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Just two years after the end of the 'frightened fifties', Spike Milligan wrote the play "The Bed Sitting Room", a black comedy about life in post-apocalyptic London and, in 1969, Richard Lester directed this film version. The film is essentially an interconnected series of absurdist sketches featuring some of England's best known comedians playing survivors in the radioactive aftermath of a two minute war (the "nuclear misunderstanding"). In the film's off-kilter reality, mutations are causing dramatic changes to people, including Lord Fortnum's (Sir Ralph Richardson) literal metamorphosis into the titular room and 'Mother's' (Mona Washbourne) change into a wardrobe (setting up the line "Get your hands out of my drawers!"). These strange events are all monitored by the Police Inspector (Peter Cook) and his Sergeant (Dudley Moore), either from their balloon-lofted Morris Minor or their wreaking-ball equipped bulldozer. I found the film is more fascinating than funny: some of the humour I liked (such as the BBC host) but some resembled forgettable Monty Python sketches (the Underwater Vicar comes to mind). The strange, bleak and sometimes surreal settings are the best part of the film, especially the vast piles of shoes and of the mountain of broken crockery. Apparently in a 1988 interview, Milligan said that the play was his way of saying that after the apocalypse life would just go on, with all of its absurdities intact. If that was indeed the raison d'être for the film, it was completely lost on me and I have no idea what other viewers will make of this strange, dated yet oddly compelling pitch-black farce.

This was a commercial disaster on release and has been little seen since. It was written by Spike Milligan and it is set in a post-apocalyptic world populated by very few people. The cast is very good with Milligan, Michael Hordern, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Harry Secombe, Roy Kinnear, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Marty Feldman etc on hand. There is barely a story and it is more a series of situations which are driven by the eccentric characters who live on the barren wasteland. The tone is comedic and absurd throughout and it looks great visually. As the old saying goes, it's certainly not for everyone but it's a bizarre film which is enjoyable so long as you can get into its peculiar groove.

This is a visually stunning, funny, brilliant, and extravagantly weird film that should best be compared to El Topo, Barbarella, Playtime, and the Cremaster series. It's the kind of movie made with a big studio budget and free artistic reign; a combination that existed in other late 60s and early 70s bombs that have become cult classics.

Imagine if Monty Python did a lot of LSD, spent a million dollars on art direction, and then made a nuclear-apocalypse satire. Each shot is as sumptuous and symbolically rich as any Mathew Barney created - what with middle class Brits walking on a field of broken china, Underground escalators that end in mid-air, and Cathedrals submerged in water. Plot-wise, this is as free-of-field as an experimental film. Whether you think it profoundly beautiful or profoundly ugly, the look is in the Quay brothers'/Dubuffet mold. Its narrative loosely strings together amazing images, costumes, and poignant, often hilarious scenes of British society desperately trying to hold on to any remaining shards of civilization. The Bed Sitting Room is full of sarcastic comments and profound notions. It is not full of plot - it's amazing without it.

If there is any chance to see this movie on screen, take it. Any frame is worth the price of admission.

Very much 'of it's time' but featuring some of the best British comedy actors going as best they could with the script. Decent reviews here (apart from the class clown one several back going on about Brexit). For the ultimate 'stay at home binge' I suggest you stock up with snacks & your favourite tipple then watch this followed by the 'Sir Henry at Rawlinson End' film.

It's post-apocalyptic Britain. It's three or four years after an extremely short nuclear WW3. The subway still works but it's not quite the same. Various wacky characters roam the devastated land.

This absurdist comedy has plenty of weird. First, this needs a lead character or a single group of lead characters. The plot is meandering at best. I don't know what anyone is doing. The comedy is spotty since plenty is lost in translation and over time. It's one basic joke of a weird post-apocalyptic world over and over again. I still don't know what is a bed sitting room. One may recognize a few of the faces. It's all very random and not always that funny. It is weirdly appealing.

