Dad's Army is a British sitcom about the Home Guard during the Second World War, produced by David Croft, and written by David Croft and Jimmy Perry. Set in the fictional seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea, located near Eastbourne, it follows a well-meaning platoon of men ineligible for active service as they serve as Britain's "last line of defence". The series was broadcast on BBC1 from 31 July 1968 to 13 November 1977, a total of eighty episodes spread over nine series and including three Christmas specials. Four short Christmas sketches were also broadcast as part of Christmas Night with the Stars. The first two series were broadcast in black and white, and the other series were broadcast in colour. Episodes ran for thirty minutes each, with some exceptions: the 1971 special ran for sixty minutes, the 1975 special ran for forty minutes and the final episode of series 9 ran for thirty-five minutes. Five episodes of series 2 were not retained by the BBC Archives, but two of those episodes, "Operation Kilt" and "The Battle of Godfrey's Cottage", were located in 2001. An audio recording of "A Stripe for Frazer", one of the three missing episodes, was discovered in 2008 and an animated version of it was released in February 2016. An episode of series 3, "Room at the Bottom", was broadcast in colour but only a black and white copy survives in the archives. The episode was restored in 2008 using colour recovery. All interior studio scenes for the nine series, Christmas specials and the Christmas Night with the Stars specials were recorded in the BBC Television Centre in West London, where the production used many of the eight main television studios there, to record the show. Many exterior scenes were filmed in a studio, but where genuine location recordings were made, they were done in Norfolk, with the production team basing themselves in the small Norfolk town of Thetford.
a. The episode was scheduled originally to be broadcast on 21 August 1968. However, the BBC cancelled that evening's schedule to cover the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Series 2 (1969)
b. The series was scheduled originally to be broadcast in January 1969. Instead, the BBC decided to repeat the first series in January 1969 because they believed many people had missed the series when it had started in the summer of 1968. Episodes in italics are missing Episode remade using new cast in 2019 Episode reconstructed using animation and original soundtrack
The 1968 sketch was broadcast in black and white, and the others were broadcast in colour. The 1968 and 1970 sketches are lost from the BBC Archives but they survive in audio. The 1968 sketch ran for nine minutes. The 1969 sketch ran for twenty minutes, whilst the 1970 and 1972 sketches ran for ten minutes each. In 1974 and 1977, the cast of Dad's Army appeared in-character for public information films commissioned by the Central Office of Information to instruct viewers how to successfully use pelican crossings.
