“The Weak and the Wicked: Images of non-Conscripted Masculinity in British Cinema 1939 - 1945”
Journal: Worcester Research and Publications (University of Worcester)
Year: 2014

The BBC series Dad’s Army is a ubiquitous classic of the British sitcom. Often cited as an exemplar of comic form and characterisation it also, as Jeffrey Richards details, existed as a quasi-mythical vision of a Golden age of Englishness, where “a nation of eccentric individualists could be blended together to defend the county in wartime” (Richards, 1997, 362). In this chapter, however, I want to suggest that, underneath the jokes, the men of Dad’s Army shed light on what was a very real probl