Both begin with an England grossly unprepared for war and depending on outmoded traditions and building a tradition for muddling through.

A squadron of Tommies, all gloriously drunk on wicked mischief, set out to launch a surprise attack on the Turkish bath in London where their Commanding Officer Major General Clive Candy is relaxing in the welcome warmth before the actual drill begins. He was of Irish descent, but spent most of his childhood in India and lived most of his later life in England, moving to Australia after retirement. Although he was also a talented musician, he became known for his mad cap and often surreal comedy writing, particularly his work on the Goon Show. If you have ever watched the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classic 'The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp', you would remember the frenetic comic frenzy of the first fifteen minutes, choreographed like a comic interlude.

Now, imagine if Monty Python directed this film and expanded the goofball humour of the first fifteen minutes into a full-length feature packed with more gags and brilliant, blistering British wit and wisecracks than you could digest in one go.

Bexhill, Pevensey Bay, and "Robin's Post" (a private house used by the regiment) each have a script named for them. The presentation is an unusual format freely mixing narrative anecdotes, contemporary photography, excerpts from diaries, letters, rough sketches and performance programs, along with comic sketches and absurd fake memoranda from ranking Nazi officials; the hard facts are usually apparent. Roughly every third sentence is a joke, and most are good - sometimes, randomly, the horrors and insanity of his situation creeps in for a paragraph where he describes (without joking) how a fellow soldier died in an accident, or how decades later he visited the same place and cannot deal with the ghosts ('What’s happened to us all since then?We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. He is famous for his work in The Goon Show, children's poetry and a series of comical autobiographical novels about his experiences serving in the British Army in WWII.

There are lighter comic digs made at stiff-upper-lipped authority, the abysmal cooking, the futile marches and camping trails that only amount up to idleness, farce and trivial affairs. The last page for example when he talks about two tragedies, lightens it with the story of the Burnt Bum Affair before hitting you with the final line.The book contains plenty of surprising and frequently outrageous anecdotes, many of which are loud out loud funny. It's like director Norman Cohen was influence by two then recent films, "MASH" and "Oh What A Lovely War", both anti war comic looks at war and what he should have done was a Carry On type of film.