Abigoliah: Hello there. This is All British Comedy Explained, the podcast where I finally learn about all the British comedy shows I have been missing out on. I’m Abigoliah Schamaun, a stand-up comedian from America, but who lives in London. And to guide us through our comedy labyrinth is Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello there.
Abigoliah: Hello. I didn’t say you were a writer this time.
Tom: It’s fine either way, but it was—
Abigoliah: Literally when I was—
Tom: —like writer, podcast producer—
Abigoliah: All of the things.
Tom: And here we are, episode eight of series two.
Abigoliah: We’ve done it.
Tom: We’ve done it again.
Abigoliah: This is going to be our last episode ever—no, of this series.
Tom: Last episode looking at sitcoms. Still weighing up what we might do for season three. Yeah, I think I know which way I want to go. What we might decide to do is make this a decision that we can be helped with by our supporters on Patreon. So maybe this is a good time to mention that we have a Patreon. So for £3 a month, you can get an ad-free version of the feed where you get all of the Tom and Abigoliah goodness and none of the ads. And for £5 a month, you get special bonus mini episodes as well. So at the end of each recording, we have a little conversation related to the show we watched. And our topic for this week is going to be—and you’ll understand again more why this is the case once we’ve seen the show—but we’re going to talk about what is better: an ensemble cast or a show built around one star performer.
Abigoliah: I cannot wait to have that conversation.
Tom: And we may come to our Patreon supporters to help us make decisions—either what broad area we look at, or possibly what we might do is I’ll pick seven shows and I’ll give Patreon a choice of three or four to fill the eighth slot.
Abigoliah: Yeah—audience pick. I think that’s what we should do. We should do an audience pick. Let’s discuss this right now on the podcast.
Tom: Okay. Yes.
Abigoliah: Guys, join our Patreon for £5 a month and you can do the audience pick.
Tom: But no audience pick needed, because we are going to watch Dad’s Army.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Which keeps being mentioned in the same breath as things like Fawlty Towers as the best sitcom that’s ever been on British television. It was first transmitted in 1968.
Abigoliah: Okay. Is it going to be in black and white?
Tom: The first episode will be in black and white.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Most of the episodes are in colour, and the ones that get repeated are in colour, but the first episode we’ll watch will be in black and white.
Abigoliah: Okay. So what happened in 1968? Give me the context.
Tom: In America, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood premiered.
Abigoliah: The greatest show of all time.
Tom: Did you grow up on that?
Abigoliah: Yes, of course I did.
Tom: Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the computer mouse for the first time.
Abigoliah: Ooh.
Tom: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph was first performed—Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—which, as a musical theatre kid, I assume you’ve—
Abigoliah: Yes—played in. I loved Joseph when I was a kid, and now I—okay, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s brilliant, but he’s so sugary, you know what I mean? Like, now that my taste in musicals has developed more, I’m not as big of a fan of his work. But Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood came out that same year, which is great.
Tom: What do you know about Dad’s Army?
Abigoliah: I know it is about a father with an army of children, much like—so basically it’s a comedy riff on the Von Trapp family. It’ll be in Austria.
Tom: None of this is accurate.
Abigoliah: Leonard Rossiter will play a Nazi.
Tom: I would like to see that.
Abigoliah: Morecambe and Wise do a cameo as two nuns. No—I really—it does take place in the military, right?
Tom: Not exactly.
Abigoliah: Okay. I know nothing about Dad’s Army.
Tom: Yeah. You’re right—army is referring to the military, yes. So this was conceived by a man called Jimmy Perry.
Tom: He was an out-of-work actor, and he thought one way to get into work would be to write a show that he could act in.
Abigoliah: That’s what they always told us in acting school. They were like, write your own stuff. Did they teach us how to write? No. They only taught us how to act. And then they told us to write stuff and we were like, we haven’t learned how to do that. And they’re like, that’s your problem. Go off, children, and be waiters and baristas.
Tom: So a couple of things inspired him. One was Will Hay comedy movies. Now, Will Hay is a slightly forgotten figure now, but he was a star of lots of British comedy movies in the 40s.
Tom: And he would usually play a kind of harassed authority figure who had an older man and a younger man as his kind of assistants.
Abigoliah: How very Greek.
Tom: Yeah. Yes, exactly. And he was also thinking about something called the Home Guard.
Abigoliah: The Home Guard?
Tom: Yeah. So this was a volunteer service established in Britain in 1940 for men who were either too old or too young or too infirm to be enlisted in the armed forces, but who would make a little kind of home guard, a little local platoon. And the idea was, if there was going to be an invasion, you would have some people already there who could at least slow the enemy down until the actual army could come and take charge.
Abigoliah: So in America it would be like the National Guard, except you do have to be a certain age and a certain level of fitness to be—
Tom: But the point is, these are the people who couldn’t get into the regular army.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But it was all very patriotic—they wanted to do their part.
Abigoliah: And this was in the 40s?
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Yeah, because you know what—that now—there’s no army overflow in 2026.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: Sorry, I just want to say this real quick. I was talking to a Navy man the other week, and he was saying that basically, because recruitment has become such a problem—and I was saying I read in The New Yorker how the American army now has like a boot camp to get into boot camp—so if you’re too out of shape, you go to this boot camp, and then if you can get through that boot camp, you’re allowed to go to army boot camp and enlist. And he goes, no, we are not doing that—we’ve just lowered our standards more and more. So yeah. So is the Home Guard still a thing?
