A Comedy On This Day: Dad's Army - Ring Dem Bells (5 September 1975)

 The first episode of the eighth series. If you've got a programme as well-established as Dad's Army was by 1975, with much loved regular characters, you only need to have one very good idea per episode. A premise that's original, can be easily described and creates an image in the mind will is probably be enough to carry your audience. "The platoon dress up as Germans" is just one such idea.

 Having dressed them up, the eventual plot that stems from this idea ends up as a bit of a runaround. Far funnier are the little character bits that arise from the change of costume - Pike dressed as a German officer playacting behind Mainwaring's desk when he's alone in the office, or Wilson's approval of the "awfully smart" Nazi uniform.

 The reason why they are dressed up as the enemy is because they're extras in a film. The 'Crown Films' people that the platoon deals with are the part of this story that most extends the Dad's Army world. Instead of glamorous characters, they turn out to be a pair of unpreposessing cockneys played by John Bardon and Hilda Fenemore, who often appeared as variations of these roles, and it's diverting to see a bit of London visit Walmington-on-Sea. Neither has very much distinctive to do, but costume woman Queenie's combined solicitousness (calling the soldiers 'dear' as she measures them up) and practicality rings true to me.

A Comedy On This Day: Dad's Army - The Battle Of Godfrey's Cottage (8 March 1969)

 One of the two lost episodes recovered in 2001, watching this reminded me of Nancy Banks-Smith's peerless review of the repeat.

 I do find Dad's Army episodes a bit busy at times. I would have been happier seeing more than a minute of Godfrey's tea with his two spinster sisters, before it becomes disrupted and overturned by the usual capers (although watching the two old ladies accommodate themselves to the situation has an English absurdist quality). The actress who played the elder sister Dolly (Amy Dalby) died two days after the broadcast. She was born in 1888, a link far back in time that probably informs her performance as Dolly Godfrey, an out-of-her-time Edwardian figure who barely registers that she's now living in 1940.