BOTTOMS UP 1960 B/W British Comedy Film.

It stars Jimmy Edwards in a spin-off of his TV comedy series Whack-O! (1956), playing the seedy, alcoholic, cane-wielding headmaster of Chiselbury School, a fictional British public school. Professor Jim Edwards is the headmaster of Chiselbury School, a private boarding school for boys. A new head of the school's Board of Governors threatens to replace him as headmaster unless he can drastically improve the school's performance. When Edwards is also confronted by his bookmaker demanding money he owes and which he cannot pay, he devises a plan to deal with both problems by agreeing to accept into Chiselbury the bookmaker's son who will impersonate the heir to the throne of an oil-rich (fictional) state in the Middle East, which he hopes will persuade other parents to enrol their sons. Melvyn Hayes played the part of Cecil Briggs, he is best known for playing the effeminate Gunner (later Bombardier) "Gloria" Beaumont in the 1970s BBC sitcom It Ain't Half Hot Mum.

The usual mix of comedy one-liners and slapstick and nothing wrong with that. Totally un-PC in today's climate though in the sixties close enough to be true of school life in a public school. I must have seen Jimmy Edwards in Whack-O! before as I remembered him playing the headmaster, though this film was a new one to me. It brought others to mind such as Will Hay films and the St. Trinian film series.