Tom: No, no.
Abigoliah: No. I was right.
Tom: It was a wartime thing. So Jimmy Perry began writing a script about this sort of ramshackle group. He drew on his own memories as a teenager during the war. And the part he created for himself would be the one young, fit adult in the platoon—a spiv who has managed to finagle his way out of the regular army. Does that word “spiv” mean anything to you? This is a bit of 1940s slang.
Abigoliah: No, but it sounds like a word we’re not allowed to say anymore.
Tom: No, it’s not a racial slur. This would be the guy who, during rationing, when it’s hard to get hold of things like nylon stockings or butter or meat, can somehow manage to get it for you. That was the spiv.
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah.
Tom: A bit of a wide boy. And Jimmy Perry thought, I can play that part. And that’s why everyone else in this series is going to be an old man. There’ll be this one young, fit man that I can play him.
Abigoliah: Can I guess what happens? He sells the sitcom to the BBC and they immediately recast him.
Tom: I mean, you’re not far—you’re not far off. There’s one detail that you haven’t factored in. Okay, so Perry does manage to get a job. He’s cast in a sitcom produced by a TV veteran called David Croft. And because he is a little bit of a spiv, during rehearsals he slips in the script—
Abigoliah: Cheeky boy.
Tom: —and Croft passes it to the Head of Comedy, Michael Mills. And Michael Mills says, this is good, but it’s not ready yet. But David Croft, if you’re interested in this as a project, why don’t you and Jimmy Perry work together? So you have this young actor on the make and this television comedy veteran who are now going to join forces.
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah.
Tom: The show at this point was called The Fighting Tigers. It was Michael Mills who renamed it Dad’s Army.
Abigoliah: Sounds like a sitcom about a high school American football team—the Fighting Tigers.
Tom: Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? But the key idea at the heart of this could not be more English. So the key comedy engine for this is that it is middle-class bank manager George Mainwaring who is made captain of the local Home Guard, and his upper-middle-class chief clerk, Arthur Wilson, who is his sergeant. So the ranks and the classes are the wrong way round.
Abigoliah: Yeah. This also sounds like guys who might be spivs themselves—like they join the Home Guard, I mean obviously Instagram wasn’t a thing back then, but to say they’re doing something even though they’re not doing anything—does that make sense?
Tom: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, a lot of this is about what we now, I suppose, call self-actualisation.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: It’s people wanting to be more than their station in life. And that was a big driver for this as well. The interplay between Mainwaring and Wilson is the kind of comedy engine at the heart of the show.
Abigoliah: I feel like someone of the upper classes who joins the Home Guard is doing it because they’re bored and not because they have a sense of civic duty. But it is the 40s.
Tom: You forget how much the sense of civic duty was what everybody felt. It was the unifying force.
Abigoliah: Sorry, I am seeing this through a 2026 lens. Whereas if anyone joins a specific part of—not the armed forces—but say policing in America, you’re just seen as problematic and only doing it for the bonus, the signing bonus, which you will all never get—ice. Okay, I definitely have to take that out because this is coming out in like four months, but go on.
Tom: There’s a definite sense that, yeah, these men want glory, but underneath that there was this patriotism that was just running through every interaction in Britain, like the writing in a stick of rock. So anyway, two characters do not a cast make. So they also added a teenager, Frank Pike, based on Perry’s own experiences of the Home Guard. Throughout the show it’s implied—and this actually is a big feature of the first episode we’re going to watch—it’s implied that Wilson is sleeping with Pike’s mother and may, in fact, be his biological father. That’s sort of a running joke through the whole thing.
Abigoliah: Most Shakespearean.
Tom: Most of the rest of the cast were old men, but the supposed oldest character, Corporal Jones, was played by Clive Dunn, who was only 48 when he was cast. But he’d made playing doddery old men his speciality, and he would continue to do it for decades to come. Finally he was as old as some of the characters he’d been playing when he was in his 30s. And as you rightly guessed, the one person who was not in front of the camera was Jimmy Perry.
Abigoliah: Well, how did he write himself out of it?
Tom: Well, Michael Mills said, you have to decide if you’re going to be in the spotlight working as an actor or up in the production box working as a writer.
Abigoliah: This is before Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais came along—but Morecambe and Wise—no, Morecambe and Wise had writers.
Tom: Yeah. I’m leaping right ahead now, but a later sitcom by the same team, which we briefly discussed with David Tennant—if I haven’t decided to cut that out—called It Ain’t Half Hot Mum has in its cast an actor called George Layton, who was also a sitcom writer. And he didn’t write any episodes of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, but he was working simultaneously as an actor and a writer, and I don’t know why Jimmy Perry didn’t object to that or refused to cast him. Anyway, when we cover It Ain’t Half Hot Mum sometime in 2031, we will.
Abigoliah: We’ll get there eventually.
Tom: Now, the one thing that nobody wanted to do was kind of make too much fun of the Home Guard, because that would be easy to do. It was 20 years later—30 years later by the time the show finished—and it’d be easy to say, look, aren’t they ridiculous? But they wanted to make it clear that they were facing a genuine threat.
Tom: And David Croft wanted to use archive footage of refugees and Nazi soldiers for the opening titles.
Abigoliah: That is a bad idea.
Tom: It’s a super bad idea.
Abigoliah: That is a very bad idea.
Tom: Controller of BBC One, Paul Fox, vehemently objected.
Abigoliah: And that was the correct idea.
