The Bed Sitting Room

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 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.

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 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.

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!