War Dance is a curious episode that has its peaks and troughs. Overall, it's a nice, laidback half hour about a Home Guard dance, with the main source of tension being Pike's determination to announce his engagement to a girl deemed inappropriate by the snobs around him (she works in a fish 'n' chip shop. The scandal!). This leads to Wilson being badgered into having a heart to heart chat with Pike, and that particular scene is written and played beautifully, with Wilson's awkwardness and Pike's embarrassment both imbued with the pathos of a tentative father/son relationship made impossible by the oppressive opinions of the era. It's also interesting to see how sensitive a subject his relationship with Pike is for Wilson, with Mainwaring's constant badgering resulting in him delivering the unusually candid line "My God, Mainwaring, you can hit pretty low when it suits you!" On the flipside, there are a few strangely sour notes struck here, with one of Walker's wisecracks suggesting coercive abuse and Mainwaring's arrival at the dance sporting a black eye taking the ongoing, downbeat gag about his unhappy marriage to an unusually dark extreme. Neither of these jokes would've seemed so controversial back in an era when Walker's comment would've been deemed that of a cheeky red-blooded chappie, and when domestic abuse was regularly considered fair game for humour, especially when the man was the victim.
If times have changed a little too much for all of War Dance to sit comfortably, it does at least give us a glimpse of the gender politics of both late-60s sitcoms and the wartime era that this specific one represents. And the final scene, in which Wilson, Pike and a worse-for-wear Mainwaring congregate in the office having been locked out by their respective partners/mother, is a gem of character comedy, with a fanatic drunk act from Arthur Lowe and a pleasing sense of melancholy tempered by male camaraderie. Some other choices work well, such as having Pike's announcement faded down in the audio mix so that both his words and the audience reaction are drowned out by music, while others parts aren't quite so good. A scene of Jones trying to stall with a series of impressions of famous people goes on far too long with no real comic payoff. Ultimately, War Dance gives us glimpses of Dad's Army at its best but it doesn't quite have the consistency of a classic episode.
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