  cover art  Lads Army: The Complete First Series  (ITV; UK DVD:
4 Jan 2010)  OK, first the premise, which is simple enough: 30
young men will essentially be sent back in time to the ‘50s,
where they will be subjected to a month’s national service in
the British Army. Everything about their experience will be 100
pecent authentic: the isolation from society, the uniforms,
types of food, style of soldiering, exercise, punishment,
equipment, and even the barracks will all be exactly as they
were when millions of young British men were wrestled from the
bosom of a loving family, and with rifle-in-hand and boot-up-
arse, were spirited away for some military discipline and
‘character building’ (a sinister euphemism shared, I would
imagine, with the harsh, non-rehabilitative regimes of prisons
of that era).  Welcome, then, to the regressive social
experiment that is Lads Army (a play on the title of Dad’s Army,
the beloved British sitcom about a geriatric gaggle of rural
Home Guard soldiers during WWII). The concept