quite the most gripping aspect of Lads Army — even more so than its droolingly hideous recreation of Fifties service life, from the scratchy, baggy underpants (which you have to put on backwards if you don't want your willy to keep popping through the flap) to the terrifying regime of ruthlessly enforced pointlessness — is this tension between what it's purporting to be and what it actually is.
Despite its every effort to pretend that the recruits are subject to real military discipline, the only things stopping them going back to their girlfriends, children or mums are their sense of pride and the contracts they signed with Granada TV. So every time one of them throws a strop after yet more gross unreasonableness from one of the NCOs, there's always the tantalising possibility that this time he'll say, 'Fuck you, corporal, you're a bastard, I hate you and this is only pretend anyway. I'm off home.'
That this hasn't yet happened is surely down to the NCOs' brilliance at psychological manipulation. One second they're bonding and motivating, the next they're screaming and bullying, the next they're having quiet chats bordering very un-Fiftiesishly on the touchy-feely. It's a fine balancing act: act too nice and human and they'll devalue the experiment; push the recruits too far and they'll simply rebel and walk out. I'm amazed at how well they're holding it together. Half a century ago it can't have been all that difficult to train callow, virginal teenagers born into a world of order, austerity, discipline, deference. Far harder to do the same for a generation weaned on drugs, sex, fast food, video games and almost boundless personal freedom_ Yet amazingly, they've done it. Of course, veterans are going to quibble over details, but — given the inevitable limitations in an age of political correctness and rampant safety Nazism — Lad's Army seems to me to have succeeded quite spectacularly well in bringing home the horrors and joys of National Service to the E generation.
What comes across most strongly is the intense sense of camaraderie that the shared misery seems to have engendered among disparate men from all walks of life. It makes me wish, dearly, that they'd bring National Service back: not because scrubbing toilets with toothbrushes instills discipline, or any of that rot, but because it might remind a fractured society of that community of spirit it has long since lost. The gang of black teenagers who hang around my park waiting for people to mug; young Muslim hotheads looking for a cause: spoilt middle-class teenagers who think their whole life's going to be one leisurely cruise. Call the buggers up, I say. Make them whitewash coal.
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