New version of Spike's classic play

Paul Merton has adapted Spike Milligan’s classic absurdist play The Bed-sitting Room for the radio.

He will also play the central character of Captain Kak when the star-studded production airs on Radio 4 on Boxing Day.

Merton has adapted the play alongside original co-writer John Antrobus.

The play was a critical and commercial hit in London’s West End in 1963 and again in 1967. A less successful film version was released in 1969, starring Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Marty Feldman and Harry Secombe

The play is set in a post-apocalyptic London, nine months after World War III, which lasted for two minutes and twenty-eight seconds – ‘including the signing of the peace treaty which is now on sale at Her Majesty’s Stationery Office with a free T- shirt’.

Nuclear fallout is producing strange mutations in people, including Lord Fortnum, who finds himself transforming into a bed-sitting room, as Captain Kak and his fiancée Penelope discover.

Derek Jacobi plays Fortnum in the new adaptation, with Catherine Tate as Penelope. The role of Mate, which Milligan played in London and in the film, will be taken by Bernard Cribbins.

Merton’s wife, and fellow Comedy Store Player, Suki Webster plays Mrs Ethel Skroake; Antrobus himself plays the Vicar and newsreader Corrie Corfield is ‘the BBC’.

The play, which airs at 2.30pm on Boxing Day, was made by the BBC’s radio comedy department, directed by Sam Michell and produced by Victoria Lloyd.

It is not the first time Merton has taken over a classic comedy role, having recorded new versions of some of the scripts Ray Galton and Alan Simpson wrote for Tony Hancock back in 1996.

And in 2009, he read Milligan's war memoirs for a Radio 4 series.

Here is a trailer for the film version:

Published: 25 Nov 2015