Tom: Yeah—pointing out, as you instantly can tell, the tone was completely wrong for what was going to be a family sitcom with broad appeal. Instead, a simple animation was used, and Jimmy Perry wrote the lyrics and Derek Taverner the music for a theme tune which many people think is an old wartime standard, because it sounds so exactly right, so exactly of the period.
Abigoliah: What’s the song?
Tom: It’s called “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr. Hitler?”
Abigoliah: That’s cute. Yeah. I don’t know that one.
Tom: And the vocals were recorded by a 72-year-old vaudevillian, Bud Flanagan. It was his last professional engagement before he died.
Abigoliah: Oh, good for you, Bud.
Tom: We’re getting the deaths in early.
Abigoliah: In the conversation.
Tom: And everyone’s very enthusiastic—Michael Mills is enthusiastic, Paul Fox is enthusiastic, Jimmy Perry’s enthusiastic, David Croft is enthusiastic—and the cast seem to gel and the audience has a good time. But somebody in the BBC remembered that they had paid some research team to put together focus groups for them, and they thought, well, we’ve got this focus group facility, I guess we should use it. And so they showed the tape of the pilot of Dad’s Army to a focus group, and the report was damning.
Abigoliah: I was gonna say, this is a bad idea.
Tom: David Croft, although he read the report, managed to put it at the bottom of his boss’s in-tray, with the result that nobody actually read it until the series had been commissioned.
Abigoliah: Did they film it in front of a live audience?
Tom: They did.
Abigoliah: Wasn’t that endorsement enough? Wouldn’t people laugh?
Tom: To be fair, you could probably think of pretty terrible shows—and you’ve done studio audience warm-ups—you know that the whole point is to whip the audience into a frenzy so they’ll laugh for pretty much anything. And being in a studio audience—you’ve got free tickets and you kind of feel benevolently towards the enterprise—and it’s much easier to laugh than to not laugh. And if you don’t laugh enough, those laughs can always be sweetened in post.
Abigoliah: Yeah, that is true.
Tom: So getting a laugh track that you can transmit is relatively easy. We have heard stories—like on Yes Minister, like on Absolutely Fabulous—where the reaction of the studio audience was big even for a studio audience, which has been an extra vote of confidence. But here, like I said, somebody just thought, well, we have this research team, we should probably use them.
Abigoliah: And the—
Tom: Research—I don’t think it was a terribly good idea.
Abigoliah: Comedy should not be made by committee.
Tom: Yeah. Now, talking of writing, it is usually the case with double-act writers like the writers on Hancock’s Half Hour that they write in the same room. Occasionally you have stories like Ben Elton and Richard Curtis on Blackadder, who would just send the same script back and forth and only do their writing separately. And that’s kind of how I do it with my writing partner.
Abigoliah: Yeah, and then sit at Rowan Atkinson’s knee as he goes, “Well, good first draft, then.”
Tom: But Jimmy Perry and David Croft had a very unusual way of writing, and I’ve never heard any other writing team talk about writing this way.
Abigoliah: Tell me.
Tom: They’d spend a couple of days together coming up with plots, and then they’d just divide the workload. Croft would write half the scripts and Perry would write the other half, and neither would rewrite the other.
Abigoliah: Have you ever played that game? Yes, I think we played it at your house, where you start a story and then you fold a piece of paper—
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: —so by the end you have this ridiculous story.
Tom: They’re writing whole half-hours on their own.
Abigoliah: Oh, I thought you meant that one was writing the first half of one episode and one is writing—
Tom: They have six episodes to write one, one writes three, the other writes three, and then the job is done. And the cast say they could sometimes think they knew that this is a Jimmy Perry script, this is a David Croft script, but the writers themselves never divulged who wrote which episodes.
Abigoliah: I mean, they must have had a really deep understanding of joke type and tone in order to pull that off.
Tom: It’s just bizarre. I can’t imagine anyone choosing to work like that, but it worked for them.
Abigoliah: I mean, when Joe and I wrote our book Neurodivergent Moments, available now—please pre-order or buy whenever this comes out, it’ll be out June 18th—but when we wrote Neurodivergent Moments, we came up with our themes and, say, school, and Joe writes an essay about school, and then I write an essay about bylines.
Tom: Yeah, exactly. It’s your voice or it’s Joe’s voice.
Abigoliah: That’s what I was going to say. And then we came together and we gave each other notes and would try to help gag each other’s stuff up, but they were supposed to be totally different. Like, that was kind of the point of the book, is this person’s perspective and this person’s perspective. And having written and worked with Jo enough, I can’t imagine writing whole scripts separately and coming together.
Tom: Like with Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, we talked about the fact that it was Jonathan Lynn who was more left-leaning, and he would be standing up for Jim Hacker, and Antony Jay who was more right-leaning, more conservative, and he would be standing up for Sir Humphrey. And so you kind of want that dialectic. You want that argument to be happening around the typewriter to make sure that both points of view are respected. Otherwise, you get an episode which is all about Humphrey, and Humphrey’s right about everything, and an episode about Hacker, and Hacker’s right about everything. And that’s not the balance. But anyway, it worked, because this was the beginning, as we’ll come to talk about, of a Perry/Croft—especially David Croft—comedy empire.
Abigoliah: I do love the fact that they never divulged that. I listen to another podcast—you guys should check it out—called Nerd of Mouth, and one of the guys who’s on it, Mike Lawrence, I started doing comedy with these guys, now writes for—like, he helped Nikki Glaser, he writes the big—not speeches—but when she hosts the Emmys, right?