This film is set in Britain several years after WWIII--a war that concluded after only 2 or 3 minutes. In its wake, the country is a post-apocalyptic mess--and the survivors, in true British fashion, struggle to maintain their everyday lives and keep a stiff upper lip. I enjoyed hearing the way people referred to the war (because they DIDN'T call it a war--more of a 'misunderstanding'!) and seeing the BBC news was a hoot. In fact, the first 10 minutes or so of "The Bed Sitting Room" was very enjoyable. Unfortunately, there was another 80 minutes to go! Yes, this is a wonderful example of a nice concept for a short sketch being drug out to an incredibly over-long mess. To me, it all became very ponderous after a while. Now don't assume that I just don't like British comedy--many of my favorite films and shows over the years are from the UK. It's just that the pacing of this film was dreadful and it desperately needed SOMETHING--not just more of the same. A clear misfire.

Pilloried in the decade that was His Time, Richard Lester had radishes thrown at him for being "modish," gimmicky, aggressively hip. (The great Manny Farber was uncharacteristically cruel, cruel.) He may seem in some lights like the Austin Powers of auteurs, but time has been kind both to his formal gifts (as magnificent as Nicolas Roeg's--or David Fincher's) and to the complicated, unsentimental, but hard-beating heart at the center of his movies. At least one Lester work, 1968's PETULIA, ranks among the greatest movies ever made. This little-seen classic, a sort of British-seaside ENDGAME, gets my vote as the most thrillingly beautiful end-of-the-world movie ever.

Coauthored by the "Goon Show" genius Spike Milligan, this post-apocalypse omnibus of sketches suggests John Osborne's Archie Rice rewriting an absurdist play by Gombrowicz. Tweedy lord Ralph Richardson post-atomically mutates into a bed sitting room while sixtyish, uncombed Michael Hordern uses the state of general unrest to get into bed with Rita Tushingham. (Her pregnancy arouses Hordern--until she gives birth, after seventeen months, to what is either a bird or a large pile of felt.) And above it all, Peter Cook flies on a hot-air balloon as a sexy cockney sadist--the post-nuclear Prime Minister to be, the first-draft choice of the Clockwork Orange Party.

A plot summary does no justice to Lester's and the DP David Watkin's images, which challenge the Vesuvian frescos of FELLINI SATYRICON for sheer overwhelmage. And the work of Lester's longtime composer Kenneth Thorne, with its English merriment never once acknowledging its own irony, ranks with the tip-top achievements of Rota or Morricone. This is a beautiful, haunting, great, sadly completely forgotten movie. Film hipsters have had their day lapping up Lucio Fulci and Jess Franco. Bring back a guy who once had a real job! Up with Lester!

The 1960s satire boom did not only lead to the Monty Pythons, although they remain the Holy Grail of British comedy (haha, did you get it??). At approximately the same time as the "Flying Circus" was irremediably savaging the minds of millions of unsuspecting Brits, "The Bed Sitting Room" was released to equally unsuspecting Brit audiences (they clearly are more circumspect by now). Both share the same type of nonsensical satirical humor, while Richard Lester's film deftly mocks the absurdities of war (the conflict lasted 2mn28sec, including the signing of the peace treaty, a line which never fails to amuse me). After all these years, though, let's be frank and subversive: "The Bed Sitting Room" kind of lags in the middle (like my... wit). It started out as a one-act, one-man play in 1962, and I feel whoever adapted it as a longer story did not entirely succeed (or try very hard). Some of it feels, after a while, heavily repetitive, with subplots concerning an annoying trunk and a hasty marriage which fail to amuse me much (when you are short on ideas, just introduce a cuckold husband, that will do the trick). The soundtrack, with its heavy-handed emphasis of comical moments ('hey, this is funny, hahaha!') also gets on my nerves. So I would agree with reviewers who have, since the film's release, been pointing out the amount of padding that hinders the film (well, yes, I try to make sure none of my ideas are actually original, that would be pretentious really). Overall, though, this is still a fine example of Oh So British satirical humor, and nobody does it better... than the Monty Pythons.

