D: Richard Lester. S: John Antrobus, Charles Wood. Play: Spike Milligan, John Antrobus. P: Oscar Lewenstein. Cast: Ralph Richardson, Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Rita Tushingham, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): BFI.

Three years after World War III (a “nuclear misunderstanding” lasting two-and-a-half-minutes from start to finish, including the signing of the cease-fire), Britain has been reduced to a bleak and homogenous landscape of slag-heaps and slurry, with the occasional garbage-dump providing an oasis of topographical interest. The dishevelled handful of surviving Britons, numbering around twenty, moves restlessly across the ruins, monitored from a balloon by a two-man police force (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore). Anxiously awaiting his turn to be Prime Minister, Arthur Lowe and family (Mona Washbourne, Rita Tushingham) stumble across the wreckage of London, encountering a physician (Michael Hordern) whose chief patient, an ex-member of the House of Lords (Ralph Richardson), fears he is soon to mutate into a bed sitting room…

The first casualty of atomic war, it seems, is plot. Perhaps to suggest that stories are irrelevant once history itself has been murdered, writers John Antrobus and Charles Wood (adapting a play by Antrobus and Spike Milligan) opt for a scattershot format eschewing the conventional notion of narrative almost entirely. Their rudimentary scenario essentially provides director Richard Lester with a very loose skeleton on which to hang an assortment of proto-Python comic skits employing the talents of Goons (Spike Milligan as a deranged postman, Harry Secombe as a sex-starved misogynist living in a fallout shelter), distinguished thesps (Richardson, Hordern), wall-eyed jackanapes (Marty Feldman as a cross-dressing Nurse, Jack Shepherd – Renfield in the BBC’s Count Dracula – as an underwater vicar), Lester regulars (Roy Kinnear) and blink-and-miss-them sundries (Ronald Fraser, Dandy Nichols).

Technical credits are flawless. Assheton Gorton’s production design is a knockout – the dome of St Paul’s emerging from a slate-grey ocean of mud; an escalator projecting from the bowels of the London Underground into a flattened wasteland; a mass-grave of rusting vehicles mired in eternal gridlock – and David Watkin’s photography prefigures Tarkovsky’s Stalker in finding strange beauty in ugliness. Night sequences cue extreme coloured filter effects (reminiscent of Freddie Francis’ work on Dracula Has Risen From the Grave) to suggest irradiated skies and a polluted earth. This is a striking-looking film.

The humour occasionally strikes just the right tragicomic note. Frank Thornton as “the BBC”, a mendicant newscaster dressed in the tattered remnants of a dinner jacket, kneels down behind the empty shell of a TV set to read the headlines (an endlessly reiterated account of the war three years earlier – the last thing actually to happen to anybody). Gems of deadpan silliness glitter in the dialogue. So why does The bed sitting room fail?

First problem. Nothing actually happens. Aimless wandering amidst quarries and sludge-pools, while surrealistically picturesque, is just deadly dull to observe over 90 minutes.

Next problem. Ken Thorne’s score is trying in the extreme, a relentless slide-trombone assault relentlessly determined to convince us that what we’re witnessing is absolutely hilarious, with the result that the film seems more influenced by Billy Smart than Buñuel. It improves in the latter half, but I suspect many disgruntled viewers will have abandoned hope of improvement long before this.

Third problem. The central conceit – of a Surrealist catastrophe causing irradiated survivors to mutate into items of furniture and the bed sitting room of the title – is quite brilliant, reminiscent of absurdist SF writers like John Sladek, who used the genre as a springboard for satire. But it’s hard to sustain narrative interest in a story comprised essentially of flip non sequiturs; Sladek himself was at his very best writing short fiction, his long-form work proving much more heavy-going, and The bed sitting room follows much the same pattern of diminishing returns.

Edited down to 45 minutes and re-scored, the film might have been a genuine classic; it might even have served as a colour postscript to Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, a fittingly nonsensical continuation of Terry Southern’s inspired lunacy. As it stands, The bed sitting room is just shapeless, self-indulgent and only intermittently funny. End-of-the-world completists and lovers of the wilfully obscure will be keen to give it the once-over; approached with expectations suitably lowered, they may find the occasional glimmer of promise amongst the ruins.