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: And there’s a rule in those writing rooms that once it goes out, you never say which joke is yours and which joke isn’t. Like, it’s all Nikki’s now. You’re never like, I wrote that one.
Tom: This is like that again. I don’t know if this phrase means anything to you: as in Yes, Minister, they talked about cabinet having collective responsibility, which was an idea that I think went out with Thatcher, certainly was gone by the time of Blair, where the idea was any decision made in cabinet was made by cabinet, and nobody was able to say, I voted for it or I voted against it. It was collective responsibility.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: I put a line in our play about the Labour Party that was on last year, The Gang of Three: “Collective responsibility means no one will say who voted for what, like children not wanting to let on that they’ve discovered Santa Claus isn’t real.” Anyway, back to Dad’s Army. The first series got some warm reviews, some decent viewing figures, certainly enough for the BBC to order another six episodes, and then it just took off.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Which is what’s going to happen with our podcast in the second series, which you’re listening to now but isn’t out at the time of recording.
Tom: A third series, now in colour, went out the same year as the second series and consisted of 14 episodes.
Abigoliah: Wait, sorry. They released the second and third—
Tom: —in the same calendar year. One early and one late. The 1971 Christmas special raked in 18 million viewers, and the same year the show won the BAFTA for Best Light Entertainment Programme.
Abigoliah: I really feel like the BBC doesn’t give a fuck when things come out.
Tom: They’ll come out when they’re ready.
Abigoliah: Yeah, sometimes they’re like, everyone’s busy, we’re waiting two years for season three, and other times they’re like, we’re gonna do two in a year, you lucky dog.
Tom: Again, it’s not like this is sort of where we are now with streamers, but in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s with American network television, it was always: the new season starts in September, and it goes on till June. And then there’s the summer repeats and then it starts again. And you do 22 episodes over 39 weeks or whatever it is. And that’s what you do. That’s the order. And it hasn’t been like that for a while, but it’s never been like that here.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: They just start whenever they start.
Abigoliah: That’s a good point. I think that’s why I’m always so baffled by the rules here.
Tom: We’re going to watch series two, episode four, Sergeant Wilson’s Little Secret, and series six, episode one, The Deadly Attachment. His secret is not, in 1940, in a show transmitted in 1969, that he was gay. No.
Abigoliah: Okay. And then what’s the second one called?
Tom: It’s called The Deadly Attachment.
Abigoliah: Is it about his gay lover?
Tom: No, not that kind of attachment. Okay. What are you expecting?
Abigoliah: Oh gosh, I don’t know.
Tom: You’ve seen quite a lot of these BBC studio sitcoms now. You’re kind of getting a feel for them. Remember, we watched Fawlty Towers right at the beginning of the series, you said, oh, it’s like watching a play. And that’s one of the things I think runs through all of these. And you can see with shows like Absolutely Fabulous and, to a certain extent, The Vicar of Dibley, and certainly Reginald Perrin, they’re trying to do more with the possibility of a television studio and editing and camera angles and so on. But a lot of these, like Yes, Minister, like Fawlty Towers, it is just the proscenium. It is just like, here are the actors, here’s the audience. And it is the dialogue and the actions and the microexpressions that make it work.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I guess now that you remind me of all that—because I’m really focused on the fact that the Home Guard—and I’m like, I know nothing about the Home Guard. There will be three sets, no more than three sets, and then of course some 16mm exteriors, I think. So in Germany, they have—like, it’s not military service, they’re called CVS or civic—I can’t remember the actual word, but for short they’re called CVS, which is like instead of doing military service, you do civic service, right? So is there anything—it takes place in the 40s—
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: So are they, you know, canned-food drive, passing out blankets, something like that goes awry? Are they doing community service work?
Tom: Less than you might imagine. A lot of the episodes—I think both the ones we’re going to watch—begin with a sort of preparation for something that clearly isn’t going to take place.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But for some sort of like, what would we do if the Germans were invading? So we need to do target practice, we need to learn about camouflage, we need to—all this stuff. So it’s a little bit fantasy, a little bit like, these are old men, and the amount of practical use they would actually be in a combat situation is open to question.
Abigoliah: Okay. All right. So scrap that, except for three sets total. Maximum. Maximum. The only thing I will guess is that the middle-class man who’s ranked higher than the upper-class man is having a grand old time, and the upper-class man who’s lower ranked is always trying to prove that he should be higher ranked. And then the middle-class man keeps shutting him down.
Tom: If anything, it’s the opposite, really. The class structure is so strong, it’s the constant feeling of inferiority from the senior man. That’s the issue.
Abigoliah: Nothing will escape the British class system, not even in a fictional war scenario.
Tom: It’s a famous line. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything. I don’t think this is in either of the episodes we’re going to watch. But a famous line that kind of defines the relationship is Wilson, the sergeant, after Mainwaring’s been sounding off about posh English schools, saying, “Mind me saying so, a little bit of a chip on your shoulder about that,” and, “Chip on my shoulder? There is, though, three pips, and don’t you forget it.” And that’s the dynamic.
Abigoliah: Okay. So are they more of an Eddington and Hawthorne?
Tom: A little bit.
Abigoliah: Yeah. That sort of like, oh, you’re the prime minister, but I’m the one actually making the decision. Okay. But basically, because I know nothing about the Home Guard, let’s just watch it. Let’s just watch it. All right, let’s do it.
