lay preacher Leonard Swindley in the northern soap opera Coronation Street, in which he appeared until 1965. He negotiated a contract through which he only had to work six months of the year, three months on and three months off. During the months he was not playing Swindley, he remained busy on stage or making one-off guest appearances in other TV series such as Z-Cars (1962) and The Avengers (1967). His most acclaimed stage roles during this period included pompous north-country alderman Michael Oglethorpe in Henry Livings's Stop It, Whoever You Are at the Arts Theatre (1961), and Sir Davey Dunce in The Soldier's Fortune at the Royal Court Theatre (1966). Lowe did not relish work on Coronation Street and was happy to give it up, but viewer responses to his character led to him reprising Swindley for starring roles in the spin-off series Pardon the Expression (1966) and its sequel Turn Out the Lights (1967). Stardom In 1968, Lowe was cast in his best remembered role, as Home Guard platoon leader Captain Mainwaring in the BBC sitcom Dad's Army (1968–1977). Some colleagues on the show later remarked that the role resembled him: pompous and bumbling. Frank Williams said he felt this perception was unfair: "He certainly didn't suffer fools gladly and always knew his own mind, but he also had an ability to laugh at himself. Personally, I found him to be a most kind and generous man". David Croft said Lowe had to be treated with kid gloves. He had firm ideas on what he was willing to do and never took his script home, which resulted in uncertainty over his lines. He could be pompous and over time his part was written so there was a blurring of the line between actor and character. An oddity of his contract was that he would never have to remove his trousers. Lowe held conservative political views and disapproved of the left-wing politics of his co-star Clive Dunn. Dunn, in turn, described some of Lowe's opinions as outrageous, but as an actor rated him "ten out of ten in his field". Despite some tensions, Jimmy Perry described the cast as a "marvellous bunch of pros" with "no sort of volatile animosity between anybody". Lowe also played Mainwaring in a radio version of Dad's Army, a stage play and a feature-length film released in 1971. He played Mainwaring's drunken brother Barry