Railway Carriage

A businessman reading alone in a railway compartment is joined by a bespectacled man in a bowler hat who cannot sit still. The newcomer asks to swap seats, decides he preferred the other one, frets endlessly over whether smoking is truly allowed, then accepts the commuter's cigarettes only to hoard them for later. He explains a bizarre verbal tic his doctors supposedly cured, narrates a fairy tale to himself, starts a game of I spy with an unguessable answer, and finally insists he can make himself invisible. The exasperated commuter ends up alone in the compartment, swatting at the empty seat while the stranger's voice carries on with his story.

Railway Carriage comes from the final episode of At Last the 1948 Show, first broadcast on 7 November 1967. The BFI singles it out as one of the show's finest sketches.