GERMANY: The German village of Mödlareuth is the real-life Puckoon and, like Spike Milligan's imaginary town, well used to division.
For 41 years the iron curtain ran straight through this village, dubbed "Little Berlin" by the American soldiers stationed nearby.
As Germany marked 15 years of national unity yesterday, locals in Mödlareuth celebrated a decade and a half as a united village.
While the 166km-long Berlin Wall turned West Berlin into a capitalist island in communist East Germany, Mödlareuth was divided by the other wall, the 1,400km inner-German border of concrete, minefields and watchtowers.
After the second World War the Bavarian side, including the village church, was suddenly part of the American, later Allied sector, while the school and the pub was in the Soviet zone.
The division deepened with the 1949 foundation of West and East Germany, when villagers could cross the border only with a special pass.
Three years later, nearly a decade before the Berlin Wall was built, GDR authorities created a 10m buffer zone between the two sides.
Then the first buildings were demolished and trees felled for the new, permanent border. A strict curfew was imposed and even waving at friends or family across the border could get you into trouble.
"We had two waves of forced resettlement here and the people who were left were threatened. They said: 'You'll be moved too unless you behave yourselves'," remembers local historian Arndt Schaffner.
A 700m-long concrete wall, three metres 30cm high, was eventually constructed through the centre of the village in 1966, surrounded by a death-strip with automatic machine guns and a separate run for guard dogs.
"The world was divided and this is where the two great military blocs, Nato and the Warsaw Pact, came eye-to-eye," says local journalist Berthold Dücker in the new documentary On the Trail of the Inner German Border.
The pedestrian crossing between East and West Mödlareuth was finally opened in December 1989, two months after the Berlin Wall fell.
More than 20 German villages had a similar fate, but only Mödlareuth has retained part of its wall, now the main attraction of the town's German-German museum visited by more than 50,000 tourists a year.
Unlike other border areas in Germany, there's still plenty to see here: watchtowers, barbed wire and a border stone bearing the GDR hammer, compass and wreath insignia.
Like the rest of Germany, however, the euphoric post-unification months are long gone and, apart from the easterners who work in Bavaria, the 50 villagers go their separate ways.
There are still two mayors, two telephone area codes and two post codes. The villagers on the Bavarian side greet each other with "Grüß Gott" while the villagers in the state of Thuringia say "Guten Tag".
In the town's museum, pride of place is reserved for a quote from 16 years ago: "To present reunification as a realistic goal is reactionary and highly dangerous". The speaker? Gerhard Schröder.