One of those movies where one looks at everyone involved with the film and thinks a surefire hit but it isn't. Really just a series of skits about carrying on in the English way after a nuclear attack, the film never connects in any way with the viewer. Originally a play by Spike Milligan, I have a feeling that on paper the movie would seem hilarious and though a couple of scenes translate well (the tube train that keeps running even though no one needs it and the wedding) most of the skits fall flat. I, for one, cringed every time Marty Feldman appeared wearing a nurses uniform. Maybe part of the problem is that the film is definitely targeted towards a British audience and since I'm American, I don't get it but I think that even the English would find it dated today.

This is a wonderful surreal comedy based on the play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. You know that it is going to be an odd film right at the beginning, when the opening credits list the cast in order of their height. The film begins with the BBC (Frank Thornton) telling us through the facade of an old television that this is the third, or is it the fourth?, anniversary of the shortest war in history, lasting 2 hours and 28 minutes. England is now a barren landscape, littered with derelict cars and buildings, hills of old boots, broken crockery, and other debris. Forty million people perished and there are only 20 known survivors. The Queen did not survive, and of the 20 known survivors the next in line for the throne is a Mrs Ethel Schroake of 393a High Street, Leytonstone. Among the other survivors are Ralph Richardson (O Lucky Man!) as Lord Fortnum of Alamein, who isn't looking forward to his impending mutation into a bed sitting room. Michael Hordern is Bules Martin, who wears a 18-carat Hovis bread ring. Spike Milligan is a postman who wanders around and delivers some memorable dialogue, for example: "And in come the three bears - the daddy bear said, 'Who's been sleeping in my porridge?' - and the mummy bear said, 'that's no porridge, that was my wife' ". Arthur Lowe is slowly turning into a parrot (which is then eaten by Spike Milligan), while his wife, the owner of her own death certificate, turns into a wardrobe. His daughter is pregnant with a strange creature, which she has held inside her for seventeen months. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are a pair of policemen who perpetually tell the others to "keep moving!". Moore growls a lot and turns into a dog at the end. Marty Feldman is a wellington-boot-wearing nurse. It's a hilarious, absurdist treat, and one of my treasured filmic pleasures.

After the grim realism of Peter Watkins' 'The War Game' this film marked the sixties' headlong retreat into total fantasy in which the Central Line still functions and radiation causes mutation into a bed-sitting room rather than boring old radiation sickness.

An amazing cast - including two Goons - make complete fools of themselves in the film in which Dick Lester blew once and for all blew all the professional capital he'd made directing the Beatles.

Ken Thorne's music like the rest of the film is likeable but far too emphatic.

Buried in the sheer oddity and downright perversity of the humour there is a deep pathos. People of all classes from Lord to lunatic try through activities and language to cling to a civilization represented by heaps of objects. The horrors of holocaust are tempered by humour arising mainly from the ridiculous pretensions of the cast. Every mainstay of British middle and upper class culture has been made absurd - some of the characters are busy mutating into absurd objects - a bed sitting room, a wardrobe, a parrot. The humour is zany, the one-liners often mixing double entendre, understatement and naievity with real pathos. Arthur Lowe as the pompous father, Mona Washbourne as the all-sympathetic mother can bring a lump to the throat.

The nearest rival to Milligan's and Antrobus' satire is to be found in Swift. Lampooning society after it has endured the very worst of tragedies and demonstrating through a torrent of absurdities, that human decency survives is something difficult to sustain in text, but this Fellini-like panorama could never be contained by the pages of a book. It almost defines one of the things which film can do best.

It is ragged and patchy - but a film which includes Harry Seacombe as a 'regional seat of government' defies conventional criticism!

A very strange film, this one, a surreal post-apocalypse comedy with some broad satire aimed at British politics and culture. It's quite unmissable on account of the incredible cast of famous faces and worth seeing just for them doing their bit, but the rest is more of a sketch show than anything else. It's moderately funny, on par with a typical MONTY PYTHON episode of the era.

