 Cook admitted later that he had partly based his portrayal of the Rimmer character on David Frost, who provided funding for the film and took an executive producer credit.The mysterious Michael Rimmer (Cook) 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 (Arthur Lowe).