The Best Episodes Directed By David Croft

After Maria is sent to Lieutenant Gruber with the sausage containing the real painting of the Fallen Madonna for copying, she is caught by General von Klinckerhofen, who places the sausage in his wardrobe and helds Maria hostage until his lawn mover engine is returned by the Resistance. Herr Flick, the Colonel and the Captain, and René hears about this and decides to go to the chateau through the secret passages and steal the sausage from under the General's nose, using Helga, Yvette and Lieutenant Gruber as erotical bait.

After the Colonel's and the Captain's uniforms are borrowed by the British airmen, and later burned, they will have to send for replacement uniforms. Supplied by Michelle are carrier pigeons, which madame Edith accidentally cooks and serves to Herr Otto Flick.

Hans mistakes the nitro for gin and accidentally blows up the railway himself! The Germans capture René, Yvette, and the peasant-disguised Colonel and Captain. As Helga, Leclerc, and Edith each attempt to help the gang escape, General Von Klinkerhoffen arrives in town and demands that the only known saboteur be shot. This means René's death by firing squad, with Lieutenant Gruber in charge of the squad!

We pick up the action mere moments after the close of the previous episode, as the airmen-filled cow narrowly escape being milked by a German patrol while awaiting the landing of the plane. As they watch disappointedly, the plane does not land, and instead jettisoning two parachutes, one of which yields a new escape package. The other yields Officer Crabtree, sent from "British Ontelligence Headquitters". Disguised as a policeman, he is supposed to blend in. Unfortunately, his French is abominable, getting the vowels wrong as often as not. Meanwhile, the plan to blow up the non-painting-filled knockwurst on its way to Hitler has hit a snag: René can't find anyone to blow up the train.

After René ran away from the duel with Monsieur Alphonse, he hides. He's rescued by Michelle from the Resistance who smuggles him back into the café dressed as a member of the Resistance, while she explains to Monsieur Alphonse that René is the bravest man in France. But Herr Flick has captured the Colonel and the Captain, and brings in René as well, and torture them unless they reveal where the painting of "The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies" is hidden. They are rescued by General von Klinkerhoffen. With life back to normal, there's only a matter of getting the British airmen out. As the General imposes a curfew, Michelle's plan is a funeral for Madame Fanny.

The sausage containing the painting of the Fallen Madonna, which was taken by Lieutenant Gruber's dog, is minced by the Lieutenant – but fortunately he discovers it first and saves it. At the same time, the missing knockwurst means that Monsieur Alphonse cannot get back the money which he leant to pay the ransom of the kidnapped sausage. The Resistance pays him back with Monsieur Leclerc's badly forged money. But after everything seems to be getting back to normal, the sausage is sent to Lieutenant Gruber to make another copy. Also, Michelle's latest plan to get the British airmen back is by an old plane with the motor from general von Klinkerhoffen's lawn mower.

With René again in the possession of the sausage containing the painting of the Fallen Madonna, the attention turns to getting the two British airmen out of France. Michelle proposes a steam engine tour through Nouvion. Michelle's newest hairbrained scheme of getting the airmen out will of course need 80 meters of suspenders, and it's René's job to get them from every Frenchman in Nouvion. Herr Flick and Helga arrive in his staff car to spy on the show.

After the plot to get the two British airmen out failed, a frustrated René returns to the painting of the Fallen Madonna. He hides it behind an ugly painting in his café which is immediately recognized by General von Klinkerhoffen as a Van Gogh and requisitioned for his office in the chateau. He also requistions the two new maids in Café René – or as they are better known: the two British airmen in disguise. Realizing that the two airmen will be recognized right away, Michelle of the Resistance comes up with another hairbrained scheme of digging a tunnel from Monsieur Alphonse's morgue into the prisoner of war camp and smuggling in the two airmen into the camp.

Since Maria's disappearance, the café needs another waitress, but René and Edith has somewhat different ideas about who should fill the position, but finally Michelle from the Resistance brings tiny Mimi from another cell, to be René's bodyguard. In the meantime, General von Klinkerhoffen gives the Colonel a new assistant, Italian liaison Bertorelli.

There is still no batteries for the wireless radio underneath the bed of René's mother in law, so Michelle's newest hairbrained scheme is to have René and Yvette powering the radio with the generator from a bicycle until the stolen batteries from a German midget submarine are delivered. The Lieutenant is finished copying the paintings (The Fallen Madonna and the Van Gogh), and delivers them as sausages. Sausages also comes from Captain Bertorelli (real ones), Monsieur Leclerc (submarine batteries), and Officer Crabtree (explosives), and soon they're all mixed up in the German officers pants.

The Germans arrest René, and the Colonel demands an explanation for the knockwursts with explosives in them. After a small lie, René is sent home with around a dozen knockwursts to hang in his kitchen. Meanwhile, the British have sent a spy camera with which the Resistance should be able to photograph the plans for the German invasion of Great Britain, but the camera landed in the vineyard of Monsieur Alphonse's, and since the Germans commandeered the vineyard, the Resistance cannot go and look for the camera. This problem is solved when the General orders every peasant in Nouvion to work on the vineyard, which also leaves room for some assassination attempts on the General's life.

René is forced to masquerade as the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler himself, in an attempt to rescue Frau Von Kinkenrotten from prison. Of course, this is actually Herr Flick, still in his earlier disguise.

