I'd never previously heard of this radio and TV phenomenon from 1950's. I watched the 1954 film to go along with the "House of Hammer" podcast. Whilst was initially amusing, I soon found it transformed to wearing.
Ben Lyon (Ben Lyon) moves to a house in Marble Arch, London with his wife Bebe (Bebe Daniel), daughter Barbara (Barbara Lyon) and idiot son Ben (Ben Lyon). They move in on a short-term lease ahead of purchasing the property from house proud Mr Hemingway (Hugh Morton). A series of calamities befall them as they try to convince Hemingway that they are responsible enough to take on the house.
Effectively this was a feature length pilot for the series that followed on the BBC soon afterwards. The real-life family transfer their act from the radio to this visual medium and to a degree its successful. None of them are tasked with being particularly good actors, so their broad performances don't jar because nobody in the film is downplaying anything. It's not so much a film as a collection of vignettes, introductions, skis in the hall, clean the chandelier, cook a meal, build a water feature. Often, they involve an amount of physical slapstick comedy, but mostly, as you might expect from the radio origin there's a lot of verbal gags, witticisms, and asides. There's not much consistency in main character Ben, who seems capable of buying a house but doesn't seem to know that you need to peel apples for an apple pie. Molly Weir, of "Rentaghost" and The Vaselines fame has a role in the film as the Lyon's Scottish Housekeeper, it too is a broad performance but fits in with the film.
I felt the film was relatively charming and amusing in the first few minutes, but for me, it quickly became a bit of a drag and I turned on the characters - particularly the ridiculous children pretty quickly. (by the way, Ben repeatedly turning down Belinda Lee - you should be so lucky).
