User Reviews

Rene has two German officers in the cafe, who don't have their uniforms, Michelle hatches a plan involving carrier pigeons.

This is Allo Allo at its very best, it is totally over the top, crazy, bonkers fun. It took a very serious subject, and made it fun, in typical British fashion.

Pure slapstick, true farce, it's not to be taken seriously, and it was never meant to be. Great use of costume drama, particularly Otto Flick dressed in lingerie, super funny.

Many great scenes, Madame Fanny and Monsieur L'Eclair reunited in particular.

Great. 8/10

How complex are the goings-on in "Pigeon Post," the third installment of the first series of the British situation comedy "'Allo 'Allo!"? Rene, the put-upon proprietor of the small bistro in Occupied France during World War Two, has now taken to delivering a fourth-wall recap at the top to keep viewers on track.

However, just as that is done smoothly and humorously, so too is the ongoing narrative with its many ramifications spread among the large ensemble cast that meshes with (cuckoo) clockwork precision, marshaled by producer-director David Croft, who with series co-creator Jeremy Lloyd scripts another engrossing--and hilarious--installment of Rene's ongoing saga of having to mollify both the conquering Germans patronizing his café and the underground French Resistance using his café as a way station for spiriting downed Allied airmen back to Britain, a nod to a series inspiration, the wartime drama "Secret Army."

A nod, albeit a wry one, to another inspiration, the American situation comedy "Hogan's Heroes," are the overripe accents the characters use to indicate which language they are supposed to be speaking, although with the preponderance of French and German characters, the assumption is that they are all bilingual--they all understand each other perfectly.

Thus, the only language barrier encountered is by the two British fliers, Flight Lieutenants Fairfax and Carstairs, who have escaped Rene's café in the German uniforms Rene coaxed off the backs of Colonel Von Strohm and Captain Geering but, in an amusing but pointed complication, the two airmen are recaptured--not by the Germans, but by the Communist-allied segment of the Resistance as opposed to the Free French/Gaullist-allied Resistance represented by Michelle "of the Resistance" Dubois, who has a penchant for appearing without warning at Café Rene.

The humorous aspect involves the Brits: After Michelle's group has opened fire on the Communist group holding the Brits captive, they are abandoned by their captors and, thinking that the Germans are attacking them, burn their German uniforms so they don't get shot as spies; in the distance, Michelle's group sees them scarpering off in their underwear.

The pointed aspect involves why Michelle's Gaullist resistance group would be firing on the Communist resistance group, who are presumably their French compatriots against the occupying Germans, n'est-ce pas? Non. In the most overtly polemical moment of the fledgling series thus far, Michelle makes her animosity toward the Communist side of the Maquis clarion: In a brief diatribe at Rene's café, she declares that, after the war, the Gaullists and the Communists will battle for control of France; she then describes the Commies as "ruthless killers" who will have to be eliminated.

(In actual postwar Western Europe, Communists in several countries, who often mounted the fiercest resistance to Nazi occupiers, were brutally suppressed by both internal forces and external ones such as the American Central Intelligence Agency as the Cold War resumed with a vengeance. In France, fighting in Marseilles was among the most violent as the CIA abetted the Union Corse, the Corsican Mafia, to defeat the Communists, with one consequence being the resurrection of the famous heroin pipeline the "French Connection.")

But what of the pigeons in "Pigeon Post"? For now, they're MacGuffins--but just wait until the next exciting installment of "'Allo 'Allo!" It'll be a blast. Oh mon!

(And for classic "Doctor Who" fans, keep your eyes peeled during the scene in which Michelle's group fires on the Communist group: The only male member of her team is one of our favorite extras and stunt men, Pat Gorman.)

The early episodes of Allo Allo had to well constructed farces while retaining its cheeky, even risqué humour.

Von Strohm and Geering are hiding in Rene's mother in law's bedroom and are without uniforms. Rene is sending two carrier pigeons to London for replacement uniforms but the tailors are Jewish. Unhappily the pigeons end up in a stew.

The British airmen carrying the picture of the Fallen Madonna are captured by the Maquis, unsure whether they were Gaullists or Communists they escaped, burnt the uniforms and disguised themselves as onion sellers.

Madame Fanny meets an old flame, the forger Leclerc. Herr Flick reveals his kinky side when he gets Helga to undress and Maria has to disguise herself as a boy but still wears stocking leaving Lieutenant Gruber both confused and excited.

Through this muddle Rene needs to keep whatever sanity he can, fend off the Germans, keep the resistance satisfied and balance the attention of his waitresses.