Don't tell them how good this show is.

4:47pm Tuesday 3rd June 2008

Comments (0)   Have your say »

Dad's Army, The Lost Episodes is at Malvern Theatres this week and is a chance to see some episodes screened in the late sixties and subsequently lost by the BBC, along with one much-loved classic episode, the often repeated and much quoted 'one with the U-boat captain'.

I wasn't sure a new cast would be able to capture the magic of the original television series but the production is as much a tribute to actors like Arthur Lowe and John Le Measurier with the cast taking on acting not just the roles of the fictional Home Guard characters but paying tribute to the actors who first made them so popular.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery the audience must assume that the cast are all Dad's Army fans. Timothy Knightley plays pompous, but basically decent, Captain Mainwaring just as Arthur Lowe did and Richard Tate's Corporal Jones, Kern Falconer's Private Frazer and Leslie Grantham's whiskey and nylons toting Private Walker were as much impersonations as acting roles. The production works because it gives us Dad's Army just as we all love and remember it.

Unlike so many sixties and seventies comedy's Dad's Army with its wartime setting hasn't dated and the show, which ran for longer than the war that inspired it, has become something of a TV legend. This stage version didn't disappoint so if you want to hear classic lines such as "Don't tell him Pike" and and laugh out loud as Private Frazer utters "we're doomed, we're doomed" go and watch the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard back on parade in a show that marks the 40th anniversary of this evergreen comedy.