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 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.

For some strange reason, I recorded this movie one afternoon when it aired and my brother still has it on tape. Hilarious. Ralph Richardson, MIcheal HOrdern, Dudley Moore and Peter cooke were incredibly funny, but Mona Washburne as Mother had us laughing mostly, such as when nurse marty Feldman informed her she had died while she was still very much alive. "Well, you can't argue with it. There it is in black and white." and especially when she was throwing the dishes and was called a 'slut'. "Get out of here, ya slut." too funny! Rita Tushingham gets a bit irritating as the youthful voice of reason, possibly what hurts this movie most, but Peter Cooke's dialogue is priceless. Absolutely priceless. Then of course, we have to pay homage to our Royal Family. Or as close as we can get. Mrs. Ethel Stronk, was it?

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.

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.

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!