TV Cream's A-Z of films (original) (raw)

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X-RATED COMEDIES
"You can't come streaking through 'ere!"

Yes, we know we're dragging Creamguide's respectable name through the mud with this choice of subject, and we're very, very sorry. But, the fact that we can't think of anything else that starts with X aside, there's much worthy of exploration here, as these films provide not only a compendium of British comedy acting talent in its rent-paying dotage, but they also form part of the story of the British film industry's post-'60s decline as a whole. Oh, and it's the richest seam of film titles based around weak puns and ending in exclamation marks we know of, which must count for something, surely?

The story of the sexcom begins with former horror film cinematographer and exploitation entrepreneur extraordinaire Stanley A Long. Long made his name, in the law courts as much as the cinema, with 1961's WEST END JUNGLE ("The sex-film that London banned! Made in the actual places of vice!!") a breathless "expos�" of Soho's sex trade, made in a mock-documentary style that was to provide the blueprint for British sex films for a decade before comedy came into the equation. Various follow-ups appeared in short order, with titles like LONDON IN THE RAW and **TAKE OFF YOUR CLOTHES AND LIVE!**1965's PRIMITIVE LONDON is a bizarre bit of salacious moralising indeed, with scenes of beatniks, kids and Billy J Kramer being interviewed about pop music and, of course, "free love", familiar enough from endless '60s documentaries, strangely intercut with gruesome footage of car crashes, operations and battery hens being slaughtered, and appearances from Barry Cryer and Mick MacManus.

This weird mix can be explained - sort of - by the still very strict censorship to which films in the UK were subject. Cheap exploitation fare had to show it was taking a moral stance, or at least paying lip-service to one, and hence films from this era are all "expos�s" of the nefarious activities of wife-swappers, porn merchants and increasingly delinquent youth. Of course, it's all just an excuse to revel in the vicarious thrills these subjects provide, but the finger-wagging tone of the voice-over narration, coupled with the tabloidesque sleazing-up, ironically makes the films seem far dirtier than they actually are. They were extremely tame, and not only by today's standards. The following year's SECRETS OF A WINDMILL GIRL had Pauline Collins playing an ing�nue showgirl at the celebrated eponymous theatre, agonising over whether or not to appear nude on stage, and finally deciding, er, not to bother. Martin Jarvis and Harry Fowler provide local colour from both ends of the spectrum.

Probably the first out-and-out sex comedy came from Long's Salon Productions stable in 1969, with former "naturist" film director and horror scriptwriter Derek Long at the helm. THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER! was a portmanteau comic trilogy (with stories called This, That and, er, The Other) every bit as effortlessly funny as that exclamation mark in the title might suggest. Genuine star names begin to appear - Dennis Waterman and Alexandra 'Champions' Bastedo among them. Probably the biggest at the time was Victor 'Not a drop of water touched me' Spinetti, as a suicidal depressive who hooks up with - hooray! - a saucy hippy girl. Elsewhere, cab-driving porn- hound John Bird crashes his carriage and suffers erotic hallucinations in what amounts to some very experimental film-making for the largely no-nonsense genre. The sub-Carry On quickfire style hadn't yet been purloined, but here already was the basic set-up that pretty much every sexcom would take - horny young bloke, lecherous middle-aged bloke, naive-yet-sexually-available nymphet and latently rampant older woman all find themselves thrown together in various perms and combs by unabashedly contrived circumstance, and Fanny's your aunt.

But old habits died hard, and Long and Ford quickly went back to the sleazy tabloid expos� format, which was to yield their biggest success yet, thanks to a recently-minted social phenomenon. 1970'sTHE WIFE-SWAPPERS purported to lift the lid on a suburban sex cult through the tried and tested medium of the obviously staged mock documentary (one of the ageing "swingers" is played by a future Captain Birdseye, which is about as stellar as the cast gets) "following" the sexploits of an ing�nue couple, with faked hidden camera footage, on-street vox pops, and even an interview with an "eminent psychiatrist", all held together with a fiercely disapproving "Just look at this! And this!" voice-over. It made a relative mint at the box office, and naturally follow-ups came thick and fast. GROUPIE GIRL was basically the same again, only this time set among a thinly-realised rock music "scene", with fictional groups like Sweaty Betty mixing with gagging girls, scheming record company execs, Billy Boyle and Jimmy Edwards in a clueless but still rather savage attack on the counterculture that's one part feigned puritanism and two parts lewd envy. In a similar vein, BREAD told the story of a bunch of longhairs taking over a country estate for a pop festival, with the obligatory lashings of drugged-up nudity resulting.

