Plot
Renowned surgeon Sir Lancelot Sprat (James Robertson Justice) arranges a cruise for his patient, the famous television star Basil Beauchamp (Simon Dee). The captain of the ship is Lancelot Spratt's brother (Robert Morley).
Doctor Burke (Leslie Phillips) becomes a stowaway by mistake when chasing his girlfriend (Angela Scoular) onto the ship to propose to her. She is one of a group of models doing a fashion shoot with camp photographer (Graham Chapman). Other passengers aboard ship include pools winner Llewellyn Wendover (Harry Secombe) and Mrs. Dailey (Irene Handl), a socially ambitious lady hoping to find a wealthy match for her daughter Dawn. (Janet Mahoney)
Burke is pursued by the Master-at-Arms (Freddie Jones) who correctly suspects that he does not have a ticket. Burke tries various ruses to try to escape him, including dressing up as a doctor. Eventually he is caught and exposed as a stowaway. Captain Spratt orders him to serve as an orderly, scrubbing the ship.
When the ships doctor falls ill, from a tropical disease, Burke takes over his duties. He is called into action when a Soviet cargo ship sends a request for help, as there is a patient with a severe case of appendicitis. Burke is transferred to that ship to perform the operation. By the time he has finished his own ship has departed, and he is forced to stay on board the Soviet vessel until it reaches Grimsby. By the time he goes to meet the cruise ship, as it returns home, he finds his girlfriend has got married to the ship's doctor, now recovered from his illness.
Meanwhile Dawn Dailey, having failed to snare Captain Spratt, decides to marry Wendover - only to find, once they have tied the knot, that he is not quite so wealthy as she had imagined.
Read more about this topic: Doctor In Trouble
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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