* * * * *
Tom: Permission to speak, sir?
Abigoliah: Permission granted.
Tom: What did you think of Dad’s Army, Abigoliah sir?
Abigoliah: It’s really uttered in the same breath as Fawlty Towers?
Tom: It absolutely is.
Abigoliah: I do not agree. Okay. I wrote down: what happened to Britain between Hancock’s Half Hour and Fawlty Towers? Like—I—okay, so the first episode we watched, which was series two—so it had the—you know what I mean? It wasn’t like the pilot—I felt like even the audience, the studio audience, wasn’t laughing that much at it.
Tom: You definitely see how much crisper the pacing is of the colour episodes. They kind of know where the punchlines are, the audience knows the characters better. So yeah, it’s definitely kind of a lot livelier. The first one we watched takes a little while to get going.
Abigoliah: It definitely picked up in series six, but if you compare it to something like The Good Life—that I said, I was like, oh, there just seems to be more space and time between the jokes. We watched one of the first series of that, and it felt like everything was rooted in—and the laughs were there.
Tom: Whereas, like Yes, Minister—that was the pilot that we watched.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And then the first season—or the second series—of Dad’s Army, I just felt like—I just felt like it was—the characters were developed, but I didn’t think it was very gag-heavy. And also, I didn’t see the class disparity or the argument of power between the sergeant and the captain. That’s why I kept being like, wait, so he’s the one in charge? Wait, he’s the posh one? I didn’t see—
Tom: The ending of that second episode, I think, makes that fairly clear—that it’s Mainwaring who’s full of pomposity and ordering people around. Actually, it’s Wilson who knows what’s going on and will calmly save the day at the end.
Abigoliah: Yeah. But I don’t know, I just—I mean, we just watched Yes, Minister, and if you compare the two—yeah. I did like the butcher in the first episode. I just liked him as a character.
Tom: It is quite—you asked me about catchphrases—it is quite a catchphrase-heavy show. And unlike Reginald Perrin, where the catchphrases are half the script, they do come along quite infrequently. So I was waiting for Frazer to say, “We’re doomed,” which is his catchphrase. Actually, he never said it, and we got some variations on it. But from Corporal Jones, the butcher, we’re used to him brandishing a bayonet, saying, “They don’t like it up ’em, sir!”—which we never quite heard either. We heard little variations.
Abigoliah: Yeah. He sort of said it at one point. But was—there’s a famous line from series six—I didn’t catch it.
Tom: The one thing you laughed at.
Abigoliah: The one thing I laughed at—what was that?
Tom: “Don’t tell him, Pike.”
Abigoliah: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah—that was fun.
Tom: And so “Don’t tell him, Pike” enters that weird pantheon of lines that make little sense out of context, like “Don’t mention the war,” which always come up. And Ian Lavender, who plays Pike—I saw a lovely interview with him—and he said the director said, so after that line we’ll cut back to you on top of the ladder. It’s like, cut to anything but me. I am never going to be able to keep a straight face. I haven’t kept a straight face in any of the rehearsals. If you cut to me, you’re going to have to go again. It’s like, well, who else can I cut to? He just said, “Don’t tell him, Pike,” I have to get your reaction. It’s a very short shot. It lasts about half a second.
Abigoliah: That’s all he can manage before he completely corpses. The second episode we watched was crisper. The laughs were better. Even the scenarios—like, okay, the first one is they’re practising camouflage, and there’s the whole plot of the one woman having a baby and him thinking he’s got to make an honest woman. Funny plot. And then the German prisoner of war—funny plot. I just struggle to care about Dad’s Army.
Tom: Wow.
Abigoliah: I was thinking about this with The Goon Show and Monty Python, which I didn’t care for. At least for those, I was like, I don’t think I get it, but I respect why they are so beloved. With this, I’m like—with everything we’ve seen so far—I’m like, I don’t understand why this is beloved over—and why this is so much more remembered than, say, Reginald Perrin or Tony Hancock—Hancock’s Half Hour. I don’t think anyone in our comment section has ever asked for—people always ask for Dad’s Army, and I don’t know why. If I were to compare the two side by side, and Hancock’s Half Hour came out much earlier, I thought it was much funnier. Do you like it, Dad’s Army?
Tom: So it was always like part of the furniture. We’ll come on to talk about this. And I just teed this up in the first half, that it’s the root of a family tree of sitcoms. And one of the things they all have in common is this ensemble cast. So up until Dad’s Army—this is a huge oversimplification—but up until Dad’s Army, sitcoms had generally been built around one comedy performer, like Tony Hancock, or a central relationship. So that early Richard Briers–Prunella Scales sitcom—which we haven’t watched, but I have mentioned it a couple of times—where it’s about this marriage. But the idea of this kind of gang show, with yes, there are obvious leads, but everybody gets a turn and it has a more ensemble feel—that was new, and that was what Jimmy Perry and David Croft invented again and again and again for 20 years after this.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So it was always being repeated, as were the other shows in that stable, and so it’s just sort of part of the furniture. But there is something nice and sort of sweet about it, about these old men who firmly believe that they are a vitally important part of the war effort and in fact are basically irrelevant. And so then you have the warden character pricking their pomposity and calling Mainwaring Napoleon—but it never lands. He continues in his belief. And again, he is the root of those authority characters who don’t actually have the chops that we later see in—especially David Brent. There’s a line that connects Captain Mainwaring to David Brent, absolutely, passing through Basil Fawlty and others, who fail in different ways. But it’s a real British archetype: the man put in a position of power over others who ought not to be wielding that power.
