Here's the third episode of series one of the brilliant comedy "Fairly Secret Army" starring the brilliant Geoffrey Palmer it was broadcast in 1984 in the early days of Channel 4,strangely this excellent series which despite getting poor press reviews at the time lasted for a second series,but has never been repeated or released on vhs or dvd video. I seem to be the only one who recorded it at the time for my collection. Mid way through this you will see a short interlude sequence which I have shortened for this upload which channel 4 used at the time to fill up for a lack of advertising.Amazingly channel 4 in an age when their were only 4 TV channels in the UK was unable to find sufficient advertisers to fill its advertising slots,but they soon remedied the situation as advertisers woke up to the new TV channels potential. I always felt the series owed a debt to the early 1970's Hanna Barbara comedy cartoon series "Wait Til Your Father Gets Home" starring Tom Bosley which featured a right wing "Reds under the Beds" character called Ralph,but I seem to be the only one that has noticed this similarity to the Reginald Perrin "Jimmy" Character who was Renamed Major Harry Truscott character for this very funny series.Perhaps it is just a coincidence,but I spotted the .similarity as soon as I first watched this series in 1984. Fairly Secret Army is a British sitcom which ran to thirteen episodes over two series between 1984 and 1986. Though not a direct spin-off from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the lead character, Major Harry Truscott, was very similar to Geoffrey Palmer's character of Jimmy in that series, and the scripts were written by Reginald Perrin's creator and writer David Nobbs. Harry Kitchener Wellington Truscott (ex Queen's Own West Mercian Lowlanders) is an inept and slightly barmy ex-army man intent on training a group of highly unlikely people into a secret paramilitary organisation. This idea first emerged in an episode of Perrin when Jimmy confided the plan to Reggie (who rubbished it) and was based on persistent though unsubstantiated rumours in the 1970s press that right wing generals were secretly planning a coup to rescue Britain from union militancy. The character's name was changed due to Fairly Secret Army being broadcast on Channel 4, and the television rights to The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and its characters being held by the BBC. The first series was script edited by John Cleese, whose training films company was responsible for the series. The series did not have a laughter track.[1] Nobbs only started work on the show when he turned down an offer to write a spin-off sitcom for Manuel of Fawlty Towers.

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