The latest escape plan for the British airmen involves them wading along the canal underneath a tin bath. Herr Flick and Von Smallhausen pose as escaped British airmen, hoping to be picked up by the Resistance. The Resistance have built a communication post in René's 'grave', in an effort to get around German jamming of their radio signals. René, Edith and Monsieur Alphonse try it out. René gets caught on the aerial and is hoisted above his 'grave'. Lieutenant Gruber sees him and thinks it's the ghost of René's 'twin brother'.

The Gestapo and the Italians plan to infiltrate the Resistance. Little do they know that René and friends are waiting for them.

The Colonel & the Captain and Herr Flick are all disguised as onion sellers while the German uniforms are being remade by the Jewish tailors of London. Michelle delivers a bottle of nitro-glycerin disguised as a bottle of Bols Gin to hide in the Cafe until they come to fetch it that night to blow up a German railway.

The Communist Resistance wants to make a martyr out of the dead René, and kidnaps the Colonel and the Captain at the Captain's birthday party. To make matters worse, they offer them on a platter to René's twin brother René, so that he can shoot them.

After failing to destroying the train, which will take the copy of the painting of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies to Hitler, René and the Captain are captured by the Resistance, only to be rescued by Herr Flick. The Colonel and the Captain are afraid that Hitler will understand that the painting is a copy, and prepare to escape to Switzerland. In the meantime, British agent in disguise, officer Crabtree, has a new escape plan for the British airmen.

René tries to hide from the seconds of Monsieur Alphonse, the undertaker, but in his stead Lieutenant Gruber accepts the duel. However, the Colonel and the Captain want to save René and plans an exercise to "accidentally" kill Monsieur Alphonse. The plan is thwarted by Herr Flick, who has discovered that the sausage that was sent to Berlin containing the painting of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies did not contain any painting – either real or fake. Herr Flick correctly assumes that the Colonel and the Captain stole the painting, and arrests them and cancels the exercise. Now René has to fight the duel on his own, while Yvette and Maria grieve on the sidelines and his wife Edith catches up on the gossip of the week.

While the Captain is sitting in the café, herr Flick from the Gestapo is listening when René is talking to London on the wireless. He soon cracks the code surrounding the message with the plan to dig a tunnel from the mortuary to hide the British airmen. But it's soon apparent that the two airmen and Monsieur Alphonse need help with the digging, and the café staff are called in, leaving Madame Fanny and Leclerc in the café. But the Colonel and the Captain follow René, discover the tunnel, and are captured in the prisoner of war camp.

Dressed as girls from the Folies Bergère, the entire gang (the staff and the Germans) escape from the prisoner of war camp, and completely against plans bring the two British airmen with them. Outside again, the Colonel finds that the Captain is missing, only his glasses are found. Herr Flick and von Smallhousen intercept a message from London and try to send their own message, but René catches on and tosses the radio out the window, which leaves the Resistance without a means to contact London, until Michelle thinks of the radio in Lieutenant Gruber's little tank.

The Gestapo suspects that the Colonel and the General are in on a plot to assassinate Hitler, so Herr Flick goes undercover as Private Irma Von Kinkenrotten and plants a somewhat bizarre daffodil-shaped microphone in the Colonel's office, where Gruber and Von Strohm are making plans to get rid of Bertorelli in some way. Meanwhile, as Edith prepares for her wedding, René & Co. must get the aerial for their new radio above the jamming signal of Herr Flick, so they disguise Mimi as a small nun to obtain a box kite which they fly to contact London and request plastic explosive to blow up the safe in the General's chateau to get the British Invasion plans.

The Colonel's birthday party becomes a perfect opportunity for getting the real painting of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies back from Herr Flick of the Gestapo, and substituting it with the forgery that was made earlier. The plan is to not invite Herr Flick but make sure that he hears about the big Binge – a traditional feast with genuine Bavarian dances featuring girls dressed as the Hitler Youth – so that he will have to come. In the meantime, René and Edith are supposed to walk into the office of Herr Flick and substitute the real with the fake. Of course, they fail – which means that Herr Flick now both has the fake and the original plus a second forgery, which he commissioned on his own in order to have money for his marriage with Helga after the war.

After the British airmen are gone for good – or so René thinks – there is still the problem of Herr Flick owning all three copies of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies (one original and two fakes), and while Herr Flick kidnaps Lieutenant Gruber (a former art house worker), the Colonel and the Captain start to plan their next move. All the while, René's widow Edith have found René's will, and being the sole beneficiary, goes on a spending spree with René's money to attract better suitors. And the British airmen return as nuns. They are last seen hidden in the piano.

René is caught in a dilemma when he must choose between the women he loves: his waitresses Yvette and Marie, and his wife Edith, who as his widow has all his money. Unfortunately, he cannot bring himself to woo Edith again, so Edith seeks the attention that she can get from other suitors in town.

Having been trapped in the POW camp, René is enlisted in the plan to re-dig the tunnel, by getting rid of the dirt. Hans and the Colonel are playing cricket, though not very well, and Herr Flick and Von Smallhausen are digging their own tunnel into the camp. Monsieur Alphonse arrives at the café to report to Fanny the news that René has been captured, but René and Company join in on the British prisoners' plan to escape – though only one person can escape in this way. Meanwhile, Helga reports the situation to Gruber, and together they decide on a plan to rescue the Colonel, the Captain, and René, involving Gruber dressing as a nun.