After a ropey start to series seven, with episodes that felt either bland, silly or inconsistent with established characters, The Godiva Affair finally gets back to something akin to classic Dad's Army. Though it's not quite up there with the very best episodes, this feels like the ensemble is back on the same page and making use of their multi-faceted performance styles. OK, so John Laurie is still strangely overplaying Fraser (perhaps due to the presence of Talfryn Thomas as Cheeseman, who's tendency to play to the audience reportedly left Laurie feeling threatened) but overall this neat little script works very nicely. We have the first act in which the platoon get to rehearse a Morris dance, supplying the broader slapstick laughs, and then we get the fumbled attempts by Mainwaring to help Jones sort out his love life, leaving Mrs. Fox believing that Mainwaring is another one of her growing list of suitors. Pamela Cundell is always a hoot as the glamorous widow and she gets much more material to work with here, while the amorous misunderstandings never reach ridiculous levels and instead give way to an amusingly bawdy subplot about a Lady Godiva parade. Crucially, the well-meaning attempts by Mainwaring to help out his friend finally reinstate the sweetness at the core of Dad's Army, which had been strangely missing for a while at this point. This felt like something of a homecoming.