Dad's Army Graham McCann Fourth Estate, 292pp, £16.99 ISBN 1841153087

The first person I can remember dying is James Beck - aka Private Walker, the crafty cockney type in Dad's Army. Actually, he wasn't a type at all. As with all the characters in Jimmy Perry and David Croft's sitcom, Walker seemed like, if not someone you knew, then someone it would be possible to know. Wilson, Mainwaring, Godfrey, even Jonesy, were more than just a cluster of catchphrases. They might have been dummies, but they weren't stuffed dummies. They breathed their stupidity. So when James Beck died young, it registered with at least one 11-year-old.

Part of the reason why the Dad's Army mob seem so real, one learns from Graham McCann's new book, is that the actors were very similar to the characters they played. John Le Mesurier (rhymes with "treasurer") really was a laid-back lounger (although, unlike Sergeant Wilson, one with a taste for the bottle). John Laurie, who played that poet of schadenfreude, Frazer, took great delight in proving to Arnold Ridley (taunted on screen as "that old fool" Godfrey) that he was by far the fitter of the two men. And when Clive Dunn was awarded an OBE in 1975, Arthur Lowe was heard to say that "when it comes to my turn I don't want any of that bargain-basement stuff" - vintage Captain Mainwaring if I ever heard it.

So were the parts written to suit the actors, or did the parts rub off on the players? There is little way of knowing from this book, which is no more than a high-class cuts job, padded out with extracts from the Dad's Army scripts. Given the quality of those scripts, the padding is luxurious feather down, but padding it remains. There is a place for such publications, but one expects rather more from books with McCann's name on the spine. A lecturer in political theory at Cambridge, McCann has written the best biography of Cary Grant there is, a good study of Woody Allen, an intelligent analysis of method acting, and a fascinating cross-cultural look at Marilyn Monroe. Three years ago, however, he published a monograph on Morecambe and Wise which, though as assiduously researched as the present volume, felt, again like the present volume, rather longer than it needed to be.

Dad's Army was a television phenomenon, one of those rare moments of cultural unity in which the bulk of the nation sits down to watch something together. (Even today, as it is repeated for the umpteenth time, millions of us still tune in.) But McCann makes no attempt to account for this popularity. Despite dropping names such as J B Priestley, Randy Newman and Wittgenstein, he merely takes it for granted that the show was brilliant, and that's that. What is going on? How can the author who gave us the semiotics of James Dean have missed the significance of Dad's Army bursting into the mind of its creator as he watched a changing of the guard during the summer of love? Or that the show hit the screen just a couple of months after May 1968? Might it not be that this reassuring comedy about life in Blighty during the Second World War was a response to the final breakdown of the cosy postwar order? Such questions are at least worth asking.

Since Roland Barthes's Mythologies licensed the serious study of popular culture, too many academics have been making a living writing about any old showbiz detritus, hence all those tiresome and trite books about shows such as Crossroads and Nationwide. With or without the sociological waffle, Dad's Army was a great sitcom; but if you are going to eschew the cultural studies route, then your chief duty as a critic is to analyse how it achieved greatness.

This book, surely the product of a commission rather than a passion that grew into an idea, ends up being no better than a compendium of Dad's Army fandom. Who does he think he's kidding, Mr McCann?

Christopher Bray is an editor at the Daily Telegraph

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