A hard-drinking, unconventional junior lecturer is frustrated with his stuffy university, but still wants to curry favour with the formidable head of the history department. A family gathering and an academic ceremony provide opportunities to make an impression - but nothing goes to plan. Comedy based on Kingsley Amis's novel, starring Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas and Hugh Griffith.

Jim Dixon feels anything but lucky. At the university he has to do the bidding of absent-minded and boring Professor Welch to have any hope of keeping his job. Worse, he has managed to get entangled with unexciting but neurotic Margaret Peel, a friend of the Professor's. All-in-all, the pub is the only friendly place to be. His misery is completed at a dreadful weekend gathering of the Welch clan by the arrival of son Bertrand. Not so much that Betrand is loud-mouthed and boorish - which he is - but that he has as companion Christine Callaghan, the sort of marvellous and unattainable woman Jim can only dream about.