On more solid ground were the twin wonders of SUBURBAN WIVES andCOMMUTER HUSBANDS, multi-story affairs telling various tales of erotic misadventure in the environs of New Malden, the latter more interesting to us here, as not only are the segments linked by a martini-sipping Gabrielle Drake, but the tone of the stories (of bowler-hatted businessmen finding their repressed sexual fantasies being made flesh) swings from the lurid style of the earlier films back to comedy. SEX AND THE OTHER WOMAN furthered the comedic style, with Drake replaced as narrator by Richard 'Sykes' Wattis. Long also expanded his grubby repertoire by offering up a couple of sarcastic sex-down-the-ages documentaries of the type that wouldn't be out of place in a Channel Four evening schedule. NAUGHTY! was a tongue-in- cheek romp through the history of "erotica", while 1973's ON THE GAME offered up a jokey, Eureka!-style series of historical re- enactments telling the history of prostitution. Charles 'Blofeld' Gray provided narration, and Carmen Silvera and Peter Duncan provided the requisite "together at last!" cast pairing.

Then, into Long's virtual monopoly on big-name sexcom, stumbled a proper film outfit, Columbia Pictures - and Robin Askwith. The Confessions films, although taking their cue more from the Carry Ons than Long's oeuvre, were based on a similar faux-reportage format - the original books, supposedly the real-life memoirs of the haplessly horny Timmy Lea (really by future Bond screenwriter Christopher 'Moonraker' Wood), which the films more or less ditched, save a chummy voiceover at the start ("'Ello!") and end. What the films, from CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER onwards, did develop, was the format of the working class heroes (Askwith - who, according to industry legend, pipped Michael Cashman at the post for the part - and Tony Booth as his cousin Sid Noggit, and of course his extended family headed by Bill Maynard and Dandy Nicholls (and later Doris Hare), who lived in a Steptoe and Son-style squalid two-up, two-down full of old junk - there was even a stuffed bear) constantly bedding posh and/or exotic totty. There was the frightfully posh Lynda Bellingham in ...DRIVING INSTRUCTOR, supposedly glamorous Jill Gascoine and Rula Lenska in ...POP PERFORMER (the best, for what that's worth, of the series, thanks mainly to the wondrous fictional glam band Kipper) or French strumpet Linda Hayden in ...HOLIDAY CAMP. That was the underlying philosophy (if you can all it that) of the Confessions - effortlessly cheerful upward mobility via the speeded-up al fresco dry hump. Not quite the social revolution Timothy Leary and co. had in mind, but it was more than enough for the fictional denizens of Borehamwood and environs to be going on with.

By 1975 though, Stanley Long and pals hit back at the Johnny-come- latelys with the apotheosis of the sexcom genre, a film unprecedented in its conceptual complexity and witty self-awareness. Well, for the territory, at least. In ESKIMO NELL, Michael Armstrong and Christopher Timothy try to make a porn film under the crooked aegis of producer Roy Kinnear, who funds the film, Producers-style, by securing four separate backers all of whom demand different, and conflicting, versions of the story. The hapless Timothy sets to writing four scripts - hardcore version, gay version, family- friendly version, and kung-fu musical version - while Kinnear assures each of the backers that their various acquaintances, lovers and offspring (including, rather wonderfully, Christopher Biggins and Katy Manning as brother and sister) will be given starring roles. It all descends into good old-fashioned farce by the end, as the various versions of the finished film are sent to the wrong premiere screenings, necessitating a frantic chase to stop them being seen. It's probably the only film in the genre that actually bears watching on its own terms (it's certainly the only one in which the plot amounts to more than a half-arsed device to get from one nookie-saturated encounter to the next), and the name cast certainly give better value in this than the rather bored/embarrassed performances that are offered up in other films, particularly an apoplectic turn from Kinnear. The (real) script was written by Armstrong, drawing upon his copious experience acting in and writing such efforts as INTIMATE TEENAGE SECRETS and raunchy cat burglar romp THE SEX THIEF (together at last - Diane Keen and Big Daddy).

