The mysterious Michael Rimmer appears at a small and ailing British advertising agency, where the employees assume he is working on a time and motion study.

However, he quickly begins to assert a de facto authority over the firm's mostly ineffectual staff and soon acquires control of the business from the incompetent boss Ferret.

After arranging for the Shadow Home Secretary Sir Eric Bentley to give an inflammatory anti-immigration speech to give Hutchinson a pretext for firing him and to demonstrate the Conservatives' opposition to immigration without outlining specific policies, Rimmer becomes the MP for Bentley's now-vacant seat of Budleigh Moor (a reference to Cook's frequent collaborator, Dudley Moore).

Rimmer introduces direct democracy by holding endless referenda on trivial or complex matters via postal voting and televoting, which generates so much voter apathy that the populace actively protests against the reform.

The story satirises many well-known British political figures including Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, and Enoch Powell, and although the resemblances were played down at the time of the film's release, Cook later admitted that the title character of Rimmer was heavily based on David Frost himself.

Cook admitted later that he had partly based his portrayal of the Rimmer character on David Frost, who provided funding for the film[4] and took an executive producer credit.

The targets here are as predictable as the jokes are laboured: Tory women all wear hats, army officers are comic buffoons, public opinion polls tell you what you want them to tell you. ...

Peter Cook's performance as Rimmer is as bland and plastic as the character, and most of the other familiar faces (Denholm Elliott in particular) are left uncomfortably stranded in the debris of misfiring jokes.

[6]Kine Weekly wrote: " Considering names in the production team and the cast it is not surprising that this film has an affinity of style with Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python's Flying Circus.

of the earlier absurdities are very amusing particularly in the case of Arthur Lowe, as Ferret, but the story becomes progressively less funny and inventive when it enters politics ...Peter Cook plays the part of Rimmer with a bright eye, an enigmatic smile and little else.

Kevin Billington's direction is sometimes not acid enough for the situations but he, with Cook, John Cleese and Graham Chapman, have built up a screenplay that has wit and ideas.