Some far thinking person at our new state of the art Village Twin Cinema decided to run The Bed Sitting Room and 2001: A Space Oddyssey as a double bill here in the very early '70's. That's where I first saw both and they have been locked in my consciousness as equally great and poignant comments on the "future". In one we get to boldly explore space, the other has us desperately rummaging in our own refuse to survive.

In August 2001 I wrote "I ache to see "Bed Sitting Room" again. Arthur Lowe and Mona Washbourne were exemplary, as was Ralph Richardson (and all of the rest). With the torrents of abominable drivel that has made it to DVD release, it is hard to fathom why such a unique gem is not even available on VHS. If there is a God he will inspire a DVD mogul to master and release The Bed Sitting Room, for the good of humanity - if not for my sake alone."

So now I am overjoyed that the Bed Sitting Room has been made future-proof and available to the general public in the carefully restored high definition MGM transfer which was simultaneously released on Blu-ray and DVD in the UK in 2009 by the British Film Institute. Both versions have valuable extras and a very helpful booklet.

After a "nuclear misunderstanding" has left 40 million people around the globe dead, an aimless, straggling group of survivors in and around London appear to be blithely ignorant of their own circumstances. Apocalyptic satire from director Richard Lester came complete with a defensive ad campaign which put down potential naysayers of the picture by proclaiming its humor was "over their heads". Lester could never be called a piquant filmmaker--more often than not he's simply smug--however, his crazy imagination and staging occasionally reveals a despairing underbelly which holds a lot more resonance than the revue-styled humor. Adapted from a play by John Antrobus and Spike Milligan, the film is mostly filled with the same type of punch-drunk, tail-chasing blackout sketches which permeated Lester's 1967 WWII satire, "How I Won the War". It's the kind of dried-up, far-out humor some admirers like to label as 'savage', though the jokes would be far more cutting had the characters not been so unappealing. A great deal of top British talent was employed here, yet the on-screen chattering eventually congeals into a head-splitting din. David Watkin's (appropriately) bleak cinematography is exceptionally strong--too strong and ugly, perhaps, for a farce. Results are strangely fatigued, scattered (albeit intentionally), and risible. *1/2 from ****

With it's completely surreal narrative and winning photography, The bed Sitting room hits me now for a number of reasons, the first of which, is that despite looking strangely contemporary, all it's main leads (Except the young uns) are dead. Marty Feldman, Micheal Horden, Arthur Lowe, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan and Sir Ralph, are all pushing up the daisies. There's something tragic about the cast in a comedy all being dead. For all intense and purposes, the film may as well be dead too as it was blind luck that I caught it. It is criminal that this bona fide classic never really made it past the main gates, while lesser films took the glory.

Made by Richard lester (A hard Days Night, Superman 2 & 3) in 1969, just before Monty Python hit pay dirt, it tells the story of Brits after the bomb, working class through to upper, it encapsulates the British eccentricities perfectly. It's pomposity and its sheer blooded bloody optimism. These characters, you might see on the tube on the way to work and despite furniture mutation and hunger, they're just the same. It's a testament to all concerned, that a potentially silly premise, is performed with total conviction and a little tragedy. It's especially weird to see Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir Micheal Horden as leads. In such a bizarre film, it swings the whole experience into brain frying proportions. It'd be like having Sir Ben Kingsley play Ace Ventura, Pet detective.

Another reason, this film is a triumph, is the superb set design and photography. While in Monty Python, it's surrealistic landscapes, while funny and inventive, never really touches the views on offer here, What was essentially a quarry, is now landmarks of Britain, with bits of it sticking out all over the place. stacks of shoes, dismembered traffic jams and indeed Bed sitting rooms clog up the toxic horizon, all glum and desolate, you half believe the story, as the landscape seems sort of real. I'll bet my mums dog that Python was influenced by the designs on display here. As the film was based on a play (By Spike Milligan and John Antrobus) I wonder how it looked in a theatre.

There you have it, a classic film in every way if you like that sort of thing. If you catch it, you'll wonder if you saw it, then you'll be angry that you've never heard of it, after that you'll never forget it, it's just a shame you'll probably never get to see it...

