The Cool Mikado is a British musical film released in 1963, directed by Michael Winner starring Frankie Howerd, Lionel Blair and Stubby Kaye.

[1] It was produced by Harold Baim, with music arranged by Martin Slavin and John Barry.

The music that remains is re-orchestrated into styles popular in the early 1960s, including the twist, and the Cha-Cha-Cha.

[citation needed] The colourful sparsely dressed sets, not always tending towards realism, give the film a surreal quality.

[6] Winner told the Los Angeles Times in 1970 that the experience prompted him to start initiating his own material, so he hired a writer to write The System which was his breakthrough film.

[7] Frankie Howerd told Barry Took in 1992 the film "had the appearance of being made in a wind tunnel.

Nobody could make any sense of it and I can say without equivocation that not only was it the worst film ever made but the one production in showbusiness I'm positively ashamed to have appeared in... it was absolutely incomprehensible gibberish.

"[10] Andrew Roberts in The Independent in 2013 wrote: "Who else but Winner could have directed a musical containing the rousing number 'Tit Willow Twist', as played by the John Barry Seven and as interpreted by Lionel Blair and His Dancers?

To this day, Winner's bold attempt to combine Gilbert and Sullivan with the comic talents of Mike and Bernie Winters stands as a prime example of how British cinema can, occasionally but always memorably, produce films that are the celluloid equivalent of those relatives who are only wheeled out at family weddings, and who are then studiously avoided at the reception.