Abigoliah: Yeah, and talking about it as a gang show, it is fun to watch—like Cub Scouts for old men. That’s essentially what it is, because they are taking it really seriously. I mean, I thought it was cute. For me, the funniest moment in the first episode we watched was when they start to display their camouflage costumes.
Tom: “My bees are quite friendly, sir.”
Abigoliah: Yeah, and then the guy who’s dressed as a haystack, and the other one can’t be around him because he’s itchy—
Tom: He’s brought a note from his mum.
Abigoliah: Yeah, he’s brought a note from his mum. It’s cute. I mean, it’s cute. But I can’t believe that people put it up there with Fawlty Towers. I’m genuinely shocked that it’s on that high of a pedestal. Beloved, sure. Appreciated, sure. But like—it ain’t no fucking Fawlty Towers. I think it’s a far cry from it.
Tom: Let me say a little bit more about what happened to it. And while I doubt that’s going to sway your judgement—nine series. So let’s tell you that story. In 1971—
Abigoliah: I don’t get it.
Tom: —when the show was at its height, a film adaptation was commissioned by Columbia Pictures.
Abigoliah: Are you fucking serious?
Tom: Actually, this started a trend of British sitcoms making one-off movies, including a George and Mildred movie, a Please Sir! movie, a Man About the House movie, and Bless This House—and in fact three On the Buses movies. In 2005, The League of Gentlemen movie satirised this trend, pointing out the cliché that the movie was generally the same as the TV version, except all the characters go on holiday together.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Despite negative reviews, the Dad’s Army film was a box office hit, but no sequel was forthcoming. A stage show in 1975 was also a big success, both in the West End and on tour, with some of the parts either recast or shared—because this is a cast of ancient old men.
Abigoliah: Yeah. To be honest, as a stage show, I bet I would love it. I really do think I would.
Tom: Now, with a cast of old men, it was always a possibility that they’d lose somebody before the show came to a natural end. John Laurie was 71 when the pilot was recorded. Arnold Ridley was 72.
Abigoliah: Oh wow.
Tom: But no one could have expected James Beck to die from pancreatitis and heart failure in the middle of the sixth season, when he was only 44.
Abigoliah: Jesus. Was he the first to go?
Tom: He was.
Abigoliah: Oh yeah, no one saw that coming. If this is as beloved as it is, that had to be like a national tragedy.
Tom: The second episode we watched, The Deadly Attachment, was the first one broadcast after news reports of his death.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: So rather than kill off his character or formally write him out, there were just vague references every so often to Private Walker being away or not being available, and the part wasn’t recast or replaced. But supporting characters—
Abigoliah: Sorry, that’s what they did with—oh gosh, what’s his name—in And Just Like That. The gay friend.
Tom: Oh yes—Stanford.
Abigoliah: Stanford, who actually did die—
Tom: Died, yes.
Abigoliah: —and they never gave him his moment. He just ran off with someone.
Tom: So other supporting characters, like the vicar—who we didn’t see—or the warden or the verger were given a bit more to help keep the ensemble bubbling away.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But Perry and Croft showed no signs of stopping. The first series had been set in 1940, and that showed the establishment of the Home Guard, and subsequent series had all been set in 1942. So, like The Simpsons, it never actually moves forward in time. But by the late ’70s, some of the cast were in ill health. John Le Mesurier had been diagnosed with a liver complaint.
Abigoliah: I feel like “a liver complaint” is the English way of saying, like, you’ll be dead on Tuesday.
Tom: I think so, yes. John Laurie had emphysema. When Edward Sinclair, who played the verger, died at the age of 63, it was felt that the time was up. And so the ninth series was the last. The final episode, Never Too Old, was shown on Remembrance Sunday, 1977.
Abigoliah: That’s quite sweet.
Tom: Yeah. And of course, there’s an American adaptation.
Abigoliah: MASH?
Tom: Called The Rear Guard.
Abigoliah: I was gonna say, because MASH is fucking great.
Tom: It got as far as a pilot in 1976. You can find it on YouTube, and it’s based on the second episode that we watched, The Deadly Attachment. It’s the same plot.
Abigoliah: Now, this is the thing—I don’t know about America, but did we have, like, a Home Guard?
Tom: Not quite the same, but it has enough in common that they were able to reuse the same plot and basic idea. But yeah, you can have a look at it on YouTube. It’s not good.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And then, because this is so beloved, in 2016 a second big-screen movie was released, but with all the parts recast.
Abigoliah: Well, of course, because they’re all dead by then.
Tom: So Toby Jones was Mainwaring, Bill Nighy was Wilson, Daniel Mays was Walker, and so on. It did quite well at the box office despite negative reviews. Very oddly, the same year there was a TV movie called We’re Doomed!, which dramatises the creation of Dad’s Army—the behind-the-scenes story. So an entirely different cast also recreated these iconic characters. So this time around, John Sessions plays Arthur Lowe playing Captain Mainwaring, Julian Sands plays John Le Mesurier playing Wilson, Mark Heap is Clive Dunn, and so on and so on. I think that film is—regardless of what you think of Dad’s Army—the story of its creation is brilliantly told in that film, and you can find it on Amazon Prime.
