It Ain't Half Hot Mum - Goodbye Lofty
Don Estelle (May 22, 1933 - August 2, 2003) playing the part as "Gunner 'Lofty' Harold Sugden" in It Ain't Half Hot Mum, a British Don Estelle (May 22, 1933 - August 2, 2003) playing the part as "Gunner 'Lofty' Harold Sugden" in It Ain't Half Hot Mum, a British sitcom. This clip is a tribute to the late Don Estelle taken from an episode entitled "The Long Road Home" (27/08/1981) [Season 8 Episode 6]. This is the second last episode of the series, where Lofty is unable to join the lads home to Blighty, as he did not receive his required inoculation. Though in the end he does, of course. Check out the ending and most touching scene of this episode at: "It Ain't Half Hot Mum - Goodbye Char Wallah Muhammad" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dn86jcgg6Q ]
It Ain't Half Hot Mum was a British sitcom about the adventures of a Royal Artillery Concert Party, broadcast between 1974 and 1981, and written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the creators of Dad's Army. It was set in British India and Burma, towards the end of the Second World War. The series ran for 8 seasons, amounting to 56 episodes for 7 years - between 1974 to 1981.
The character was dubbed with the ironic nickname of "Lofty" on account of Don Estelle's small stature (4 feet, 9 inches). He had a powerful tenor voice and as a spin-off from the series Estelle, and his co-star Windsor Davies, had a number one hit in the UK in 1975 with a semi-comic version of Whispering Grass.
In his privately-published autobiography Sing Lofty: Thoughts Of A Gemini, Estelle was extremely bitter about the state of modern-day entertainment, attacking those who refused to repeat It Ain't Half Hot Mum as "tight-crutched, white-trousered morons".
