Kingsley Amis' frenetic but funny novel about the complicated life of a young lecturer squirming for better things in a redbrick university shouldn't really have been hammered into a 'whoops-matron' Ian Carmichael farce follow-up to Private's Progress and I'm All Right, Jack.
Carmichael does comical drunk well, but can't stretch to working-class Northern and turns the big finale, in which Jim lambasts the hidebound clods who blame him for everything, into a Norman Wisdom routine.
On the plus side, there is priceless hidebound cloddery from Hugh Griffith ('History speaking'), and a superb exercise in smarmy, pretentious, asexual sleaziness from Terry-Thomas.