[1] In 1975, a recording of "Whispering Grass" performed by Don Estelle and Windsor Davies in character as Gunner "Lofty" Sugden and Sergeant Major Williams (respectively), reached number 1 on the UK Singles Chart and remained there for three weeks.
[2][3] One specific criticism has been the casting of a white actor, Michael Bates, as an Indian character, with darkening makeup that some have described as brownface.
The series was based on the experiences of its creators during the Second World War; Jimmy Perry, aged nineteen,[7] had been a member of a Royal Artillery concert party in Deolali, India,[1][6] while David Croft had been an entertainments officer in Poona (now in the Indian state of Maharashtra).
[6] The characters in the series were based on colleagues co-writer Jimmy Perry knew while stationed in Deolali as a Royal Artillery concert party member.
[1] George Layton left his previous show in which he wrote and starred, Doctor in Charge, to appear as Bombardier "Solly" Solomons in It Ain't Half Hot Mum.
Captain Ashwood's utter stupidity does occasionally infuriate him, but he is effectively good-natured and tries at all costs to avoid losing the easy life he has.
His catchphrase is "It's a tricky one, sir", which he says in reply to Colonel Reynolds asking for his opinion when the concert party runs into a particular problem.
He is extremely bigoted in his views, making every effort to bully the Indian camp staff and remind everyone of British supremacy in Asia.
Williams often mispronounces long words, turning "hysterical" into "historical" or "hysterectical", "misapprehension" into "mishappropriation", "education" into "heducation" and "ignorant" into "higorant".
(In one episode, a letter addressed to Gunner Parkin and intended to be opened only in the event of the Sergeant Major's death falls into the hands of the Concert Party, who read that he is only being hard on the men in order to turn them into soldiers, and he actually thinks that "they are all grand lads, especially little Lofty".)
[10] Parkin references the show's title in its first episode, when he signs off a letter to his mother with the words "I've been in India now two days, and it ain't half hot, Mum."
This is why the Sergeant Major frequently repeats what he says in an exaggeratedly effete tone, as well as mockingly addressing him as "Mister La-De-Dah Gunner Graham".
Ramzan the punkah wallah always sits outside the officers' quarters, pulling a string that is attached to a large fan indoors.
In the earlier episodes, she is the lover of Colonel Reynolds; the two have a strong relationship, to the point when she accompanies the patrol on a journey to a nearby town.
As Colonel Reynolds is distracted, Mrs Waddilove-Evans is kidnapped by a group of Pathan tribesmen and the concert party, Rangi, Muhammed and Rumzan attempt to save her.
Her father, the owner of the Deolali Chinese restaurant, arranges for Williams and Ling Soo to elope to the mountains and marry secretly.
The Inspector is the head of police in Deolali, who warns Colonel Reynolds and Captain Ashwood on a few occasions when the locals are rioting, demanding that the British go home.
Me Thant is a Burmese smuggler, who is bribed by GHQ with twenty pieces of gold a week to keep away from, and avoid assaulting, the local British troops.
Ah Syn is the cook for the camp later in the series, a man of Chinese ethnicity who served food that Captain Ashwood describes as "furniture stuffing".
[11][12][13] In 1988, two off-air VHS recordings of the missing episodes were discovered in Australia[12][13] by Dave Homewood, the founder of the New Zealand branch of the Dad's Army Appreciation Society.
[17] Unlike other sitcoms written by Perry and Croft, such as Dad’s Army, the series does not get repeated by the BBC, as it is regarded as falling short of modern broadcasting standards concerning its content.
[2] In 2014, Ed Richards, then chief executive of Ofcom, said 1970s and 1980s sitcoms with racist and offensive content "are unimaginable today", with all viewers objecting to such broadcasts.
[2] In the opinion of journalist Neil Clark, for a profile of Perry written for The Daily Telegraph a decade later, it "appears to have fallen victim to political correctness".
[20] David West Brown wrote, in English and Empire, that the case for Bates' character rests on an assumption that his "dramatic and social functions are not derogatorily comic in the way that depictions of African diaspora identities are" in a series like The Black and White Minstrel Show.
[2] In his 2013 Daily Telegraph interview, Perry defended the casting, commenting that Bates, who was born in India to English parents, "spoke fluent Urdu, and was a captain in the Gurkhas".
He referred to the behaviour of his own Sergeant Major in the concert party in India, who told them: "'No man who puts on make-up and ponces about on a stage is normal - what are you?'
[26] The series' overall tone of sympathy towards imperialism is believed to be at least partly responsible for it being no longer repeated on British television in later years,[2] along with, according to Darren Lee writing for the British Film Institute's Screenonline website, a belief that it contains "national stereotyping and occasionally patronising humour",[27] or in the words of Stuart Jeffries in 2015, it contained "obliging underlings sporting cheerful grins that, even when I was a boy, made me cringe.
[29] According to Mark Duguid, again for Screenonline, it suffers "from its narrow stereotypes of its handful of Indian supporting characters as alternately servile, foolish, lazy or devious".
[27] Concerning the issues with It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Alex Massie wrote in January 2019, shortly after the death of Windsor Davies, that "even when judged by modern standards" the series is a "relatively minor offender when compared with programmes" such as Mind Your Language, Love Thy Neighbour and Curry and Chips.
The intention was to screen all episodes of the series (including those retrieved from off-air recordings) in their complete broadcast form, without editing any potentially offensive material.