David Croft (I)

Paul Ritter stars as frustrated thesp Jimmy Perry, while Richard Dormer is David Croft, a jaded comedy producer feeling pushed out by the BBC. When Perry comes to Croft with his script for a sitcom tentatively titled The Fighting Tigers, the two men begin a battle against "the enemy within" to get it made by the BBC. The dialogue may be on the broad side, but the acting and direction are splendid. Ritter and Dormer are grippingly good, while John Sessions makes for an astonishing Arthur Lowe.

We're Doomed: The Dad's Army Story (22 December) is good fun, although the perennial doubts about the factual liberties taken by this genre are alarmingly raised by the producers having to apologise in advance to the family of Dad's Army co-creator David Croft for depicting him as a chain-smoker rather than the fanatical anti-fags campaigner he was.

Radio Times review

From the animated-arrow captions to the church hall set re-creation, this knockabout biopic envelopes Dad's Army fans in a very warm embrace. It charts the meeting, partnership and battles with the Beeb of two of our finest comedy writers, Jimmy Perry and David Croft, whisking us back to the smoke-wreathed 60s - all brown and beige, big specs and high hems.

Writer Stephen Russell holds your hand through the who's who and what's what, but with a lightness of touch and a deep affection for the imperishable Home Guard sitcom. There are lump-in-the-throat moments, too: Perry overseeing his hero Bud Flanagan record the theme tune is a beauty (Bud died shortly afterwards), and the whole thing ends with the perfect pop song.

Paul Ritter and Richard Dormer are superb as flamboyant Perry and commanding Croft. Just as this drama is a tribute to them, so is Dad's Army's longevity. Frank Williams, 84, the show's original vicar, recently told RT, "People have often asked me whether there was a lot of re-writing? No there wasn't, because there wasn't any need to. They produced the goods."

You have been watching their work for four decades, and will be for many years to come.

We're Doomed! The Dad's Army Story review

With all the season's comfort and joy but none of the mawkishness, We're Doomed! The Dad's Army Story dramatised the delightful, cocklewarming story of how two middle-aged has-beens called Jimmy Perry and David Croft triumphed over adversity to create the greatest British sitcom of all time.

Obituary: Jeremy Lloyd

As one half of an era-defining writing partnership with David Croft, Jeremy Lloyd dominated British television comedy in the 1970s and 1980s with two long-running hits reviled by critics but revered by audiences.

Appropriately enough, the theme in the final documentary in the series looking at the work of Dad's Army and It Ain't Half Hot Mum creators Jimmy Perry and David Croft is how the duo's writing was so often concerned with the end of an era. This meant they wrote about old ideas as these faded, and as new British identities emerged. It's a notion replete with possibilities: Captain Mainwaring as an arch conservative yet also representing the rise of grammar school boys in the era of Heath and Wilson, anyone?

The series charting the careers of Jimmy Perry and David Croft, the duo behind sitcoms Dad's Army, Are You Being Served? and more, considers what their work tells us about attitudes towards love and sex in Britain in the 20th century. This is, when you consider Sergeant Wilson's relationship with Mavis Pike, at least in part a story of how the British are adept at making things perfectly well understood yet left unsaid. It's a story about class, too, expressed in the way Hi-de-Hi! yellowcoat Gladys Pugh yearns for a bit of posh.

Radio Times review

Dad's Army turns into Trumpton in a late-1972 episode that drew more viewers (18.5 million) than any other. When challenged to outwit the Home Guard commando unit by planting a dummy bomb in their fuel depot, the platoon dress as firemen for their "secret" mission.

As you might expect from the outlandish premise, the humour is Norfolk broad - Pike getting squirted at regular intervals, Jones deafening everyone with the fire bell, and so on. That said, there are some lovely moments with Mainwaring getting snubbed at the Rotary dinner (writers Jimmy Perry and David Croft never failed to prick his pomposity). There's also a formative role for Geoffrey Hughes (two years later he had become Corrie's bin man Eddie Yeats) and, from Godfrey, the line "I wouldn't mind dressing up as a nun."

A new film of Dad's Army is to be made, which is a brave move on the part of all involved. Few TV programmes are so inextricably associated with the people who played the main characters rather than with plot or place. To imagine someone other than Arthur Lowe playing Captain Mainwaring is hard, though Bill Nighy stepping into John Le Mesurier's shoes as Sergeant Wilson is less difficult to envisage. Jimmy Perry, whose co-author David Croft died three years ago, said he was letting the film-makers "get on with it". But in the mid-Seventies, the show was a national institution, with audiences sometimes in excess of 18 million. A sympathetic reworking of the original will be a considerable achievement given the special place that Dad's Army has in the nation's heart. As Corporal Jones might have said (and presumably will say again): "Don't panic".