I clearly remember the fist time I saw The Making of Private Pike. I had grown up watching and loving Dad's Army but it had been years since I watched an episode. I popped the TV on and one was just starting so I thought Great, this'll be reliably cosy viewing. The episode was The Making of Private Pike and by the end of it I thought Hang on, is Dad's Army terrible?! Fortunately, the answer was no, and there are absolutely loads of episodes that justified my long-term love of the show. But for one terrible moment I imagined I'd grown out of it and that every Dad's Army episode was as bad as The Making of Private Pike.
In the years since James Beck's death had left a hole in the ensemble, Ian Lavender had really stepped up as Pike, finding the character in spectacularly effective fashion. Croft and Perry had clearly noticed, tailoring several great scripts towards his comic talents. Unfortunately, The Making of Private Pike isn't one of them. This tale of Pike's fleeting and passionless dalliance with Hodges' niece Sylvia (played in that game 70s sitcom fashion by Jean Gilpin) foregrounds Pike a bit too much, with the rest of the ensemble sidelined to detrimental effect. When the other cast members are present it's not much better though. In fact, a lengthy slapstick routine involving musical chairs in a staff car represents the series at its absolute worst: an unfunny premise, executed poorly. There's one interesting scene in The Making of Private Pike in which Wilson, believing Pike has had a more amorous adventure than he actually has, gives him a fatherly talk about how the values of their day aren't necessarily that progressive, aligning his own mindset with the gradually more permissive 70s attitudes from when the episode aired. It's quite a bold move given that many of Dad's Army's viewership probably disagreed with Wilson's wisdom and it ends the episode on a better note than the rest of it deserves. Still, with Ian Lavender now in his 30s, the naive boy routine was beginning to look as strange as clearly ailing old men doing slapstick.
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