Abigoliah: I was going to say, that actually does sound good to me. I don’t need to watch Dad’s Army again, but I’d watch this film about it.
Tom: It’s terrific. There are also radio versions made of most of the TV scripts, which was the thing that used to happen when not everybody had TVs and repeats weren’t that common because there were only two channels. And because some of the early episodes are lost, the radio recreations are, in some cases, the only versions of those episodes that we have.
Abigoliah: And is this an example of the reason why they don’t exist anymore—is because they would get taped over?
Tom: Exactly, yes. There was a spin-off radio show called It Sticks Out Half a Mile, which ran for—that’s what she said—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: It’s supposed to be about Mainwaring and Jones, but Arthur Lowe died after the pilot had been recorded. It’s supposed to be about them building a pier—and it sticks out half a mile.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So by the time it was broadcast, the only surviving members of the platoon were Clive Dunn, who died in 2012 at 92, and Ian Lavender, who died in 2024 at 77.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: So let’s just talk briefly about this family tree I mentioned. So while Dad’s Army was a smash hit—while it was still on the air—Perry and Croft created It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. So we’ve talked about this a couple of times, but just to be clear: it’s another World War Two story. It’s about a group of Royal Artillery recruits in Burma who put on concerts to entertain the troops. So once again, it’s sort of war-adjacent.
Abigoliah: And I said as we were going up to record this—because I knew nothing of the Home Guard—I was just kind of picturing the opening to White Christmas. And what you’re describing now is the opening to White Christmas—the song-and-dance men performing for the troops.
Tom: It Ain’t Half Hot Mum ran for eight years and 56 episodes.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: Before that ended, Perry and Croft created Hi-de-Hi! about goings-on in a seaside holiday camp in the early 1960s. While these shows were on the air, David Croft partnered with a different writer, Jeremy Lloyd, to create Are You Being Served?, which ran for ten years and was set in a department store. While that was still on the air, they launched an even sillier World War Two sitcom, ’Allo ’Allo!, about a Parisian café whose owner is unwittingly recruited into the French Resistance, that eventually racked up even more episodes than Dad’s Army. Those are just the big famous ones. David Croft created or co-created almost a dozen British sitcoms over about 30 years.
Abigoliah: I mean, they sound prolific, I’m sure.
Tom: Have you ever seen ’Allo ’Allo!?
Abigoliah: No, of course not.
Tom: The chief gag in that—which is very silly but I think is brilliant—is: it’s about a French café owner under German occupation, and they’re also trying to hide two British airmen. All the dialogue is in English, but you can tell who is speaking what language by what accent they’re using. So French people speak in a French accent, but when the resistance leader is talking to the British airmen, she says, “Hello, chaps, now pay attention,” so now we know she’s speaking English.
Abigoliah: Okay. So when the French people are speaking in a French accent—
Tom: They’re speaking French.
Abigoliah: To the English actors, and the people playing the English are pretending they don’t understand the French people.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: And the audience understood that?
Tom: The audience seemed to get it straight away.
Abigoliah: I actually kind of like that.
Tom: It’s fun, but it’s a very, very, very silly show. A lot of it was serialised. Did you ever watch Soap?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: It’s an American sitcom which was a spoof of soap operas, famous for its convoluted plotlines.
Abigoliah: When did this come out? I have no memory.
Tom: But I think it was repeated a lot.
Abigoliah: It’s not on Nick at Nite.
Tom: But there was always an incredibly complicated and hard-to-understand voiceover synopsis of what had happened on previous episodes, which would end, “And that’s what you missed on Soap.” And similarly, René—
Abigoliah: At some point—because I was so unimpressed with Dad’s Army—you’re just like, well, they made other stuff too.
Tom: René would always begin with him talking to the audience, explaining what had happened in previous episodes, because it was very serialised, and a lot of the action revolved around the attempt to hide, obtain or sell a famous painting always referred to as “The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies.”
Abigoliah: Oh, I like that. So I just want to go back real quick—because I asked, do you like it? And you said it’s “part of the furniture,” which is like when someone comes to your play and—oh, I think I’ve told this story—someone once came to a preview of my Edinburgh show and then told me it looked like I was having fun, which just means your show’s bad.
Tom: Yeah, my usual M.O. is just to say, “Well, that was a lot of fun.” Ever said that to you? It means I hated it.
Abigoliah: Okay, all right, good to know. I think you said that about my comedy special.
Tom: Oh—
Abigoliah: That’s right—yes—on YouTube, please check it out.
Tom: It is much more than “a lot of fun.”
Abigoliah: Yeah, but like—this—this one that you would go back and watch and enjoy now—or if you were flipping through channels and you just wanted to watch something—would you put on Dad’s Army?
Tom: So it doesn’t have a special place in my heart the way that Reginald Perrin definitely does. Partly because Reginald Perrin has been forgotten about, so I sort of feel the need to champion it. The way that Fawlty Towers made me laugh till I hurt when I was a teenager, so it sort of never occurred to me that anyone could dislike it. But your criticisms are valid. It is much less bang, bang, bang, rat-tat-tat. You’re waiting quite a long time sometimes for the laughs to come along, and it’s just sort of cosy familiarity with the setting and the characters. I think that’s pulling me through.
Abigoliah: I mean, sometimes you do go back and watch old sitcoms. I have been like, oh, I love this, and you go back and you’re just like, oh, it’s just nice, you know? But I mean, we could argue—I’m really trying to give up vaping and so I’m chewing on gum—and we could say that’s the mood. But again, there’s no one alive that we’re going to try to get a very special episode for this, right?
