Back-Room Boy

When he is reprimanded, he tries to resign, but this is refused, but when he says he wants to avoid all women, he is posted to a remote Scottish lighthouse to make weather reports.

Before taking a boat from the mainland, he is warned by the locals that he will go mad from the isolation and the curse of a mermaid within a month, as his predecessors have.

Pilbeam realises he is not as isolated as he thought and meets Jane, a young girl who stowed away on the boat that brought him to the island, and then Bobbie, a model and the sole survivor of a torpedoed ship.

This makes it very crowded in the lighthouse, until people start to mysteriously disappear during the night, leaving an anxious Pilbeam trying to discover what has happened to everyone.

In his book about 1940s British cinema, Realism and Tinsel, Robert Murphy describes the film as "the funniest if the least original of the Askey comedies".

[8] David Parkinson in Radio Times said, "The main problem is the film's insistence on hammering home every gag, with Askey particularly at fault.

[9] The film was also released in the Arthur Askey Collection box set on DVD in 2007 in the United Kingdom, followed by another edition in 2012.