From The Demi-Paradise

"..Much of the world thinks that you care only about money, and you care much more about cricket or nightingales or a good job well done. Much of the world thinks that you are perfidious and hypocritical and you are warm and kindly and do you know why the world thinks these things? Because you want it to, it amuses you, it pleases that dreadful sense of humor of yours, and that sense of humor is perhaps the guiding factor of your lives. If you can laugh at life and at yourself, you can be tolerant, if you can laugh, you must hate persecution, you must love decency. Above all you must love freedom, for there is no laughter where there is no freedom. ... today we are allies, friends - let us remain friends. Let us fight together in the years to come and then laugh together in the years afterwards -- fight selfishness and greed and violence and then laugh them out of existence

The Demi-Paridise

The film is a gentle satire on the values the English hold so dear. It was designed to encourage sympathy between Britain and the Soviet Union. The film's title is a reference to John of Gaunt's famous speech in Richard II which begins:
This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise