I'd been looking forward to watching this satire of the English aristocracy in which Peter O'Toole plays a paranoid schizophrenic earl who inherits the family estate despite the slight handicap of believing that he's God, but in the event I was disappointed.

The movie was adapted from Peter Barnes' stage play- and therein lies the whole problem: it's too stagey by half. It's not so much that the characters will suddenly break into song-and-dance routines- although it's not really a musical- as that the acting itself hasn't made the necessary adjustment from stage to screen. And O'Toole's God make-up is a serious error; you can practically see the greasepaint, and what a terrible wig!

I know that satire calls for broad brush-strokes, but this was simply wooden.

With great British character actors such as Alistair Sim, Arthur Lowe and Coral Browne, this could and should have been a lot better.

Plus the film suffers from its failure to cast John Goodman.

Do you mean John Inman, Mr Humphries from "Are You Being Served?"?

That would certainly have put the cat amongst the pigeons.