It Ain't Half Hot Mum is a British television sitcom, written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft. Set in 1945 during the last months of the Second World War, the series follows members of a concert party of the Royal Artillery. The sitcom ran for eight series, which were broadcast on BBC1 from 3 January 1974 to 3 September 1981.[1] Each series had between six and eight episodes. Fifty-six episodes were created in total, and each had a duration of 30 minutes. Series 1 to 4 were set in Deolali, India, while Series 5 to 8 were set in the fictional village of Tin Min, Burma.[2]
Episodes were filmed from 1973 and 1981, with a break in 1979. Two episodes from the first series, "A Star is Born" and "It's a Wise Child", are currently missing from the BBC Archives, since they were wiped after their repeat broadcasts.[3] [4] [5] In 1988, two off-air VHS recordings of the missing episodes were discovered in Australia by Dave Homewood, the founder of the New Zealand branch of the Dad's Army Appreciation Society. They had been recorded from Australian broadcasts on Channel 7; however, they are incomplete, since Channel 7 edited certain scenes from the episodes so that they would fit within the channel's timeslot. An estimated four minutes has been edited from these episodes.[6]