In the summer of 1968, BBC1 screened the pilot edition of a situation-comedy about the British Home Guard. It was not widely expected to catch on, but it did. Decades after the final series ended, Dad's Army is still capable of attracting massive audiences whenever and wherever it is repeated and is generally considered to be the finest sit-com Britain has ever produced. Great sit-coms project back into our homes a wryly exaggerated vision of what it is that makes us who we have no choice but to be; when we laugh at Dad's Army we laugh at ourselves. Walmington-on-Sea's community of comic characters was brought to life by a brilliant ensemble of performers who, through a mixture of temperament and design, became more and more like the characters they played. Arthur Lowe, unforgettable as the pompous Captain Mainwaring, had it written into his contract that he should not be obliged to remove his trousers in any scene, and refused to take his script home to study.