PETER Richardson was once part of the Comic Strip, those comic radicals of the British Eighties. He was responsible for the surrealist satire Strike!, the one where he played Al Pacino playing Arthur Scargill.

He was always hit and miss, and alas Churchill: The Hollywood Years is all miss and no hit on Richardson's return to his comedy roots.

The Comedy Strip cupboard has been stripped bare, and the result is the most embarrassing British comedy since Johnny Vegas and Mackenzie Crook stumbled around oafishly in Sex Lives Of The Potato Men.

Now Crook has a turkey to go with his Potato because he has an excruciating cameo as Irishman Jim Charoo, but he is not alone in committing crimes against comedy.

Vic and Bob ponce about as a pair of Royal footmen, Bendie and Potter, with not one chuckle between them; Leslie Phillips does his old rogue schtick, this time as a Nazi sympathiser; Rik Mayall continues his sad decline in a nondescript cameo that appropriately ends in the river; and Jon Culshaw does his President Blair impression again.

What Richardson is attempting is to take Hollywood's rewriting of history to its ultimate conclusion (although the Holy Grail will remain turning the Vietnam War into an American victory).

"We shall fight them in our breaches," says the familiar voice of Churchill, as Richardson fires the first of many blanks, but that Churchill is then rudely removed and history is torn apart. That portly, cigar-smoking Churchill was in fact a stooge, an after-dinner speaker and character actor by the name of Roy Bubbles.

The real Churchill was a muscular, mouthy, gun-slinging, rapping American GI (Christian Slater), who came to the rescue of the Brits and scored with Princess Elizabeth (Neve Campbell, doing her Renee Zellweger does English routine). You can be forgiven for groaning at the thought, and the reality is even worse.

Miranda Richardson wastes herself as Eva Braun, and the irony of casting a Jewish actor, Anthony Sher, as Adolf Hitler, is never exploited. Only Harry Enfield's chain-smoking, party-pooping King George cuts even the slightest mustard.

Churchill? Oh no!

Updated: 09:32 Friday, December 03, 2004