We can't call Dad's Army classic comedy because it remains so fresh and alive - even though almost all of the wonderful cast are now dead!
Script writer Jimmy Perry spent some time as a young boy in Britain's Home Guard during the Second World War and observed first-hand this amazing group of ageing bank managers, butchers, actors and undertakers who all trained together and stood ready to fight to the death on the day Hitler invaded England. In those days they didn't think England might be invaded - the only question was when.
The people who made up the Home Guard were quiet, but very real, heroes. And it's amazing that Jimmy Perry and his co-screenwriter David Croft were able to keep that important truth alive while at the same time having so much fun with the pomposities, clumsiness and generally ageing doltishness of the now-immortal Home Guard troop who protected the little seaside suburb of Walmington-on-Sea.
Jimmy Perry claims that he modelled Private Pike, played in sweetly gormless fashion by Ian Lavender, on himself. Private Pike is the constant butt of the series' most famous catchcry "You stupid boy!", uttered in a score of different pitches, from rage to suffering toleration, by the so-often choleric Captain Mainwaring.
What a cast this was. Arthur Lowe plays the Captain with total repertory theatre authority - he is pompous and vain, but always intensely loveable and deserving of the praise which does sometimes come his way. John le Mesurier, a fine actor, is particularly splendid as Sergeant Wilson - ineffectual and as vain as Mainwaring, and always with his faint infuriating upper-class affectations.
And there's John Laurie as Private Frazer, the mad Scotsman always willing to see a peril in the deep or a spirit in the air, always with cold fingers clutching at his shoulder and palpable fear wrapping damp tendrils around his shivering body... what a great actor! He played the strange Scottish crofter in Hitchcock's pre-war masterpiece The 39 Steps, acted on stage alongside Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, and it was Dad's Army which finally gave him the wide audience he always deserved.
Here are five classic episodes from the series. Perhaps the two most famous are Menace from the Deep, when Captain Mainwaring and his troops have to keep watch at the end of a ruined entertainment pier on a bleak and stormy night, and The Honourable Man, when Mainwaring finds, to his horror, that his Sergeant, Wilson, has become The Honourable Mr Wilson, a member of the aristocracy no less, and has been invited to join the exclusive Walmington-on-Sea Golf Club to boot!
There is so much affection and comic invention in these episodes that all we can hope for is that The Best of Dad's Army Volume Two is just the second in a long line of 'Best of's. The secret is, of course, that there is no real 'Best of' Dad's Army; the whole thing was delicious delight from the very first episode to the last. The only limit on this series will be the extent of the BBC's archives - the BBC in those days thought nothing of the future and failed to keep these comic treasures safe for posterity. It was the public's affection which kept Dad's Army alive, not the forethought and planning of its producers.
The five episodes vary in image quite a bit - the famous map of Europe and Britain which starts each episode, with the diagrammatic Nazi arrows thrusting towards little England, are verdant green at the start of one episode, and virtually black in the next, with only a halo of green to suggest its proper colour.
But the worst video artefact is pretty minor - the colour variation is just a degree of over-saturation which is easily corrected. There's nothing here to detract from the sheer pleasure of viewing, and these episodes are probably better presented here than at any other time in their history.
