After two excellent episodes in a row, Sgt. Wilson's Little Secret is a bit of a comedown. It isn't terrible but it never really lives up to its potential either. The premise involves Wilson overhearing the end of a conversation Mrs. Pike is having about taking in an evacuee but he misunderstands and thinks she is pregnant. Taking his problem to Mainwaring, he is encouraged to propose marriage, which he does, before finding out the truth. These farces based around misunderstandings can often be tedious unless they're meticulously planned to the letter and keep escalating in a way that gets funnier. Unfortunately, after the initial mistake, there is a strangely unfunny scene in which Wilson confronts Mrs. Pike which feels like an enormous missed opportunity. Conversations where one person means one thing and the other means another can be comedy gold but it doesn't feel like Croft and Perry have really tried here. Mainwaring's reaction to the news is much funnier and, coupled with the genuinely touching offer of friendship he makes to Wilson, this is the best scene in the episode. But then it just sort of peters out with a cruel ending in which, realising what Mrs. Pike was talking about all the time, Wilson is massively relieved that he will not have to marry her. It ends abruptly before establishing just how he will get out of it, but a piece of dialogue in the following episode shrugs off the fact that he left her at the altar. In later episodes, I always thought Wilson was a very likeable character but he seems callous and selfish here. The episode also makes overt a gag that is slightly more ambiguous later down the line, with Wilson's thinly-veiled relationship with Mrs. Pike making little sense when this episode has essentially outed the whole affair. There's just about enough to keep Sgt. Wilson's Little Secret from being among the worst episodes of Dad's Army but it all seems terribly half-hearted.
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