Total Sci-Fi’s Guide to the Incredibly Strange and Obscure in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Movies

The Facts

Screenplay by John Antrobus; Adapted by Charles Wood; Based on the play by John Antrobus and Spike Milligan
Directed by Richard Lester
Produced by Richard Lester, Oscar Lewenstein, Roy Stevens
Music: Ken Thorne
Cast: Michael Horden, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Rita Tushingham, Richard Warwick, Harry Secombe, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan, Ronald Fraser, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Frank Thornton
Running time: 91 minutes

The Plot

The last British survivors after an unfortunate “nuclear misunderstanding” wander the post-apocalyptic landscape that used to be London, struggling to survive and trying to avoid atomic mutation.

The Lowdown

The absurdist humour of Spike Milligan and The Goon Show is threaded through The Bed Sitting Room, making this end-of-the-1960s (and very British) take on the end of the world something of an acquired taste. If you like Milligan, you’ll love this.

A who’s-who of British film, television and stage stars of the 1960s play a variety of eccentric characters in this picaresque narrative, while trying not to turn into bed sitting rooms, wardrobes and parrots a result of “atomic mutation”.


The clash of the genuinely chilling setting and the madcap character humour is what makes the movie tick. While other movie cultures would produce visions of the end of the world like Mad Max, the UK produced a witty script that depicts very British characters keeping calm and carrying on. Frank Thornton’s turn as “the BBC”, wandering from place to place and inserting himself into hollow TVs to relate the latest news, is inspired.

This very 1960s satire was highly influential. Monty Python and Terry Gilliam are the most obvious beneficiaries, but traces of The Bed Sitting Room can be found in the work of Douglas Adams, episodes of Doctor Who, The Mighty Boosh, David Lynch’s Eraserhead and even the work of avant-garde filmmaker Peter Greenaway. There are not many films you can say that about…

Cult Cast

Michael Horden may be best known as the voice of Paddington Bear in the TV series or as Gandalf in the epic, groundbreaking 1980s radio adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He played many Shakespeare characters on stage, but appeared in few fantasy/SF films. He did make an impression in a TV version of M.R. James’s spooky tale Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. He also voiced the rabbit god in 1978’s Watership Down animated film. He died in 1995, aged 83.

Ralph Richardson was a prolific and acclaimed British stage actor who made occasional appearances in fantasy and SF productions. He appeared in Things to Come (1936) and played the Supreme Being in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981) and an ancient sorcerer in Dragonslayer (1981). Other fantasy film credits include The Ghoul (1933), The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936), The Wrong Box (1966), Tales From the Crypt (1972) and Rollerball (1975). He died in 1983, aged 80.

Spike Milligan was a creative force behind The Bed Sitting Room, as well as performing in the film. Milligan’s absurdist humour was ideal for The Goon Show, but he continued as a solo writer-performer through the 1970s, notably in his Q sketch shows (one sketch featured an Indian Dalek making a curry). He suffered from bipolar disorder throughout his life and was repeatedly hospitalised. He died in 2002, having suggested his headstone should read “I told you I was ill” (which it does, translated into Irish Gaelic).


Director’s Cut

Richard Lester was born in America, but worked mostly in the UK. He was part of the 1960s film and TV satire boom and directed The Beatles’ movies A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965). In the late 1970s he replaced Superman (1978) director Richard Donner on the partially-shot sequel, Superman II (1980), and helmed the more comedic follow-up, Superman III (1983). He recently donated his lifetime filmmaking archive to the BFI.

WTF? Moment

Where to start with this movie? It’s all one giant WTF? moment, but how about the bit where Ralph Richardson actually does mutate into a bed sitting room? Not strange enough? What about the woman with the Dali-style drawer built in? Then there’s the shot of the top of the dome of St Paul’s sticking up out of the ground as part of the post-apocalyptic landscape, just like the statue of liberty in Planet of the Apes.

Behind-the-Scenes

The Bed Sitting Room was made directly as a result of the death of controversial playwright Joe Orton. Director Richard Lester had a £1 million commitment from United Artists to make a movie called Up Against It from a work by Orton. Orton’s death (murdered by lover Kenneth Halliwell) saw that project scrapped, so Lester fast-tracked the film of this Spike Milligan-John Antrobus play into production. Hoping for another music-based hit film like Help! or A Hard Day’s Night, United Artists were surprised instead to receive a post-apocalyptic absurdist black comedy that they simply didn’t understand and refused to release for several months.

Creators Talk

“The really awful thing is that we were able to film most of those scenes in England without having to fake it. All that garbage is real. A lot of it was filmed behind the Steel Corporation in Wales… endless piles of acid sludge and every tree is dead. There’s a place in Stoke where they’ve been throwing reject plates since the war and it has become a vast landscape of broken plates…” — Richard Lester, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction


Availability

After years of obscure unavailability, The Bed Sitting Room was recently released on Region 2 DVD as part of the BFI’s Flipside series dedicated to cult/obscure films.

Online Resources

Director Richard Lester interviewed by director Steven Soderbergh
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/1999/nov/08/guardianinterviewsatbfisouthbank3]

Remake

Simply impossible: can you imagine this being redone with contemporary comedians? It’d be like that hideous Carry On Columbus movie that attempted to revive the Carry on films with the 1980s alternative comedy generation…

The Bottom Line

Mad, magical and maddening, The Bed Sitting Room is simply unclassifiable, but hugely amusing and deserves to be seen.

Brian J. Robb