text: The final entry in the On The Buses trilogy sees the usual wasters go about their business in Wales. I feel sure the franchise could have continued, but Harold Pinter complained that the screenplays made him look bad in comparison, and so no more were made. <br /><br />It's actually less than two minutes before we get our first dollop of sexism - a woman running for the bus finds her breasts fall out of her dress for no reason whatsoever. Still, it does at least make Stan (Reg Varney) laugh - but then what doesn't? He and Jack (Bob Grant) spend the entire movie laughing uproariously with little or no provocation. You get the impression that they'd wet themselves watching paint dry. <br /><br />As before, the only funny element is the genuinely amusing Stephen Lewis, hilarious as Blakey. He's on his own, though, with a cheesy, dated script that even wastes first-rate talent like Wilfrid Brambell and Henry McGee. Yet it seems as if only Lewis understands how to time the shaky material, wringing laughs out of even the weakest lines. Describing how her daughter fell in a river, Stan's mum laments "I hope it's not polluted." "Well it will be now" Blakey quips. <br /><br />The plot - if indeed there is one - sees Stan lusting after a young girl, but being continually thwarted by her domineering mother. It's a recipe for side splitting hilarity I'm sure you'll agree, and whether it's on a storm-lashed boat or the swimming baths, Stan and Mavis's exploits always produce the same result... abject boredom. Later conquests include Maria, an Italian stereotype, and a staff co-worker. Even Stan's mum gets a one-night stand, with Stan considerately reminding her to "put your tin drawers on."<br /><br />When one of the comic "highpoints" is Arthur Mullard overhearing Olive trying to locate a light switch in the dark ("I can't find it") and thinking she's talking about sex, then you can see why this work reaches the upper levels of literary sophistication. In fact, why it didn't get in the BFI's Top 100 movies is beyond me. <br /><br />Other rib-tickling shenanigans involve Olive (Anna Karen) breaking her glasses. I don't know what's more surprising, the lame predictability of the set-up, or the underdeveloped pay-off. The short sighted Olive follows a man in a kilt into the gents, thinking he's a woman in a skirt. The next shot sees her marched out by Blakey and redirected to the ladies. And that's it. Next, she ends up in another man's bed, and is ordered out by his wife. And... no, that's all there is to that scene, too.<br /><br />When Holiday on the Buses was last screened on British television there was a breakdown in transmission. It actually came as blessed relief.