David Lodge

^{By Brian Slade}

Sketch comedy for a headline act has always tended towards the big name taking a multitude of different guises across their show. However, for their ideas to fully function, they normally had a strong supporting cast to provide the necessary gravitas or comic foil for their antics. One such reliable gem, whose face would be familiar to a generation of comedy fans, was so much the reliable company member that he even part-mocked himself with the title of his autobiography – Up the Ladder to Obscurity. That man was pals with comedy legends from the Goons and was as frequently on television throughout the 1960s and 1970s as the big names of the day, as well as chalking up a vast array of movie appearances – David Lodge.

Born in 1921 in Kent, David Lodge’s enjoyment of performing songs in school doubtless came from his parents’ own talents – his father was an orator and his mother a singer. After his family moved to London, Lodge received his call-up orders and joined the RAF. He claimed that the noise he made singing while on spudbashing duties brought him to the attention of pianist Teddy Rubach, and by the end of the war David was one of the performers in Ralph Reader’s famous Gang Shows, where he befriended Peter Sellers with whom he would become lifelong pals. Despite his musical background, his act was a comedy routine including impersonations of the top movie stars of the day.

Whereas the likes of Sellers and fellow Gang Show members like Dick Emery continued their ascent swiftly, Lodge, like so many performers freshly demobbed, struggled to find work after the war. He continued his one-man performance in variety and at holiday camps and even turned his hand to performances as ringmaster and clown in a circus ring. He was also, quite crucially for his career, the warm-up man for the fledgling Goons line-up.

With his vast height and frame, Lodge was perfect fodder for roles as heavies or policemen, and so it was somewhat inevitable that his first movie role would be as an authority figure in The Cockleshell Heroes in 1955. That one film was enough to send him into regular, albeit minor, character work as he reeled off an array of performances whose character names inevitably began with Sergeant, Detective, Captain or Officer.

By the end of the 1950s, David Lodge’s appearances began to be more often than not in comedies, and the early 1960s established him as a valuable addition to the genre. In 1960, he appeared with Norman Wisdom, whom he would work with many times, in The Bulldog Breed, and in the following year he was in the first of his six Carry On… films, Carry On Regardless.

His reliability in comedy had always kept him within the professional world of Peter Sellers, from the 1957 film The Naked Truth through to a first appearance as Mac in The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975. In 1965, he had a role in a twice-weekly footballing drama, United! He played the manager of fictitious Midlands club Brentwich, Gerry Barford, struggling to rescue his team from the lower region of the second tier while juggling responsibilities at home to his wife and ambitious footballing son. Stoke City, Coventry City and Nuneaton Borough were among the clubs who assisted in the production centred in the Midlands, with Jimmy Hill becoming technical adviser. It was easily the longest running role of Lodge’s career, ending in Spring of 1966 at his own request.

The same year that he first appeared in the Pink Panther movies, Lodge became a permanent member of the company of talent supporting Spike Milligan in his anarchic Q series, by now up to Q6. Find some of the corpsing of Spike Milligan in his chaotic and hysterical programmes and David Lodge is normally somewhere to be found.

With such exposure, Lodge was by the mid-1970s as reliable a foil as there was. It kept him in constant work, appearing in such programmes as Bless This House, Robin’s Nest, Odd Man Out, Larry Grayson and many more. His size also kept him in drama with appearances as heavies in The Sweeney and Minder.

David Lodge married in 1963 in a relationship that had only been going for 24 hours during the filming of The Long Ships overseas. He was also honoured to be best man at Peter Sellers’ wedding to Britt Ekland, and whilst not always approving of some of the antics of his troubled genius friend, he defended him stoically when seedier accusations were made after Sellers’ untimely death.

In later years, Lodge began to disappear from the acting profession. With his vocal dexterity, he ran charity auctions in his private time and eventually passed away in 2003 at the age of 82.

Aside from his long-running role in United! it is safe to say that David Lodge was not a leading man. It wasn’t due to lack of talent or ambition. He himself largely blamed it on his appearance and size. But through a mass of successful films and television shows, his is a face that will be familiar to anybody who had a television set throughout the sixties and seventies, and rightly so.