Is This The Way To Army-rillo?

6:02pm UK, Tuesday May 17, 2005

After weeks topping the charts, Tony Christie's Is This The Way To Amarillo has achieved new notoriety - by crashing Ministry of Defence computers.

British troops from the Royal Dragoon Guards based in Iraq produced a spoof version of the video at their base in Al Faw before emailing it back to army friends in London.

Staff Sgt Roger Parr in leading role

But the new version of the Comic Relief video, which saw comedian Peter Kay miming to Christie's song, proved so popular at the MoD that it crashed the server because it took up so much memory on computers.

The Army saw the funny side and said that the crash was unfortunate but did not effect operations.

Each download took up 52 megabytes of memory, according to The Sun.

As well as bringing down the MoD in Whitehall the video also made it to Strike Command headquarters at High Wycombe, Bucks, and an underground bunker controlling Britain's air defence and warplanes, the paper says.

An MoD spokesman said: "The video is brilliant. Soldiers maintaining their morale on operations is always important.

"The fact that it proved so popular in the office and caused the system to crash is unfortunate but this did not affect operations and the system is up and running again."

The role of Peter Kay in the video - called Is This The Way To Armadillo - was taken on by lookalike, Staff Sergeant Roger Parr from the Dragoon Guards' tank regiment.

In the video, which was emailed around last Friday - he marches through the Iraqi camp mimicking the comedian and summoning up fellow squaddies along the way.