Adventures in Smut

I've spent consecutive weekends watching vintage British sex comedies on double bills.  Coincidentally, such films have recently put back in the spotlight by a tabloid being 'outraged' by the fact that such films are available on Amazon Prime - the usual synthetic concern for the way in which stuff like the Confessions films degrade women with their portrayal of them as sex objects, etc.  Which is always a bit rich coming from a tabloid.  Having sat through Adventures of a Taxi Driver and Adventures of a Plumber's Mate one Saturday and What's Up Nurse and What's Up Superdoc the next, I think I can safely say that no modern audience could possibly be depraved or corrupted by watching such films.  And I sincerely doubt that anybody seeing them on their original release would have seen them as anything other than, in essence, saucy comedies of the Carry On variety, but with added bare boobs and bums.  Because that's the thing with British sex comedies - they never feature that much sex and the comedy generally consists of the hoariest old gags you can think of.

But if they aren't really sexy or especially funny, what value do such cinematic artefacts have for the contemporary viewer.  Well, they provide a fascinating snapshot of seventies Britain, warts and all.  The two Adventures films, for instance, represent a celluloid chronicling of a a country sliding into decline.  The series, (which ran to three entries, Adventures of A Private Eye - which I'd seen previously - being the middle entry), were veteran exploitation producer/director Stanley Long's attempt to cash in on the success of the Confessions films, which had made a star of Robin Askwith.  They are, however, very different in texture to the rival series, which had firmly embraced the ethos of the contemporary British TV sitcom, but with the bawdiness ramped up for the big screen.  Long's films, by contrast, had a far more realist feel, reflecting the grittiness of British working class life in the seventies.  Many of the characters are petty criminals and even those who try and pursue the 'straight and narrow' find earning a living precarious - unlike Askwith's Timmy Lea character, the protagonists of Long's films can't just step into another job when their sexploits threaten their current employment: the dole and prison are ever present threats.

This is certainly true of Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976), the first and most successful of the series.  While certainly not devoid of crude laughs and old jokes, it lacks the sheer breeziness of the Confessions films.  This, in part, is undoubtedly down to the presence of Barry Evans in the lead.  Despite being a popular sitcom star, Evans ultimately lacked the gormless charisma of Robin Askwith.  The general awkwardness of the latter and his difficulties in actually bedding the objects of his desire, made it easy for audiences to identify with his character and to root for him.  Evans, by contrast, seems too confident and finds seducing women relatively easy, not only making him less easily likeable, but also robbing the film of much comic potential.  The world Evans' character inhabits is far harsher and hard edged than the one Askwith's character exists in: everybody seems to be on the make, but the criminally inclined characters aren't, in the main, lovable rogues like Tony Booth's character in the Confessions films.  While he is more of a con artist, the nearest equivalent character in Adventures of a Taxi Driver, Evans' mechanic friend, played by Robert Lindsay, turns out to be involved with armed robbers and jewellery heists.  Similarly, Evans' character has a pretty grim home life, being the main breadwinner in a household presided over by his fag smoking fishwife mother (Diana Dors) and including an inept criminal of a younger brother and a spoiled and undisciplined younger sister, (all have different, absentee, fathers).  A far cry from Askwith's comically dysfunctional screen family.

Interestingly, although Adventures of a Taxi Driver boasts a female writer and a much stronger than usual female cast, (as well as Dors, Judy Geeson, Adrienne Posta and Liz Fraser all make appearances), it still never really portrays women as anything other than broad stereotypes, (harridan mother, overbearing girlfriend, prostitute, criminal schemer, etc).  But hey - it's a seventies sex comedy, not a slice of social realism, despite its surprisingly hard edged depiction of seventies working class life.  Adventures of a Taxi Driver remains a mainly enjoyable romp, typical of its era.  But if it succeeds in portraying a society that had become, effectively moribund, with traditional means of advancement - regular employment - no longer effective means of social mobility, 1978's sequel, Adventures of a Plumber's Mate, gives us a society in full decline, where criminal graft is the only hope for the working class to resolve their burgeoning problems.  Evans had left the series after Taxi Driver, with Christopher Neill taking over the lead role.  Evans had apparently wanted to break away from sex comedies, but ended up doing another one, the dreadful Under the Doctor, after which his acting career began to decline, punctuated by the brief success of Mind Your Language on TV.  Ironically, at the time of his death, he was working as a minicab driver.



