John Clegg, actor best known for It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

During his National Service as a private in the Wiltshires, John Clegg was “taken the mickey out of something rotten” by the sergeant major on account of his plummy accent and public school background.
So it was a case of art imitating life when he was cast as “La-di-da” Gunner Graham, the pianist in the BBC wartime sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. No episode was complete without the balding, bespectacled and rather puny-looking Gunner Graham launching into a convoluted explanation with, “I’m terribly sorry, sergeant major, but …” until stopped by Battery Sergeant Major Williams (Windsor Davies) giving him the loudest and longest “Shut up!” in television history. Other recurring humiliations included the hapless public school-educated gunner saying, “No sergeant major”, only to have the words repeated in withering mimicry or the sergeant major responding to one of Graham’s gentle and quite reasonable complaints with “Oh dear, how sad, never mind”.
The programme was based on the experiences of the writers David Croft and Jimmy Perry in a wartime concert party in India at the end of the Second World War. And while never as popular as Croft and Perry’s Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum did run on BBC1 for eight series from 1974 until 1981 and attracted up to 17 million viewers. Clegg appeared in all 56 episodes as the slightly effete Oxford-educated “leftie”. The comedy hinges on Williams’s resentment at being attached to a military concert party. He consequently does everything he can, ultimately in vain, to get them transferred to the Burmese jungle to fight the Japanese.
Unlike Dad’s Army, the show has not aged well. It has been called racist and homophobic, with the sergeant major frequently calling his men “poofs”, including the effeminate Gunner “Gloria” Beaumont (Melvyn Hayes), who often appears in drag, and the diminutive, portly Gunner “Lofty” Sugden (Don Estelle), who wears a pith helmet and has a soaring operatic voice.
The Indian porter Rangi Ram is played by a white actor (Michael Bates) in blackface, while the series was also accused of reinforcing racist imperialist stereotypes; other Indian characters include a “punkah wallah”, whose job it is to fan the officers and is constantly being abused for laziness.
Unsurprisingly, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum is considered verboten now but Clegg had fond memories of it. “It was a lovely show to do. We were all speaking to each other at the end of nine years. The thing that I liked about it was that it was authentic and we had great feedback from the audience.”
John Walter Lawrence Clegg was born in the town of Murree, British India (present-day Pakistan) in 1934. His father was a major in the Royal Hampshires. He was brought up with his brother and sister in a town that his parents described as “Tunbridge Wells in the hills”. It may have been the dying days of the Raj and the Indian independence movement was in full swing but Clegg recalled “a great love and affection going both ways. It was greatly exaggerated that we were treading the Indians down with our feet upon their necks.”
Clegg was educated at the Pilgrims’ School, the Winchester cathedral choir school, and at Canford, the public school near Bournemouth in Dorset. He did National Service straight from school, stationed in Hong Kong. The ribbing from Sergeant Major Baldry stopped only after Clegg entered officer cadet school as a second lieutenant.
After demobilisation he won a place at Rada, where contemporaries included Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole and Judi Dench, and where by his own admission “I lost my inhibitions” after his regimented upbringing. A highlight was to appear as Colonel Pickering in a Rada production of Pygmalion with Glenda Jackson as Eliza Doolittle.
Clegg’s first proper job as an actor was to work in rep at the Watford Palace Theatre Company in 1956, then run by Jimmy and Gilda Perry. It was a stark contrast to his Rada training, where he would spend a term researching a character. “You would be given a script and told in five days you’re on. You realise pretty quickly if you are going to be in this business and learn how to handle an audience, how to get laughs and how to time them.”
Fellow company members included Michael Knowles and Donald Hewlett, both of whom he would appear with in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and Mavis Pugh, whom he married in 1959. Many of their fellow actors were sceptical about whether the marriage would last as Pugh was 20 years his senior and in her mid-forties. The marriage did last. Pugh, who forged her own career in the BBC comedy You Rang, M’Lord? in the 1990s, died in 2006. There were no children.
Clegg capitalised on the fame he attained from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum by writing and starring in a one-man show about Rudyard Kipling. “I was fascinated by the work of Kipling because of my Indian background, this magic country where I was born. I had read his books assiduously, especially the Indian stories and poems. When I started going bald, I thought I could look like Kipling.” He and Pugh took the show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 1981. “It did terribly well there. We got some lovely notices and capacity houses. We even ended up making a profit of £5.”
Clegg continued to appear in cameo roles in film and television, including in Keeping Up Appearances and Bridget Jones’s Diary but he would always be reminded of his enduring association with one particular role when members of the public would come up to him and say, “Oh dear, how sad, never mind”.
John Clegg, actor, was born on July 9, 1934. His death was announced on August 20, 2024. He was aged 90