Dad’s Army features the comic ineptitude of a Home Guard platoon in Walmington-on-Sea, an imaginary seaside resort on the south coast of England. The Land Defense Volunteers were formed in 1940 as a reserve volunteer force made up of men who did not meet the standards of age and fitness required for regular military service. These units were soon officially renamed. the Home Guard, but they also attracted the somewhat derisory nickname of “Dad’s Army.”

Perry and Croft’s scripts, based on vivid memories from the period, won them professional recognition with a screenwriting BAFTA Award in 1971, and their subsequent work has secured them a central place within popular British television comedy. They went on to produce It Ain’t ‘Alf ‘Ot Mom! (1976-81), set in a British Army entertainment corps posted in Burma during World War II, and Hi-de-Hi (1980-94), set in Maplins Holiday Camp in 1959. In their own way, these programs have tapped into, and contributed to, television’s myths about wartime Britain and the immediate postwar period of the 1950s. All three series feature ensemble casts of misfit characters brought together under a quasi-authoritarian order (a volunteer army, concert corps, or holiday camp staff) and whose weekly crises demand that the group pulls together against adversity.

The longevity and endearing appeal of Dad’s Army in particular is explained in part by the way in which the series successfully constructs myths of British social unity and community spirit that were so sought after in the years following the revolutionary moment of the late 1960s. The revival of the series in the late 1980s pointed up the starker, more divided nature of contemporary British life, riven by class, radical, national identity tensions. Dad’s Army depicts with humor — but obvious underlying affection — the “bulldog” spirit of Britain popularly taken to characterize public morale during the Blitz and its immediate aftermath (1940-41). Britain alone against the threat of Hitler’s Nazi army occupying Europe is the subject of the program’s signature tune lyrics, “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Hitler, if you think old England’s done,” written by Perry and sung by wartime entertainer Bud Flanagan in the clever recreation of a 1940s sound. The opening credit sequence depicts a map of Europe with advancing Nazi swastikas attempting to cross the English Channel. In its production style, Dad’s Army exemplified the BBC’s reputation for period detail, and many episodes featured exterior sequence shot on rural locations in southeast England. This film footage was mixed with videotape-recorded interior scenes, and a live studio audience provided laughter for the final broadcast version.

The humor of Dad’s Army derives from a combination of ridiculous task or crisis situations, visual jokes, and a gentle mockery of English class differentiation. Perry and Croft’s skill was to script dialogue for a talented ensemble of character actors constituting the Walmington-on-Sea platoon, led by the pompous Captain Mainwearing (Arthur Lowe), the manager of the local bank. The other main character include his chief clerk, Sergeant Wilson (John Le Mesurier); Frank Pike (Ian Lavender), the junior bank clerk; and Lance Corporal Jones (Clive Dunn), the local butcher. The platoon’s rank and file are made up of privates Frazer, the Scots undertaker (John Laurie); Godfrey (Arnold Ridley), a retired gentleman who lives with his two maiden sisters in a cottage; and Walker (James Beck), a “spiv” who deals in contraband goods. Mainwearing’s main rival authority in Walmington is the chief air-raid warden, Mr. Hodges (Bill Pertwee), a local greengrocer. They frequently battle over use of the church hall and office of the long-suffering camp vicar (Frank Williams) and his toadying verger (Edward Sinclair).

Perry and Croft’s world in Dad’s Army is largely male, but women do feature, albeit in their absence or marginality. Underlying the appearance of the middle-class properties of marriage are dysfunctional relationships. Mainwearing’s agoraphobic wife (Elizabeth) never appeared in the series (except once as a lump in the top bunk of their Anson air-raid shelter). They obviously share a loveless marriage with her firmly in control over domestic arrangements. Similarly, Mrs. Pike (Janey Davies) is a young widow who entertains the debonair Sergeant Wilson, and although Frank refers to him as “Uncle Arthur,” there is some suspicion that the lad is their illegitimate son. the arduous, larger-than-life Mrs. Fox (Pamela Cundell) gives her matronly attentions freely to the platoon’s men, and she eventually marries the elderly but eligible Corporal Jones.

Dad’s Army is particularly significant in its comic treatment of English class tensions. Through narrative and character, Croft and Perry revisit a time when the war was being fought partly in the belief that the old social class divisions would give way to a more egalitarian postwar meritocracy. The chief manifestations of such tensions occur in exchanges between Captain Mainwearing and Sergeant Wilson. In a clever reversal of expectations, Croft made the captain a grammar school-educated, bespectacled, and stout man whose social status has been achieved through hard work and merit. His superiority of rank, work status, and self-important manner are nevertheless constantly frustrated by Wilson’s upper-class pedigree, public school education, and nonchalant charm. Mainwearing’s middle-class snobbery, brilliantly captured by Arthur Lowe, is also reflected in his attitudes toward the lower classes. A member of the managerial class, he looks down at uncouth tradesmen: “He’s a greengrocer with dirty finger nails,” he says of his archival Hodges. Although Dad’s Army is comic because it mocks such pretension, it is essentially a nostalgic look back to a social order that never existed in this form. The program celebrates values such as “amateurism,” “making do,” and muddling through, values that in this presentation remain comic but appear quaint to later generations of television viewers.