Pte. Joe Walker

Joe Walker is the platoon's resident spiv, a young private who can get you anything for a price — nylons, whisky, petrol, whatever the war has made scarce. He is sharp-suited, quick-witted, and treats the Home Guard largely as cover for his black-market dealings. Charming and a little shifty, he is always working an angle.

Walker is the show's cheerful crack in wartime propriety, a wide boy dropped among clerks and shopkeepers playing soldier, and James Beck plays him with a breezy, unbothered confidence that never tips into nastiness. He is likeable precisely because he doesn't pretend to be virtuous, which makes his loyalty to the platoon, when it shows, land as something earned rather than assumed.