Oh Happy Band! is a British television sitcom written by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft. The series ran for six episodes on BBC1, from 3 September to 8 October 1980, and featured the final screen appearance of comedian Harry Worth. For musical sequences, the series featured the Aldershot Brass Ensemble.
Since broadcast, the series has not been repeated or released on any home consumer media.
Harry Bennington (Harry Worth) is the conductor of a brass band in the small, fictional northern town of Nettlebridge. During the course of the series, he and his fellow band members become involved in a campaign to prevent the building of a new airport over their town.[2]
The role of lead character Harry Bennington was originally offered to Gorden Kaye. However, Kaye was unavailable and the role was instead offered to Harry Worth.[7]
Musical sequences in the series were performed by the Aldershot Brass Ensemble.[2][8][9] A week before the series' premiere on 3 September 1980, British Mouthpiece informed its reader that "a player who took part [in the series] assures our reporter that the actual situations do not try to make the band [Aldershot Brass Ensemble] take part, or make them look foolish, as some of the other shows using bands during the past year have not brought much credit to our movement".[9]
The theme music, "Oh Happy Band!", was composed by series co-writer David Croft. It was performed by the Aldershot Brass Ensemble and sung by the Fred Tomlinson Singers. In 1980, an LP record of the theme tune, along with a B-side of "Our Boys Will Shine Tonight", was released by BBC Records.[10]
Writer and historian Mark Lewisohn, in the BBC Guide to Comedy, wrote that the series was: "An odd amalgam of ideas from established sitcom creators Lloyd and Croft... Considering the usual dependability of the major protagonists here, it is fair to say that Oh Happy Band! was flat rather than sharp."[8]
Nostalgia Central noted that: "So utterly inept and banal was the show that had it not been written by comedy stalwarts Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, it likely would have never been screened."[11]
Iwan Fox, writing for 4 Bars Rest, described the series as "terrible" and "rather excruciating", criticising the "strained" and "rather threadbare" storylines and the "stereotypical" characters. Fox noted that the casting mirrored that of Dad's Army, with Harry Bennington, "a small, slightly bumptious ineffectual leader of men", mirroring Captain Mainwaring, and the rest of Bennington's band mirroring the members of Mainwaring's platoon. However, Fox acknowledged that there were "occasional gem[s]" in the series.[9]