Fans of classic British comedy, like Monty Python, should check out the 1969 Richard Lester film, The Bed-Sitting Room. Technically, it's a post-apocalyptic film, set after a nuclear war, but mostly it's just very daft. Like this "Aquatic Bishop" scene.


Film critic extraordinaire Roger Ebert recommended it the other day:

If "Monty Python's Flying Circus" had never existed, Richard Lester would still have invented it. In 1970 he directed "The Bed-Sitting Room," a film which so uncannily predicts the style and manner of Python that we think for a moment we're watching television. The movie's dotty and savage; acerbic and slapstick and quintessentially British... It's an after-the-Bomb movie, but like no other. It takes place at some time in the fairly immediate future, after England and (we gather) the rest of the world have been almost wiped out by a nuclear war. A few people still survive. Some of them ride on an endlessly circling underground train (powered by an earnest young man peddling a bicycle). Others roam through the debris above. They try to appear as proper as possible by wearing the right clothes. From his midriff up, for example, the BBC announcer wears a tuxedo. Everything below is rags, but you can't see that when he's broadcasting (which he does by holding a TV set in front of his face and talking.)


It's by no means as funny as classic Python, but it does include comedy greats Spike Milligan (seen in the clip), plus Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. And the whole thing is on YouTube.