In front of a celebrity audience Johnny Speight's bigoted comic creation Alf Garnett (played by Warren Mitchell) vents his spleen on all manner of sensitive subjects. He makes political correctness take a back seat as he gives his opinions on race relations, football, life, the government, sex, drugs and much more.
Documentary about the life of Frankie Howerd, with help from friends and colleagues and including highlights from his TV and film career.
Alf and his family have been moved from their East End home into a high-rise council estate. Alf is not only having trouble coping with his new 'home', but also with the long commute to work, the long walk to the corner pub, his long-suffering wife, rebellious daughter and her philandering, constantly unemployed husband.
In the first part, The Compartment, an insane man boards a quiet railway coach and starts to annoy a patient man trying to read a paper with incessant small talk in an increasingly menacing manner until he finally pulls out a gun and screaming class hatred bile, humiliates the man until his stop is reached. In part two, Playmates, he breaks into a lonely house and proceeds to terrorise a spinster woman who lives there.
Marty Feldman, for many years a successful comedy writer before turning to performing, explores humour through the people who create it, comparing their traditions, motivations and anxieties with his own. Among the people Marty talks to are Peter Sellers, Eric Morecambe, Peter Brough and Archie Andrews, Dudley Moore and Barry Took.
Britain's biggest pop singer, Steven Shorter, receives unwavering adulation and possesses total control over his rabid fans, which includes nearly the entire population. Yet Shorter is not an autonomous performer -- he is little more than a puppet for the government, promoting whatever agenda they see fit. When a beautiful artist, Vanessa Ritchie, is commissioned to paint his portrait, she pushes Shorter to question his obedience to his manipulative handlers.
Mr. Topaze is an unassuming school teacher in an unassuming small French town, who is honest to a fault. He is fired when he refuses to give a passing grade to a bad student, the grandson of a wealthy baroness. Castel Benac, a government official who runs a crooked financial business on the side, is persuaded by his mistress, Suzy, a musical comedy actress, to hire Mr. Topaze as the front man for his business. Gradually, Topaze becomes a rapacious financier who sacrifices his honesty for success and, in a final stroke of business bravado, fires Benac and acquires Suzy in the deal. An old friend and colleague, Tamise questions him and tells Topaze that what he now says and practices indicates there are no more honest men.