But now the cat was out of the bag, and films were appearing left, right and centre. Keith Barron and Kenneth Cope plied birds with love potion in SHE'LL FOLLOW YOU ANYWHERE, before Barron teamed up with Rod Taylor and Jimmy Jewel for swinging record company exec story THE MAN WHO HAD POWER OVER WOMEN. INTIMATE GAMES starred George 'Wexford' Baker as an Oxford professor who lectures his nubile students (among them Anna 'daughter of Ingmar' Bergman) about sexual fantasies. A country house sexcom that makes You Rang, M'Lord look like Wodehouse (it's actually written by Hazel 'Crossroads' Adair), KEEP IT UP DOWNSTAIRS has something approaching production values - well, they're actually filming in a proper manor house, anyway - and plenty of erstwhile stars fallen on hard times in the cast, including Diana Dors and Jack 'HR Pufnstuf' Wild. Comic relief is provided by Willie Rushton, putting on an outrageous Aussie accent, for some reason, as muck-raking buffoon Snotty Shuttleworth, whose main comedic schtick is falling in ponds. (Another film, the Chris 'Tomorrow People/Eric Pollard off Emmerdale Farm' Chittel- starring EROTIC INFERNO, used the same country manor milieu, but it's a much nastier piece of work altogether, and GAMES THAT LOVERS PLAY was a period romp with literary pretensions featuring Joanna Lumley as Fanny Hill.) More reliably down-budget is the black-and- white (in 1976!), Joe McGrath-directed I'M NOT FEELING MYSELF TONIGHT, in which James Booth runs a vaguely-defined "sex research institute", an employee of which, Barry Andrews (for some reason this genre attracts Barrys like no other), invents a "sex ray", with the expected results. Rita Webb, Chic Murray and Bob Godfrey are among the cameos. Magnificently self-explanatory, THE AMOROUS MILKMAN, a supposedly autobiographical labour of love auteured and, disastrously, personally funded by Derren 'Special Branch' Nesbitt, again replete with Dors in a flameproof nightie, was completely shameless in the Confessions rip-off department, but then again most of what was to follow was similarly bereft of originality.

The mid-'70s were the high water mark of the genre, with "me too" sub-Confessionals appearing thick and fast, and with a level of technical expertise which made the originals look like golden era MGM musicals by comparison. Barry Stokes kept the housewives happy in UPS AND DOWNS OF A HANDYMAN (together at last - the narrator of The Flumps and Young Mr Grace), the episodic door-to-door nature of which was echoed in the Jeremy 'Fett' Bulloch-starring CAN YOU KEEP IT UP FOR A WEEK? ('keep it up' is clearly the punning phrase of choice for these films - see also Derek Ford's brothelcom KEEP IT UP, JACK). Bulloch, sporting a fetching cartoon tiger on his y- fronts, has some kind of wager going in which he has to maintain a job for seven days, but inevitably nookie results in his premature, er, discharge. This particular haphazard gem (complete with a career- low cameo from Richard O'Sullivan as a 'whoops, duckie' gay client with obligatory sailor boyfriend) came from the powerhouse writing team of Hazel Adair and wrestling commentator Kent 'Greetings, grapple fans!' Walton.

Meanwhile, Derek Ford demonstrated his versatility by crossing the sexcom genre with horror (SEX EXPRESS - a sort of kinky version of the pilot episode of Porridge with Nazi uniforms and Derek 'Charlie Slater' Martin) and sci-fi (THE SEXPLORER - a sort of Piccadilly- bound version of Barbarella with a talking ball bearing and Michael 'Bullet Baxter' Cronin). At the same time the good people behind ...Handyman took the genre back to its tabloid shocker roots with the odd sexcom/Public Information Film hybrid TAKE AN EASY RIDE, an incompetently shot curio wherein the usual obviously fake vox pops tell their tales of being picked up by lairy truck drivers/swinging rich couples, or naively giving lifts to doped-up, knife-wielding lesbians on their way to - score ten points! - the Isle of Wight festival, while a fuzzily-recorded narrator attempts to sound menacingly accusative. Leather-gloved leering gentlemen, Epping Forest by night and the word "scene" all feature heavily. But aside from this throwback, the film-makers had moved on from the early mock-shock denigration of the permissive society (wife swapping was becoming a harmless enough saucy clich� for an implied suburban swinging scene to rear its head in Wogan-narrated margarine ads), and were now concentrating their efforts on wistfully imagining the free love movement engulfing suburban Hertfordshire.

Understandably miffed at being usurped as top of the bottoms by Askwith and Columbia, Stanley Long launched the short-lived Adventures series, beginning with ADVENTURES OF A TAXI DRIVER, setting Barry 'Mind Your Language' Evans up as the hapless hero, but keeping the coarser Long tone and trademarks - the film starts with a mockumentary montage of location footage as a voiceover pays sarcastic tribute to the Great London Cabbie, before we're launched into the Adventures proper with a truly unpleasant "gag" involving a pet snake. Evans was replaced by Christopher Neil for the follow- ups ...PRIVATE EYE and ...PLUMBER'S MATE (which rather sneakily nicked its premise of the never-made fifth Confessions film). They're all much of a muchness really, although two points stand out. They truly are the seediest-looking films you'll ever see, mainly because they're not trying for it - Evans' bedsit is surely the grottiest ever seen in the cinema, but you can bet it was only chosen because it belonged to a cast or crew member. The other strange thing is the sheer unabashed tokenism of the cameos. Willie Rushton spends many a scene talking to other characters on a telephone in a box-room, having clearly been bussed in for the day, put in a couple of hours, collected his cheque, and gone home. ...Plumber's Mate featured Stephen 'Blakey' Lewis and Elaine Paige. Jon P'Twee, playing a bent copper who absconds to Rio (a location signified by having P'Twee in his pants on a sunlounger surrounded by rubber plants), provides a delightful punchline by having his penis shredded by a toppling electric fan. Best of all, Shaw Taylor's cameo in ...Private Eye consists of him merely walking up to the camera and giving the lens a quizzical mugging stare, thus allowing the audience to go "It's Shaw Taylor!" Truly, this was cinema without pretension, or indeed ambition, of any kind whatsoever.

