The Lion Has Phones


"The Lion Has 'Phones" is the third episode of the third series of the British sitcomedy series Dad's Army. It was originally transmitted on 21 September 1969.

Synopsis

Captain Mainwaring teaches the platoon how to use a public telephone box for emergency communication.

Plot

After a successful exercise in camouflage, Mainwaring delivers a lecture on communications. Apparently, the four main targets are the gasometer, the railway bridge, the telephone exchange and the reservoir. They are vital to the town's survival, so two men will be posted at each location. If they see anything suspicious, they will phone Mainwaring via the nearest telephone box. Frazer asks Mainwaring what will happen if the telephone boxes are out of action, and many alternatives are suggested, including a heliograph, tick-tacking, shooting a hole in the top of the gasometer and setting fire to it, and tapping the railway line and laying your ear onto it.
Pike and Godfrey admit they do not know how to use a telephone box; Mrs Pike believes they are unhygienic and Godfrey is hopeless with machines. After a typically slapstick practical demonstration, the platoon marches down to the telephone box nearest the reservoir. Pike is the first to get the lesson, with Mainwaring telling him to phone the church hall, expecting it to be empty, but Mrs Pike answers and gives both Mainwaring and Wilson an earful. When a queue begins to form, Walker cons them into believing that telephone calls are going on ration from tomorrow.
That evening, while out on patrol, Frazer and Walker spot a German plane crash into the reservoir. Walker phones Mainwaring, then mysteriously vanishes. Mainwaring and the rest of the platoon arrive, and their verbal attempts to persuade the Germans to surrender result in heavy gunfire. Angered by the Germans' "cheek", Mainwaring writes GHQ's phone number on some paper and tells Jones to go and phone them and to memorise and destroy the paper afterwards. Jones' muddleheadedness results in him saying "Memorise and destroy the phone", and reading the phone number upside-down and ringing the Embassy cinema instead, and ends up believing that Googie Withers and Eric Portman are aboard the plane. He gets no joy from emergency services either, so ARP Warden Hodges helps Jones get through.
Eventually, Lieutenant Hope-Bruce of the Coldstream Guards arrives and tells Mainwaring that they've surrounded the reservoir. He pompously tries to get Mainwaring to leave the situation in the hands of the regular army, but is quick to cancel an incautious order for mortar bombs under Mainwaring's persuasion. Walker returns and tells Mainwaring that he's paid the man in charge of the reservoir to open the sluices, and the Germans will have to swim for it in less than two hours. Laughing, Mainwaring says they should leave the mopping up to the Coldstream Guards.

Cast