Spike Milligan's humour was always an acquired taste - the marriage of a vivid imagination to an anarchic sense of the absurd appealing to many including Prince Charles.

On a good day his lightning wit surreally nailed targets such as the pompous and self-important...but on others it was like spending a wet afternoon with a truculent toddler.

Puckoon, his literary debut, was first published in 1963 a few years before "the Troubles" erupted into a orgy of sectarian killing.

Unburdened by knowledge of the gathering storm, it appears a innocent celebration of the lunacies surrounding the imposition of the Irish boundary line in 1924.

Puckoon is that Irish village of legend, full of harmless locals conversing in surreal dialogue and seemingly oblivious of the world around them.

Beer-swilling wastrel Dan Maddigan (Hughes) is well down the pecking order in a hamlet where the pecking order is pretty low already.

His bicycle collision with Boundary Commissioners results in the red line dividing Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic skitting across the map and cutting Puckoon in half.

The boundary severs the public bar (so beer tax means the ale is 30% cheaper in the north, next to the fire), outside loos are in another country and a line divides the cemetery and church.

To police the new frontier, the British Army sends in Colonel Stokes, Rhys Jones doing his best Captain Mainwaring from Dad's Army impression.

So what we have is the premise for a hilarious catalogue of misunderstanding - native Irish ingenuity set against blustering British officialdom.

What we get is a depressingly hackneyed trawl through every Irish cliche and stereotype committed to film weighed down by heavy-handed satire and wince-inducing gags.

For goodness sake, we even get David Kelly reprising the idiot savant role he brought to TV sitcom Robin's Next back in the seventies.

Hughes' relaxed approach to his part (the one with all the best lines) is soporific while Daragh O'Malley's priest comes straight out of central casting, drink habit and all.

"This book nearly drove me mad," said Milligan of the source novel. The film has pretty much the same effect.

Tim Evans