The title comes from Thomas Gray's poem "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" (1768). The actual lines (the last two lines of the poem) are ".... Where ignorance is bliss, /'Tis folly to be wise".
The original 1949 play by James Bridie, under the title 'It Depends What You Mean', enjoyed a great success with Alastair Sim as the director as well as the leading man. It opened in Glasgow's King's Theatre on September 11 1944 with a cast including Angela Baddeley and Wilfred Hyde-White. The production then toured Aberdeen and Edinburgh before beginning a long run at the Westminster Theatre, London in October. Sim worked closely with Bridie on many projects and was able to use his box-office appeal to bring many, like this, to screen and also to television.
This film, like the play it derives from, was inspired by the popularity of the radio program, "The Brains Trust", which was popular on British radio during the war years and for some fifteen years thereafter. The format was that famous intellectuals and public figures would attempt to answer fairly abstruse questions sent in by members of the public. The title of the play - "It Depends On What You Mean" - derived from the catchphrase of the show's most famous (or notorious) participant, Professor C.E.M. Joad, who would invariably begins his answers, whatever the question, with this phrase. Joad's broadcasting career was brought to a premature end when he was fined for travelling on a railway train without a valid ticket.
The film was screened for the British trade on November 26th, 1952 and was press screened for Variety at the Odeon, Marble Arch in London on December 1st.
The movie is a satire on the BBC Radio program The Brains Trust. One of the famous questions asked on the program was "How does a fly land on a ceiling?" In the movie a questioner asks, "How does a fly take off from a ceiling?" (to which the answer is "Who cares?"). Professor Mutch is a satire on the program's panelist C.E.M. Joad--the joke is that, while Joad had extremely retrograde, even Neanderthal views on the place of women in society, Professor Mutch keeps saying that women should be independent and express their individuality.