SHERM

It can’t have been an easy decision, taking on the role of Colonel Sherman T Potter in M*A*S*H. After all, McLean Stevenson had been so very successful in his three years playing Henry Blake that anyone stepping into the breach made when the actor chose to leave and his character’s plane spun into the Sea of Japan with no survivors on his way home was already on a hiding to nothing.

That Harry Morgan managed to make this wise old career soldier such a memorable and lovable character is a testament to his skill and craftsmanship as an actor, as much as the fact that many consider the point where he joined the show, more or less at the same time as Mike Farrell joined as B.J., to be when the cast became a “family” is testament to his skill as a human being. There are many who believe that the warmth and humanity displayed by Potter reflected the genuine warmth and humanity of Harry Morgan and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I was a latecomer to M*A*S*H and it was a bit of a slow burner for me, too. I can clearly remember a crowd of us adolescents being around at the house of  one of our youth club leaders for some gathering or other and it all coming to a crashing halt because M*A*S*H was coming on and, even though at that time I had never even heard of it, I crowded around that portable television with everyone else to watch it. It was the episode where Hawkeye is Payroll Officer and the Army scrip currency is being changed from red to blue and hilarious doomed-to-failure money-making plans are hatched by Charles Emerson Winchester III, as played by David Ogden Stiers.

To be honest, I found myself wondering what the fuss was all about, but everyone else in the room seemed to enjoy it because, I suppose, they were already familiar with the characters. Anyway, at home the next week, possibly for the less than honorable reason that I maybe thought that having something else in common with whoever it was I was yearning after that week might help me to impress her, I tuned in again and pretty soon I was hooked, so much so that I do vividly recall refusing to go anywhere on the night that the finale “So Long, Farewell and Amen” was broadcast, instead preferring to stay in my bedroom with my eyes glued to the screen of my little black and white portable TV and mark the passing of a legendary show.

Consequently, for me, it isn’t the Henry Blake and Trapper John years that are “proper” M*A*S*H to me, but those featuring B.J. and Potter. I even have a fondness for Charles over Frank Burns for precisely the same reason. They were in the episodes I first saw, and they were the characters I first got to know and love, and the beating heart of the programme, the character whose wisdom, dignity and humanity I would constantly look towards and admire was that of the no-nonsense Colonel Sherman T Potter, whose professional yet fatherly relationship with both his company clerks, Walter “Radar” O’Reilly and Corporal Klinger, was pretty much the kind of relationship you can only dream of having in your own professional life if you ever got drafted.

Before he played Potter, Harry Morgan guest starred in an early episode called “The General Flipped at Dawn” as a General who has basically gone out of his mind and is last seen skipping off singing “Mississippi Mud” in one of the more memorable moments of the early years for me. In fact it’s rather surreal seeing the actor who became Potter interacting with Trapper and Henry. It feels distinctly odd, and yet Harry Morgan is superb in it, and it is to our eternal relief that nobody vetoed the casting of him as the Colonel on the grounds that he had already appeared on the show. The tragedy of never having had that character to enjoy, (whilst we would never have actually known about it to miss it), would have been awful.

Three key M*A*S*H moments stuck with me as we marked the passing of Harry Morgan at the ripe old age of 96 this week after a lengthy career in which he appeared with just about everyone and of which M*A*S*H was only a small but significant part. Nobody, but nobody could make my stiff upper lip wobble and make me suddenly find I had “something in my eye” like a moment of sentimentality from Col Potter in M*A*S*H, and his farewell to Radar, his toast to his fallen comrades and his new friends in the bottle of French Cognac tontine episode (“Old Soldiers” - year eight), and his final salute received from Hawkeye and B.J, in that epic final episode are almost guaranteed to make me well up in a manner only otherwise managed by Jenny Agutter’s “That’s my Daddy!” in “The Railway Children” or the people of Bedford Falls coming to save George Bailey.

Of course, unlike the man, the character and the show itself hadn’t really passed at all despite that memorable evening in my room. In television, at least in modern times, things seldom do. Almost immediately the reruns began and I was able to fill in the gaps of my own M*A*S*H experience and spend some quality time with the inhabitants of the 4077th and get to know them properly.

Nowadays, of course, I have the various boxes of shiny discs so that every episode is available to watch any time that I might choose to. I watched them all as they were delivered as, with aching slowness, each of the seasons was released, and I had a marathon viewing of them all a couple of summers ago which, with a significance I only realise now, I started with series 4 and the arrival of Sherman T Potter.

A legend.

Harry Morgan (Born Harry Bratsberg) April 10 1915 – Dec 7 2011.