John Cleese in 'Privates on Parade'

John Cleese plays a starring role in 'Privates on Parade', a 1982 film adaptation of the Peter Nichols play of the same title about a fictional  military entertainment group, the 'Song and Dance Unit, Southeast Asia' (SADUSEA) assembled to entertain the troops in the Malayan jungle in the years after World War II.

The play is set around the activities and exploits of SADUSEA, a mostly gay British military concert party stationed in Singapore and Malaya in the late 1940s during the Malayan Emergency. The drama draws upon Nichols' own experiences in the real-life Combined Services Entertainment, the postwar successor to ENSA, Entertainments National Service Association.





The film is available as a DVD and you can watch an extract below: