The Bed Sitting Room

Why, 60 years on, Spike Milligan's Bed Sitting Room is as relevant as ever

Spike Milligan's post-apocalyptic dark comedy The Bed Sitting Room has not been performed on stage for almost 40 years. Now, ahead of a rehearsed reading of the script that the former Goon wrote with John Antrobus, producer John Hewer recalls what drew him to the project...

Remember when: Bed Sitting Room left our critic cold

The original play did not impress the Glasgow Herald's drama critic, Christopher Small. Noting the presence of some "antique, good-humoured, humane ... veteran gags", he said they stood out with a noble solidity in the shambles around them, and that Milligan had a tender feeling for them.

The Bed Sitting Room Review

A very British apocalypse from Richard Lester, based on the satirical one-act stage play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus.

Review: Flipside presents The Bed Sitting Room at the NFT

A deeply detailed review into the film at a special National Film Theatre screening.

Richard Lester's adaptation of the play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus is a truly bonkers curio. Set in a blasted post-apocalypse Britain where roughly 20 people have survived, all of whom steadfastly avoid discussing what has happened, the film features an impressive pantheon of 1960s British talent - Milligan, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe - attempting to carry on as normal with bicycle-powered public transport and the ever-present threat of mutation.

Lowe turns into a parrot, Moore turns into a sheepdog, and Richardson wearily endures his inexorable transformation into the titular rented accommodation. Bleak, dark, surreal, silly and truly unique.

The long-lost 1969 comedy The Bed Sitting Room is finally given the spotlight it deserves. Based on a rather freeform post-apocalyptic play by Spike Milligan, this is rightfully regarded as something of a missing link in UK comedy. Under Richard Lester's inventive direction, Britain is reduced to around a dozen characters following a nuclear "misunderstanding" and the population dwindles further as radioactivity causes people to mutate into parrots, wardrobes and the titular cheap accommodation - yes, Spike Milligan clearly did write this. It's a bleak and funny mix of music hall gags and Samuel Beckett-style existentialism with a cast including the great Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Marty Feldman.

This is scarcely a trace of a story-line, hence all the gags and lunatic gooneries are without dramatic connection, and situation comedy cannot survive without a plot to supply the situations. The gallery of character can hardly be said to interact with one another; in many cases they exist solely in terms of a single outlandish idea or costume, with little else in the way of discernible personality. In this situation the natural comics Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Marty Feldman - thrive; the the others however - in particular Michael Hordren, Rita Tushingham and Ralph Richardson - are quite unable to sustain the interest which their predominant postition in the film demands.

I can only say primly that I don't consider post-nuclear mutation a funny joke, a clever joke, a bitter joke or indeed a joke at all.

It is not a film to be judged by degrees of laughter. What matters is the riot of thoughts and images it leaves behind with you, the way it distrubs and troubles the mind.

One laughs from time to time but, as in so much modern English far-out satire, there's no spirit, no rage, nothing left but ghastly, incessant sinking-island humor.