The Bed Sitting Room (1969)

Among the ruins of a London devastated by nuclear war, the survivors ineffectually cling to increasingly meaningless social structures. While radioactivity randomly transforms various people into animals and inanimate objects, an absurd election for prime minister takes place. And the parents of Penelope (Rita Tushingham), a young woman who's been with child for nearly a year and a half, want her to marry a man with a promising future, though the fate of the world itself is rather dim.

After the successes of his Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), director Richard Lester was given a degree of free reign by United Artists, and was able to use Spike Milligan’s one-man show as the basis of this sharply satirical end-of the-world comedy starring a Who’s Who of British acting talent.

In a vividly-realised post-apocalyptic London, Mrs Ethel Shroake is crowned Queen, and Lord Fortnum awaits his imminent transformation into a bed sitting room. Meanwhile, seventeen-months pregnant Penelope and her parents leave the safety of their underground carriage to find her a husband, and finally reclaim their baggage.

Part Goons, part Samuel Beckett, The Bed Sitting Room’s acerbic wit and bleak outlook confused audiences and led to it falling out of circulation for decades.

The aftermath of the Apocalypse has been explored many times on screen across a variety of genres, including Mad Max (1979), 28 Days Later (2002) and Children of Men (2006).