Allo Allo
Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once....
Set during World War II 'Allo 'Allo! tells the story of René Artois, a French café owner in the town of Nouvion, during the early 1940s. Germans have occupied the town and stolen all of its valuable artefacts.
These include a painting of the Vase with the Twelve Sunflowers by Van Gogh (known to those who have seen it as the The Cracked Vase with the big Daisies) and a painting of The Fallen Madonna by Van Klomp (known to those who have seen it as The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies). The five local commandants, Colonel Kurt Von Strohm, Lieutenant Hubert Gruber, General Erich Von Klinkerhoffen, Captain Alberto Bertorelli and Captain Hans Geering have decided to keep them for themselves after the war and force René to hide the paintings in his café.
Hitler also wants the paintings, and sends Herr Otto Flick of the Gestapo to the town to find them. Flick, in turn, conspires to keep them. The paintings are duplicated by a forger, get mixed up, lost, found and are put in knackwurst sausages, and hidden in the cellar of Cafe Rene.
At the same time, the café is being used as a safe house for two brave but clueless British airmen, Fairfax and Carstairs. René is forced to work with the Resistance, led by Michelle Dubois, who threaten to shoot him for serving Germans in his café. The far-fetched plans of the Resistance to get the airmen back to England repeatedly fail. These are some of the main running gags of the series.
As part of these plans, the Resistance have placed a radio in the bedroom of René's mother-in-law, Madame Fanny La Fan, as this is the only room nobody goes into unless they have to. This secret communication device between London and the resistance (codename "Nighthawk") is hidden under the bed, and incoming messages are signalled by triggering the light bulbs concealed in the bed-knobs, leading the elderly mother-in-law to cry "Ze flashing knobs!". René answers with "'Allo, 'allo, zis is Night'awk, are you receiving me?", hence the title of the show ("allô" is the normal French way of greeting someone over a remote communication system).
The Resistance is also helped by Officer Crabtree, a British spy posing as a policeman sent to France because he can speak French. However, he does not speak it well, resulting in frequent malapropisms. For example, whenever he says "Good morning", it comes out as "Good moaning".
Cache is a small tablock box