But the real sign of sexcom's success was when the esteemed producers of the films they had been ripping off all this time, the Doctors and Carry Ons, turned their hand to the now-lucrative form. Ralph Thomas, veteran of the Doctor films and much, much more, took the bleeding time to oversee PERCY, the story of Hywell Bennett's chandelier-instigated penis transplant, and the nookie-apocalypticPERCY'S PROGRESS, notable for Bernard Falk in a cameo role, getting his eye put out. Not classics by any means, but compared to their generic stablemates, they oozed wit, class and, rarest of all, a tangible plot. The Carry Ons, meanwhile, got it all wrong. CARRY ON ENGLAND was a hopeless no-budget washout, so shoddily made we're still not entirely sure whether it was meant to be set during the Second World War or the present day, with Patrick Mower leading the antics in a sexed-up mixed army barracks, while Kenneth Connor swallowed a button. More interesting (for the wrong reasons) was ...EMMANNUELLE, which was ostensibly parodying a different set of films altogether, but still conformed to the unapologetically episodic "now let's hear your saucy story, Jack Douglas" sexcom format. The likes of Joan Sims struggled gamely on, but it really is the shoddiest Carry On you ever saw, with directionless plotting and leaden pacing that really makes you appreciate the craft behind even the weakest of the series' previous entries.

Unpleasant porn baron David Sullivan was a latecomer to the party, starting off in 1977 with health farm frolicker COME PLAY WITH ME, written and directed by and starring ex-nude photographer and music hall act George Harrison Marks, who was crap in all departments, but Sullivan had the cash to make these grim productions more lavish than what had gone before, especially in the cast department. Alfie Bass, Irene Handl, Ronald Fraser, Cardew 'The Cad' Robinson, Queenie Watts, Bob Todd, Henry McGee, Norman Vaughan and even Valentine Dyall took the greasy shilling for a couple of days' stilted fretting apiece. THE PLAYBIRDS, a supposed murder mystery with Gavin Campbell as a gormless copper, was even less noteworthy, though it was, again, tremendously successful. In an increasingly crowded market, franchises were instigated, only to flounder at the second hurdle, like the films based on the medical Carry Ons that began with WHAT'S UP NURSE! and ended the following year with the copyright-avoidingly titled, Hughie Green-featuring WHAT'S UP SUPERDOC! There was also the unrelated ROSIE DIXON - NIGHT NURSE, which at least brought Peter 'a dooooomsday shrooooud' Bull and Arthur Askey onto the same bit of celluloid for posterity.

At the end of the '70s the Eady levy, that government decree that ensured a significant proportion of British film profit was redistributed to independent producers - which had kept no end of weird and wonderful celluloid enterprises going with nary a whiff of profit in sight - was wound up. The strange, unsavoury yet somehow ultimately innocent tradition of the sexcom had no further reason to exist (not that, looking back, it's that easy to fathom exactly what reasons it had in the first place). Last gasp efforts, such asCONFESSIONS FROM THE DAVID GALAXY AFFAIR, which opportunistically purloined both the old series' now-defunct title and Tony Booth for the tale of sex-obsessed astrologer Alan 'Mr Diana Dors' Lake, despite La Dors as "Jenny Stride", Queenie Watts as his mum, and solid backup from the Bernie Winters/Kenny Lynch dream ticket, fizzled out (also unrelated to Robin was CONFESSIONS OF A SEX MANIAC, a Canadian-funded effort starring Roger 'Trigger' Lloyd-Pack as the eponymous compulsive groper). Recent irony-stuffed attempts to revive it notwithstanding, the British sexcom is as historically landlocked a dramatic genre as Busby Berkeley ensemble musicals or Restoration comedy, and while we're eternally grateful that we'll never witness the spectacle of, say, Ross Kemp administering a spanking to assorted Hollyoaks alumni halfway up the Swiss Re Tower, there's still reason enough to shed an anthropological tear at the passing of cinema's most benighted, shabby, and ultimately pointless genre. Now, please wash your hands.

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