The actor John Clegg, who has died aged 90, became well known to British audiences thanks to his role as the piano-playing Gunner “La Di Da” Graham in the David Croft and Jimmy Perry sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, which ran for eight series between 1974 and 1981, achieving 17 million viewers at the height of its popularity.
The show concerned the antics of the misfit group of soldiers who made up a Royal Artillery concert party in India (and later Burma) during the final months of the second world war. Gunner Graham – bald, skinny and bespectacled – was perhaps the most genteel of the motley crew, his well-spoken good manners and university education provoking verbal barrages from Windsor Davies’s stentorian Sergeant Major Williams, a memorable character in a state of constant apoplexy with his charges (whom he referred to disparagingly as “a bunch of poofs”).