Adventures of a Plumber's Mate has a far darker feel to Taxi Driver.  The villains are far more menacing and people actually do get intimidated and beaten up.  Neill's over-sexed plumber is far less cheery than his Taxi-driving predecessor and throughout the film is threatened with not just losing his livelihood, but also the use of his legs if he can't pay off his gambling debts.  A large part of the film is taken up with his attempts to raise the money by doing various criminal (and non-plumbing) jobs for 'Dodger', a local 'fixer', played by Willie Rushton.  He also finds himself pursued by a gangster in search of a toilet seat Neill had replaced for said gangster's wife while the latter was in prison, (shagging her into the bargain, naturally).  It seems that the seat had been cast from gold stolen in a heist in order to conceal it from the authorities.  Unlike Adventures of a Taxi Driver, which lived up to its title by presenting the audience with a series of episodes in the life of its titular character, only loosely tied together with a plot, Plumber's Mate is far too plot bound, which restricts its scope and keeps taking it way from its central premise of a randy plumber using his job to get his end away.  The Britain its plot unfolds within is shown as a society in full decline, it feels like the end of an era (which it turned out to be, with Thatcherism just around the corner), with everything, every institution, looking as if it has just run out of steam.  (The intervening film, Adventures of a Private Eye, also starring Neill, has a far glossier look - it had a higher budget than the other two films - and eschews any attempts to portray its milieu in realistic terms.  Financially it was the least successful of the series and, I must admit, that I found it somewhat disappointing, never really making the most of the comic potential afforded by its subject matter).

The other two films I recently watched - What's Up Nurse and What's Up Superdoc - are the work of Stanley Long's erstwhile partner-in-crime Derek Ford and stand as testament to the fact that comedy really wasn't his forte.  While the first of the films, (which I had seen previously and, indeed, have already looked at in this blog), is actually amusing in a saucy seaside postcard manner, (helped by its seaside setting), most of its laughs are courtesy of its supporting cast of old comedy pros, such as Graham Stark and Peter Butterworth, who are sufficiently skilled that they can breath life into the most ancient of old medical gags, the sequel is dreadful.  What's Up Superdoc is utterly joyless - despite many of the same old comedy hands being present, this time around the script is so lame that there's absolutely nothing they can do with it.  The replacement of Nicholas Field in the lead role by Christopher Mitchell doesn't help.  While Field might have been slumming it in a sex comedy,(he could more usually be found playing character roles in things like Lady Caroline Lamb), for Mitchell, a sex comedy was a definite step up.  Best remembered for his role in TV's It Ain't Half Hot Mum, this is, as far as I know, his only lead - and you can see why: Mitchell simply lacks the charisma to carry the film.  You can never believe that he is some kind of super stud, let alone a sperm donor.  Not that the script gives him much of a chance,  Indeed, Ford's script even fails to realise the comic potential of the role-reversal of the traditional dynamics of a sex comedy: whereas it is usually the male lead pursuing various female characters because of their desirable sexual attributes, here Mitchell finds himself pursued by just about every woman in the picture because of his prowess at producing male babies with high IQs.  (Actually, it is his sperm which is so potent, rather than his lovemaking technique, making their crazed sexual assaults upon Mitchell nonsensical - all they need to do is jerk him off into a test tube).

But, in the end, the whole film is dreary - shot in what looks like the middle of winter, its locations look decidedly run down and unglamourous.  The performances are dull and predictable - Harry H Corbett gives, quite possibly, the worst performance of his career, and is clearly unhappy at being reduced to appearing in this sort of thing.  The only vaguely amusing things are the sight of Hughie Green calling someone a wanker and Bill Pertwee's dreadful Texas accent. Really, if you want to see Derek Ford at his best, watch the films he made with Stanley Long, things like Groupie Girl, which cast their sexploitation aspects in the mould of gritty, 'ripped from the headlines' melodramas.  But to return to the manufactured tabloid outrage we started with - are these films horribly misogynistic and sexist, reducing women to crude sexual stereotypes and objectifying them as mere collections of physical sexual assets?  Well, obviously, they are exploitation films which make no claim to be portraying sexual relations realistically.  To be absolutely fair, they portray their male characters as stereotypes, too: priapic idiots motivated solely by the idea of sexual gratification.  They are allowed no finer feelings, no subtlety.  Just as they judge women on the basis of their sexual desirability, so the female characters judge these men solely on the basis of their physical love making abilities. In What's Up Superdoc, Mitchell is seen as desirable simply because of the potency of his sperm, (which also introduces another female stereotype of women ultimately being interested only in producing babies).

So, yes, I know that these films are terribly sexist by today's standards, but the fact is that they are of their era.  Show me any film, of any genre, from the seventies which doesn't exhibit attitudes and assumptions on a range of issues, from sex and gender to race.which would be considered unacceptable now and I'll happily burn my collection of British sex comedies.  But they are what they are and have to be viewed in context.  And you know what? I enjoyed my recent Adventures in Smut and I'll happily do it all over again!