Don't Just Lie There, Say Something!

The Whitehall farces may have delighted London theatre-goers from the 1950s to the 1970s, but they have never worked on the screen. This film reduces the precise timing of the double entendres, the bedroom entrances and exits and the dropped-trouser misunderstandings to the level of clumsy contrivance, which not even the slickest of players can redeem. Few farceurs are as practised as Leslie Phillips and Brian Rix, but they are powerless to save this slipshod effort from Michael Pertwee's source play, in which MPs find themselves caught up in a sex scandal and a free-love campaign during the passage of an anti-pornography bill.