User Reviews

Following the broad farce of Shooting Pains, which closed the first series, Dad's Army starts its second series with another very silly episode in Operation Kilt. It follows the platoon as they take part in a training exercise in which they have to defend the church hall from capture by a Highland Unit. Although much of the slapstick here is not that well executed, you can definitely see the mechanics of later series starting to emerge in terms of heightened ambition. After a fairly slow opening involving PT exercises in the churchyard, the episode quickly escalates into people dressed as pantomime cows, sneezing themselves out of haystacks and dangling upside-down from booby traps. There's a slightly racier tone here too, with jokes about what's underneath a Scotsman's kilt and, depending on how you take it, either Frazer getting humped by a bull or narrowly escaping such a fate. There are a couple of good moments, including a gag that plays the long game, involving Pike and a rifle bolt, and a bafflingly convoluted explanation of how different coloured paints are used to identify dead, wounded or captured in the exercise. And it is good to see that the interesting but ultimately failed notion of opening every episode with a short training video has been dropped since series one. But largely Operation Kilt overplays its hand in an attempt to forcefully establish the arrival of Dad's Army's second series. A valiant effort at something bigger, but those who love the character beats and dialogue of Dad's Army will probably be disappointed with how much flapping about there is here.