Getting the Bird

Sergeant Wilson is missing from the platoon, and Frazer assumes there has been an argument between him and Mrs Pike. Godfrey comments that he spotted the Sergeant with his arm around an attractive and much younger woman.

The episode begins with rumours abounding that Wilson has gone AWOL. Meanwhile, Jones is having troubles with the butchers shop: shortages in rationed meat means his customers are getting more upset with him, which is affecting his mental health. Walker offers to give Jones a rabbit to skin (so he can sell the skin to a furrier), but Jones refuses as a single rabbit would make things worse, and confides he is desperate for off-the-ration meat.

The following evening, the platoon inform Captain Mainwaring that after a particularly heavy night drinking, Wilson was seen about town with a young woman (a Wren) on his arm. Pike reveals that Wilson and his mother had an argument about something, so he is not calling Wilson "Uncle Arthur", and will not take orders from him. However Mainwaring informs Pike that unless he wants to be charged with insubordination, he will respect Wilson's position as Chief Clark and Sergeant in the bank and on parade respectively.

During this discussion, Wilson is found in the church hall, asleep behind the stage curtain. While Mainwaring berates the still tipsy Wilson in his office, Wilson begins to see pigeons on Mainwaring's bookshelf. Both believe this to be the result of Wilson's drunken state until Pike enters the office and points them out. Immediately, the office is filled with pigeons. It emerges that Walker had stored the birds in the boiler room and they had escaped. Walker secretly proposes to Jones to buy the pigeons from Walker to augment his supply of meat, and is persuaded to help Walker to hide them in the church. However, Jones becomes suspicious when he hears on the radio that there is a sudden and unexplained shortage of pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and ends the agreement.

On Sunday, Mainwaring and Frazer are welcoming people as they enter the church for the morning service when ARP Warden Hodges arrives and says to Frazer "I've been helping her (Mrs. Fox) with her blackout curtains". Just ahead of a church service we hear a conversation between Wilson and the young woman, where we discover that she is his daughter from a failed marriage before Wilson moved to Walmington-on-Sea. This is reason for the argument between him and Mrs Pike, apparently it was a secret he had kept to himself. Frazer is the only person to overhear this; Wilson admits to Frazer that he hasn't seen much of her while she was growing up, but that he did his best to send her to a good school. Frazer replies that "she does you credit" and admits to Wilson that he knows he is prone to gossip, but promises never to reveal Wilson's secret.

The hymns are ruined when the organ begins to play and dead pigeons are fired across the church: Walker is exposed as having hidden several of the pigeons in the organ pipes.

The dating for this episode is problematic. A calendar in Jones’s butchers shop states that it is the month of June, yet dialogue in the series 4 episode ‘Sgt, Save My Boy’ (some 14 episodes earlier than this one) pinpoints the events of that particular episode as being on or after 22nd June 1941, meaning that only eight or nine days could have elapsed between that episode and this. As many of those intervening episodes are set over two or more days each (with the implication that the episode 'Mum's Army' might even be set over at least a week), it is highly unlikely, bordering on impossible, for this episode to be set in June 1941. It can’t be set in June 1942 as a later series 5 episode (‘Round And Round Went The Great Big Wheel’) states in an onscreen caption that it is still 1941. It could perhaps be explained away by the fact that it is later in the year and Jones has simply forgotten to change the calendar, however there is no information in either the episode or the dialogue to suggest that this is the case.

• Croft, David; Perry, Jimmy; Webber, Richard (2000). The Complete A-Z of Dad's Army. Orion. ISBN 0-7528-4637-X.

• "Getting the Bird" at IMDb