You'll be surprised to hear that wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, wasn't a cigar-chomping, brandy-swilling Tory with a face like a newborn.

No, he was a thirty-something American GI who departed from the battlefield of Europe to pursuade Britain's King George to join the war effort against the Nazis.

But what he didn't realise was that a slippery Buck House aide was secretly negotiating with Hitler and his henchmen behind the king's back.

Comic Strip director Peter Richardson has martialed Britain's comedy high-fliers to breathe farcical life into his splendid rewriting of World War II.

So we have Harry Enfield as a Scottish King George, Leslie Phillips as the duplicitous Lord W'Ruff and Rik Mayall as buffoonish army commander Baxter.

Reeves and Mortimer mug it up as a pair of mincing palace footmen - Vic is under the impression that Mein Kampf - Me In Camp F - is a gay prison story.

Cocking a knowing snook at Bruce Willis is Christian Slater, who plays Churchill as a grubby-vested man of action at a loss at limey incompetence.

He falls for young Princess Elizabeth (Neve Campbell with a cut-glass English accent) but he's got to sort out the dastardly Hun first.

This could have been a disaster on a scale of the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force but Richardson keeps the action tight and the characters splendidly cartoonish.

It helps that he's working off a gloriously un-PC script which irresistibly trashes everything that our great nation holds dear.

There's a dig at Hollywood revisionism which saw the Americans discover the German Enigma machine in U-571 and marginalise British efforts in Saving Private Ryan.

Anthony Sher is on fine goose-stepping form as Hitler, while Phil Cornwell is creepily thuggish as Martin Borman (he was born in Leyton... not a lot of people know that).

Apart from the fact that Adolf planned to marry our own good queen, the biggest surprise here is to report the arrival - after Shaun Of The Dead - of a damned fine British comedy.

Tim Evans