The World Cup and Saucer (1967)

D. Spike Milliga (and apparently an uncredited Richard Lester)
B&W


No doubt this would have been more successful and better known if it had been released actually during the World Cup in 1966, but since it was made on the fly during the tournament itself by two friends primarily concerned with amusing themselves, then commercial prospects weren’t high on anyone’s agenda. Working with no script and seemingly no idea what to do at the start of each day, the two friends ad-lib their way through the entire 64 minute running length of the film, making silly jokes, putting on ridiculous accents and appearing in ludicrously hit and miss (mainly miss) sketches. It all sounds incredibly tedious, doesn’t it? The kind of movie that would now appear on Youtube, the braying laughter of the cameraman accompanying every moment that’s supposed to be remotely funny. It sounds like the kind of thing most people would rather poke their eyes out with sharpened sticks rather than watch; but then given the old friends in question are Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, even self-indulgence is not going totally devoid of comedy.


Some of it is, to be fair, almost inspired. The ongoing travails of World Cup Willy – the lion which served as a mascot for the whole tournament – who at various points finds himself stuck outside a palace with his tail caught in the door, attacked by poodles and propositioned by an overly-amorous gay lion, did make me laugh. The highlight though is the insert of a long piece of stock footage of a bus caught in traffic with Sellers dubbed over bus driver trying to explain to the Argentinian team that they are not lost, all the time it being clear they are very, very lost. (“This is the Norwich district of London.”) I also enjoyed Spike Milligan’s Swedish man who clearly is only using the World Cup as an excuse to eat in every restaurant in London. Fifteen years later that character would be called Mr Creosote.


Unfortunately we also get the other side of the Sellers/Milligan dynamic, which is what we would call ‘ethnic humour’. The presence of so many people of different nationalities, of different skin colours, just lets these two white boys crack out the make-up and funny accents. Some of it isn’t bad, I suppose: Milligan’s Mexican footballer and Seller’s Spanish footballer meeting up and just being totally unable to understand each other, for instance. But then elsewhere we have Nazi West Germans and overly lazy Portuguese in skits that don’t start well and don’t get better the longer they go on. Most distressingly though is Milligan’s Pakistani meeting Sellers’ Indian both under the impression that this is a cricket tournament, and the comic misunderstandings that occur as they try to find the game with the bats. Milligan grew up in India and denied that any of this was meant in a racist fashion, but even if we take that at face value it’s incredibly regressive, more than a little unfortunate and a sign that sometimes even comic geniuses have feet of clay.