The 1970s sex comedy was a peculiarly British institution, fuelled by a mix of Victorian prudishness and the bawdy, end-of-pier tradition that would elsewhere manifest in the Benny Hill Show, the Carry On ... movies and the political career of Boris Johnson.
The genre was instantly successful, as we hear early in the enjoyable Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Industry (Channel 4, Sunday, 9pm), with one contributor recalling how Adventures of a Taxi Driver – a blizzard of bare bums and knob gags – made more at the UK box office in 1976 than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
A more sober documentary would have used the sex comedy as a starting point for a deep dive into the British psyche. But Saucy! is here to celebrate, not to stroke its chin. With one or two caveats, the message is that the slap-and-tickle flicks of the 1970s represented a glorious moment in UK cinema.
They certainly helped keep alive an industry that had struggled for relevancy when the rest of British popular culture boomed in the 1960s. Facing an existential threat from television and unable to compete with the glamour of Hollywood, as a new decade dawned, British cinema abandoned costume dramas for the phwoar and the glory of the sex romp.
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“Films made on a very low budget in a very poor taste – it got people to go to the cinema,” recalls Willy Roe, producer of such towering feats moviemaking Queen of the Blues and the Playbirds.
It is no coincidence that this happened in the 1970s. If the 1980s was the decade Ireland suffered an emotional breakdown – as manifested by mass unemployment, moving statues, Charlie Haughey’s “Gubu” quote . – then the 1970s was when Britain came close to losing the plot.
Chaotic government, constant strikes and the hangover from the optimism of the 1960s had put the country in a parlous state. Amid such sturm und drang, it was little wonder punters would flock to titillating distractions such as Adventures of a Taxi Driver and Confession of a Window Cleaner.
One crucial point that the documentary makes is that these films weren’t straight-up pornography. For one thing, porn was illegal in the UK – you couldn’t show full-frontal nudity and sex had to be implied.
But there was also a particular cultural attitude towards sex in Britain – that it was something to be giggled at. That was in contrast to the Continent, where porn at the time was regarded as practically an avant-garde art form and to Ireland, where the official line was that sex was shameful and morally repugnant and should be immediately followed by several decades of the rosary. The British just thought the entire thing hilarious – and that spirit crackled through the bawdy capers of the era.
“People like to laugh at sex, they like to laugh at nudity,” recalls Robin Askwith, the likely lad star of Confessions of a Window Cleaner. “They want it to be taken less seriously.”
The women objectified in these films were generally frustrated actors who turned to sex comedy because of a dearth of female roles elsewhere. “There weren’t the parts written for women,” says Penny Meredith, whose CV includes the Ups and Downs of a Handyman. They were, however, generally aware of what they were getting into. “Nobody forced me to do anything I didn’t want to,” says Linzi Drew (Emmanuelle in Soho).
There was a darker side to the industry, with British sex romps often upgraded to full-fledged porn for the Continental market. This involved shooting additional scenes using extras – often without the knowledge of the original actresses. They recall their surprise when friends told them they’d seen them in porn films. “They would get body doubles to do it – often the actress found out much later,” remembers Oliver Tobias, who starred alongside Joan Collins in the 1979 adaptation of The Stud. “Nobody told them.”
Saucy! sets out to celebrate the sex comedy rather than put it under the microscope. The assumption is that the audience shares its perspective that these films were essentially a positive, if unheralded, chapter of British cinema history. It isn’t a documentary for everyone – but for those who find other people’s wobbly bits innately hilarious, this social history fnars on all cylinders.