Apalling movie. I have to question how Spike Milligan came to be considered a comedy genius if this is the kind of tripe he produced. Some of the biggest names in British TV/cinema of the day, they should have known better but I guess it's a case of never mind the quality, feel the cash.

Richard Lester's directorial career went into nose-dive (at least for a while) after making this film, which was a pity. It's a post-apocalyptic black comedy like no other. Typically British and typically Milligan-ish, with a stunning visual sense.

What I enjoy most about this film is its uncompromising weirdness. It's incredibly inventive, if not particularly funny, and also quite depressing - but it has to be, dealing with the aftermath of nuclear war.

There are some excellent performances from a cast which seems to contain most of the outstanding British comedy talent of the last thirty years (Marty Feldman is particularly fine) and some pointed satire about the British "stiff upper lip", but it's the surreal visuals which stand out, including the remains of a motorway with hundreds of cars half-buried in mud, and an escalator emerging into a landscape almost entirely composed of broken crockery.

A flawed masterpiece.

Not really the comedy film I was expecting as there was no attempt at funny situations or building up to a laugh. A waste of effort all round especially the actors and actresses who had very bad lines to perform and I suspect that the big names were there to con people to go and see it expecting that it could not be a bad film with so many of them it it, but it was. One of the worst ever British/English films.

The fear of mutating into a small apartment, in a world where building is forbidden! Or the best metaphor for a fear of progress or "modernity", I've ever come across.

One of the oddest things I've ever seen. Richard Lester must have an impressive budget for this. All the sets are ruins, but they are amazing ruins, cathedrals submerged in water, escalates to nowhere...a bed-sitting room in the middle of the desert.

At some point in the past England lost WW3, the shortest and most nuclear of wars, which has left Englands surviving population of about 20 or so completely, if not near completely insane. Those that are not insane, like Dudley more in his balloon powered police car, forbidding people from any kind of re-construction (less the attacks be re-provoked), well these other people are suffering bizarre mutations..mostly into furniture.

After a Lord transforms, slowly and hilariously into a full on bed sitting room, others begin mutating, into Cabinents and parrots.

The life of a pregnant girl and her family who have been living on the subway (riding in perpetual circles), who decide to go back to the surface world, coincides with the story of our Lord the bed sitting room, which represents a real problem...not only is the man an object, hes the first new building, and sign of civilization in years. When he asks a doctor what he should do about it, "My advice, charge 20 quid rent, be mindful of drafts".

Hijinks ensue, and though bleak at times (a few shades light of a dead baby joke), Richard Lester's madcap "The Bed Sitting Room", is one of those odd, clever, allegorical comedies, that's just too smart for it's own good. Too political and absurd in it's time, to have been properly appreciated. For people who like Monty Python, Alejandro Jodorowsky, or Steven Soderbergs "Schizopolis", of whom Richard Lester is the driving influence, this is the only post-ASPCA-slapstick comedy you need to watch.

This is the ultimate reason why you shouldn't fill your movie with every British talent available just for the sake of it, The Story is abysmal and to be totally honest it's embarrassing that the talent starring in the film accepted the paycheck in the first place, hopefully not a single one of the them had this high up on their list of achievements as the best performance was.a parrot chewing on a pen.

I saw it in 1969 and will never forget it.

The cast was a fine cross section of the best Pommie comedy actors of the period.

The sight of Marty Feldman in a nurses uniform with Crossed Bandoliers of syringes was surpassed only by Harry Secombes ode to the Pin Up.

Would love to get it on Video - Does anyone know how we can get it onto CD, Video, whatever.

This is a movie that has followed me all throughout my life even though I have only watched it one time approx. 22 years ago. The classic British humor in this prepared me to enjoy other comedy such as Monty Python. I am new to the net and am desperately trying to purchase a copy of this masterpiece to dedicate to the now deceased friend I had watched it with years ago. Any suggestions would be appreciated.