Honestly, it's the funniest thing I've read in years and I have now bought all the other books of Spike's in this series. Dale was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles for his performance.

There are some wonderful set pieces like Spike being conned into fighting a much bigger oppenant and when should have been a sidesplitting war games adventure, but the comic payoffs aren't there. This is an utterly surreal, joyous and irreverent look at Spike Milligan’s time as a young soldier in WWII. I would sugest that people should endevour to get the original version to get an understanding of the total cock- up that he was thrown into in his first few days of the war.The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. Simple yet effectively stirring and utterly believable because this was exactly how everybody felt in those days. As a lover of music, the talk of Milligan forming a band, playing gigs and their love for jazz made me unbearably happy. At any given time, according to Milligan, hundreds of men were in transit between regiments that didn't want them.

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.Yes, that is what some of this book, the first in the series of wartime memoirs by celebrated British comedian Spike Milligan (who was, coincidentally, the inspiration for Monty Python in the first place with his group act 'The Goon Show'), would feel like: hilarious, anarchic, almost brutally sarcastic, bawdy and guaranteed to leave you in splits.