The first impression Timothy Spall made on film fans was when he played a plump, delusional, somewhat daft chef in Mike Leigh’s quirky slice-of-working-class dream, “Life is Sweet.”

Restaurateur Aubrey thought putting boiled bacon consumme, prune quiche and pork cyst on the menu of a restaurant he chose to name after a favorite French song — “Regret Rien” (Edith Piaf’s signature tune, “Je ne regrette rien”) — a restaurant named “Regret Nothing” serving “pork cyst.”

Spall’s subsequent career has garnered acclaim — an OBE from the Queen and a BAFTA — and roles ranging from Churchill in “The King’s Speech” to the great English painter JMW Turner in “Mr. Turner,” Britain’s “Last Hangman,” and Ian Paisley in the Northern Irish peace talks drama “The Journey” (opposite Colm Meaney).

“The Last Bus” casts Spall as a doddering retiree in a cross Britain quest travelogue about a man with a mission, an old man with sad secrets.

It preceeded by a couple of years the entirely-too-similar but slightly better “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” starring Spall’s “Life is Sweet” co-star, Jim Broadbent.

Both are fictional tales tacked onto a cross-country travelogue, old men stories about regrets and “promises” to keep, the infirmities of old age be damned. In “Pilgrimage,” our Old Age Pensioner hero stumbles into his undertaking on foot and becomes an unlikely Forrest Gump social media star as he covers some 500 miles to see a dying friend.

In “The Last Bus,” our trekker plans an itinerary that will allow him to travel from one local bus stop to the next, all the way from John O’Groats at the northern tip of Scotland to Land’s End at the southernmost tip of England, in Cornwall. And yes, he finds himself photographed for more than one social media mention as he attempts the 874 mile long bus ride.

We meet a young couple (Natalie Mitson and Ben Ewing) in the early ’50s just as the distraught wife is begging her mate to “take from away from here, as far away as we can go.”

Tom dutifully gets them on a bus and they flee Land’s End to the furthest point away from it in Britain, John O’Groats.

Flashbacks will tell us whether it was scandal, trauma or tragedy that sent them packing. And bits of the life they enjoyed in the north — working class jobs that got them a cozy home with a garden — are sampled as Tom packs a tiny old leather briefcase that gives him a “Paddington Bear” air — to some — and boards that first local bus.

He is retracing that journey they took as a couple long ago, with an exacting schedule, beds and breakfasts in place of the inns they knew back then.

He will meet friendly drivers and generous strangers, and bus-riding bigots and prickly, unsympathetic men behind the wheel. There will be stumbles and accidents and little moments of delight with a cheer squad, a tipsy Glaswegian and a bachelorette party bantering with football fans. Tom will share his “war” experiences with a young man off to enlist because of a young woman.

“You were in the war?”

“Yes.”

“First World War?”

A pause leaves room for a chuckle that never quite comes –– “The Second.”

He’s doing this by local “bus,” many ask him, incredulously? “Better than walking.”

Spall is, of course, everything you’d want in this little old man — stoic, playing the part in the forlorn face of old age, lower lip stuck out like his and every other actor’s version of Churchill, taking it one tiny, uncertain step at a time, in a hurry but not making great time, charming children and confronting a bully like a geezer with nothing left to lose.

The production has a limited amount of local color accompanying Tom’s many encounters with strangers of all stripes. And it does an indifferent job of letting us know of Tom’s progress, identifying exactly where he is most of the time. Well traveled Britons will pick up on accents and street scenes. But we rarely glimpse Tom’s map or itinerary.

It’s a little weepy, not terribly surprising and only colorful in its lead performance. But Spall makes “The Last Bus” watchable, even if his old castmate Broadbent bettered this film thanks to a script with more to it, one that put a more comic twist on a very personal tragedy.