The line "Don't tell him, Pike!" has often been voted one of the funniest moments in the history of British television comedy.
Welsh actor Philip Madoc was an accomplished linguist and was cast as the U-boat captain because Jimmy Perry wanted somebody who spoke fluent German for the part.
This episode was later adapted as The Rear Guard (1976), an unsuccessful American remake of the series which never made it past the pilot. It concerned the members of the American Civil Defense, the United States' equivalent of the Home Guard, in 1942. The pilot aired on ABC on August 10, 1976 and has never been rebroadcast. Mainwaring, Wilson, Jones, Walker and Pike formed the basis for the characters Captain Nick Rosatti, Sgt. Max Raskin, Bert Wagner, Don Crawford and Bobby Henderson respectively. There were no characters based on Frazer or Godfrey.
During the filming of the last scene, someone was busy mending a fence just down the road and could be heard from the location where the scene was being shot. In order to film when the person wasn't working, they had a runner running between the two locations telling the crew when they could film and when the man could continue working on the fence.
When Godfrey mentions having seen the film David Copperfield (1935), this gives Mainwaring the idea of how to deal with the platoon's current predicament, quoting Mr. Micawber's line "something is bound to turn up". Arthur Lowe would go onto play the role of Micawber the following year, in the BBC's adaptation David Copperfield (1974), which also featured Edward Sinclair as Mr. Barkis.