Tom: No, no, no.
Abigoliah: No. Oh, I hated it. Like, I’m not even gonna try to be diplomatic. Other stuff we’ve watched that I haven’t put on the Shelf of Fame, I’ve been like, I can respect what is happening here. And this, I’m just like, it just feels like another sitcom. Not bad, you know. I don’t want to—if you like Dad’s Army, I don’t want to be like, you’re stupid and don’t understand comedy, but like, oh, it did not interest me in any way. Some funny lines, the plots are fine. I’m sure—like, they sound like prolific writers. I’m sure there’s something they’ve made that I’ll really love.
Tom: Maybe ’Allo ’Allo! you’d like more. But after—
Abigoliah: We should have done ’Allo ’Allo! So much about Dad’s Army, not just from you but from other people. You know, I put it up with Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, shows that people are like, how have you never seen it? I was ready to have a good time, and I was like, when’s the time gonna start? As we were watching it, Tom’s cat kept meowing. So much so that Tom put the cat outside. And at one point I wanted to bring—like, bring the cat back. It was the only interesting thing happening.
Tom: I’ll have Toast on the sofa, and you can be outside.
Abigoliah: Yes, that sounds great.
Tom: One final thing to mention. Because these were ensembles rather than star-led, they started this tradition in Dad’s Army, which went through all of these shows that I’ve mentioned, that the titles would always have footage of them either in the studio or, with Dad’s Army, on film, and the credits will begin with, “You have been watching.” And my little hat-tip to that is that all the podcasts I produce begin their closing titles with, “You have been listening to.”
Abigoliah: Well, they did something right. And I do like that, especially now in the world of streaming where there are credits but no one lets you see them. And it’s just like, I like being like, oh, so that’s so-and-so and that’s so-and-so. I like pictures and credits. I think that’s very good.
Tom: All right. Bring on the Shelf of Fame.
Abigoliah: Well, let me do a prediction, because now that I’ve seen it, I think I might have a good prediction.
Tom: Oh, okay.
Abigoliah: Is there an episode where they do like a boot camp slash physical training episode where they’re trying to get fit and do all of the callisthenics, and they’re old and they can’t?
Tom: That is pretty much a bullseye. There’s an episode where Jones is threatened with being removed from the platoon because he’s not fit enough, and they have to stage this ridiculous thing where they kind of do like a cowboy switch. And so he has to duck out of sight, and one of the younger, fitter men, usually Walker, has to do the thing for him while the top brass watches through binoculars.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s fun. See, it’s the plots are fun. It’s got good bones. Well, onto the Shelf of Fame. I don’t think it’s gonna surprise you that it’s not going on the Shelf of Fame. It’s not even close. Out of this season, we have added things that weren’t on the Shelf of Fame from last season that are now. So Yes, Minister is now at number two. Absolutely Fabulous is at number five. Fawlty Towers is at number seven. The Vicar of Dibley is at number eight.
Tom: And that’s it. Those are the ones we added.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So we added—how many is that? One, two, three, four. We added four out of eight.
Tom: And The Good Life was on there briefly. It just didn’t stick around.
Abigoliah: It just didn’t stick around. So that’s not bad numbers. We are shifting stuff around, even if we’re comparing sitcoms to, as you said, the landmarks, the ones that have changed British television. But definitely Dad’s Army—like, Hancock’s Half Hour was a toss-up. Reginald Perrin was confusing. The Good Life made it on. Am I missing—no. So this would be the fourth. This is the only one that I really don’t give a shit about.
Tom: I’m so surprised with these last two. I would have thought, oh, maybe Yes, Minister won’t work for you, but surely you’ll love being wrapped up in the cosy embrace of Dad’s Army.
Abigoliah: Well, that makes sense that you’d think that, because there’s a streak there where I was like, I only want to watch nice things. And Dad’s Army is a nice thing, but maybe it’s too nice. Or maybe now that I’ve seen my bias, I’m trying to look edgy. I’m an edgy comedian.
Tom: If you want to watch Dad’s Army, weirdly, for a show that was repeated so often, it doesn’t appear to be on iPlayer at the moment. Some of the animated recreations of the missing episodes are on Now. You can buy episodes or whole seasons on Apple, or you can do what I did and buy the DVD box set. But it’s a little bit tricky to find at the moment.
Abigoliah: Having not looked, I would put money on it that there are full episodes on YouTube.
Tom: I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
Abigoliah: Because Reginald Perrin is all on YouTube.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: So not saying you should do that, but you can totally fucking do that. No one’s getting residuals. They’re all dead. Watch it however you want to watch it. You know what I mean? So this wraps up—
Tom: This wraps up season two. So we’ll be back next week with an episode surveying the whole of season two, and that is when we will reveal what we’re doing for season three, which is partly because I haven’t finally decided yet.
Abigoliah: So please check that out. Also remember, on our Patreon you get ad-free listening plus our mini episodes. And for this episode of Dad’s Army, we will be asking the question—
Tom: Which is better, star-led or ensemble cast?
Abigoliah: Yes. And so please check it out there. Also, please remember, go give us a five-star review on your podcatcher app. Follow us on social media. We’ll be back next week with our season two wrap-up. Guys, thanks so much for listening to All British Comedy Explained.
Tom: Thank you. Cheerio. Bye for now.
Abigoliah: Bye bye.