With a poll on ICM coming up for the best films of 1969 I started searching for titles to view. Whilst looking around online, I found film reviewer Kim Newman praise a BFI "Flipside" edition of a rarely mentioned Richard Lester creation,which led to me viewing from the bed sitting room.

View on the film:

Dusting down the film,the BFI present an excellent transfer, with a real attention to detail in keeping the various tints with the various grains they were each given during production.

Adapting Spike Milligan and John Antrobus's stage play, the adaptation by Antrobus and Charles Wood throws Goon Show word-play curve-balls at the end of the world,with hilarious mutters in an attempt to avoid saying the word "nuke" and the survivors desperately trying to give a normality to their dire situation.

Breaking from the stage origins, the writers smartly use the dark humor to bring a real sense of danger to the main family travelling across the destroyed landscape-facing a mad nurse handing out death certificates,and The Tube continuing to rumble along the silent stations.

Offered the chance to do any project he wanted after the smash hit Beatles movies, director Richard Lester reunites with The Knack and Help! Cinematographer David Watkin to end the flower power decade with a doomsday. Incredibly filmed completely at real locations, Lester & Watkin's give their post-apocalypse a proto- Steam Punk twist,via the mountains of twisted metal covering the screen.

Dipping into surreal fantasy, Lester splinters the film with melting tints that colorfully create an otherworldly atmosphere that knocks down the walls of the bed sitting room.

It's post-apocalyptic Britain. It's three or four years after an extremely short nuclear WW3. The subway still works but it's not quite the same. Various wacky characters roam the devastated land.

This absurdist comedy has plenty of weird. First, this needs a lead character or a single group of lead characters. The plot is meandering at best. I don't know what anyone is doing. The comedy is spotty since plenty is lost in translation and over time. It's one basic joke of a weird post-apocalyptic world over and over again. I still don't know what is a bed sitting room. One may recognize a few of the faces. It's all very random and not always that funny. It is weirdly appealing.

After a "nuclear misunderstanding" has left 40 million people around the globe dead, an aimless, straggling group of survivors in and around London appear to be blithely ignorant of their own circumstances. Apocalyptic satire from director Richard Lester came complete with a defensive ad campaign which put down potential naysayers of the picture by proclaiming its humor was "over their heads". Lester could never be called a piquant filmmaker--more often than not he's simply smug--however, his crazy imagination and staging occasionally reveals a despairing underbelly which holds a lot more resonance than the revue-styled humor. Adapted from a play by John Antrobus and Spike Milligan, the film is mostly filled with the same type of punch-drunk, tail-chasing blackout sketches which permeated Lester's 1967 WWII satire, "How I Won the War". It's the kind of dried-up, far-out humor some admirers like to label as 'savage', though the jokes would be far more cutting had the characters not been so unappealing. A great deal of top British talent was employed here, yet the on-screen chattering eventually congeals into a head-splitting din. David Watkin's (appropriately) bleak cinematography is exceptionally strong--too strong and ugly, perhaps, for a farce. Results are strangely fatigued, scattered (albeit intentionally),and risible. *1/2 from ****