Any search for the ancestors of the 70s sex comedy would be
bound to light on Clive Donner’s 1967 film Here
We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.
Cycling around the sparkling new streets of Stevenage (a surprisingly
vivid setting) and lusting after every female in sight, the film’s hero, 17
year old Jamie McGregor (Barry Evans) is a prototype for the randy Jack the
Lads who’d infest the nation’s fleapits in the next decade. Scenes of him fantasising about the older
women he delivers groceries to could almost be subtitled Confessions of a Delivery Boy.
But for the most part, fantasise is all Jamie does: his attempts to get
his end away with an assortment of dolly birds are all frustrated, until he
finally loses his virginity to the beautiful, seemingly unattainable girl (Judy
Geeson) he wanted most of all – after which it becomes clear she’s not the girl
for him after all. The film ends with
Jamie poised on the edge of growing up as he heads for university and a
relationship with sensible Diane Keen.
His lustful ways, we’re led to infer, are just an inevitable teenage
phase.
In the sex comedies of the 70s, men never surrender willingly
to the passing of this phase . There’s
no better way of comparing their outlook with that of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush than Adventures of a Taxi Driver, the first of three “On the Job”
sexcoms from Stanley Long. Made nine
years later, it reunites four of Mulberry
Bush’s young cast members. Barry
Evans (whose cheeky chappie persona was by now familiar from the TV sitcoms Doctor in the House and Doctor at Large) stars again, this time
as cab driver Joe North. As in Mulberry Bush, he keeps the audience
aware of his thoughts by talking to the camera throughout (it gets a bit creepy
at times here, with him informing us of his plans to seduce women who in
reality would be able to hear every word he’s saying). Judy Geeson again plays the unattainable girl
who’s the summit of his ambition: though this time it’s simply because his
friend Tom (Robert Lindsay) got there first.
Geeson’s character, Nikki, is a stripper, yet she’s one of the few women
in the film who remains clothed throughout.
At one point Joe goes to pick her up from the club where she works in
the hope of seeing her act, but misses it and instead sees her colleague Helga
(Anna Bergman, daughter of Ingmar, who would star alongside Evans in the sitcom
Mind Your Language from the
following year. She only has one line in
Taxi Driver: “Ouija board? What
Ouija board?”). After a game of “strip
spin the bottle”, Joe and Helga end up in bed, where they’re discovered by Joe’s
fiancée Carol (Adrienne Posta).
As in Mulberry Bush,
Posta (who also sings the theme song, which designates the hero as a “Cruising
Casanova”) represents a fate from which Evans’ character is trying to
escape. In the earlier film she was the
slow-witted, common-as-muck former classmate of Jamie’s, his abortive attempt
at seducing her demonstrating to him how far up the social scale his grammar
school education had taken him. Here,
her character’s only purpose is to drag Joe down, to entrap him in a clearly
unwanted marriage. Carol also keeps her
clothes on, though the sense is that for Joe at least this is a mercy. Despite her role as the conventional,
marriage-minded girl, Posta’s look – cropped peroxide hair and Bride of
Frankenstein makeup – is pure punk. She
looks, quite literally, a fright.
The final cast member of Mulberry Bush to turn up in these reduced circumstances is Angela
Scoular[1]. As in the earlier film, she’s one of the
girls who the hero dallies with along the way (though this time with
considerably more success). In Mulberry Bush she was a hoot as
upper-crust featherbrain Caroline. Here
she’s given the generic role of a housewife customer who Joe ends up sharing a
bath with, only for it to be interrupted by the premature arrival of her
husband. He’s a grey executive played by
Brian Wilde (one of several sitcom stars making an appearance), who voices his
disapproval of a colleague who “runs a Ford Anglia and doesn’t play golf” while
Jamie hides underwater, almost drowning.
Other conquests during the course of the film include posh Prudence
Drage and a suicidal young woman played by Jane Hayden, lookalike sister of Confessions of a Window Cleaner star
Linda (as if to underline the point, her character’s called Linda). Joe talks her down from Lambeth
Bridge and takes her home to deliver his own brand of comfort. Her husband turns up too – he’s played by Dad’s Army’s Ian Lavender.
There’s also a “narrow escape” with female impersonator
Bunny McQueen (Stephen Riddle), whose sex Joe only discovers when he reaches a
hand up his skirt (the response to this is comparatively free of homophobia,
Joe simply pondering to camera “I wonder if I could have him done under the
trades descriptions act?”).
Intriguingly, Joe seems to fancy Bunny more than any of the actual women
he meets. Could his claim that Bunny’s
(fake) breasts are the “most wonderfully shaped” be a subtle reference to the
unrealistic expectations men have of women? (It’s unlikely). Liz Fraser connects the Adventures films with their Carry
On forebears (and also to the Confessions
films, the next instalment of which she’ll appear in) as a gossipy
prostitute who regularly sees clients in Jamie’s cab (one of the film’s rudest
jokes has her going down on a city gent in the back of the car when Jamie has
to brake quickly: the man’s anguished gasps are accompanied by a close-up of an
advert for Jaws).
Adventures of a Taxi
Driver is clearly a response to Columbia’s massively successful Confessions films (though made for a
fraction of the cost), although Stanley Long played this down, insisting his
films were based on “comic truth” rather than the slapstick of the rival films. Disingenuous as this sounds, there’s some
truth in it, particularly in the kitchen sink feel of the scenes at home with
the North family (as far down market from the suburban, lower middle class
McGregors as Adventures of a Taxi Driver
is from Here We Go Round the
Mulberry Bush): resentful single mother (Diana Dors in full-on fishwife
mode), thieving brother Peter (Marc Harrison, star of spooky kids’ show Sky, minus the wig and freaky contact
lenses) and lawless baby sister. What
little plot the film features between its set pieces revolves around Joe
leaving the family home to move in with Tom and Nikki, and becoming unwillingly
involved with a gang of thieves that includes both Tom and Peter. Evans makes a more engaging (and attractive)
sexcom lead than most, in turn helping to make Adventures of a Taxi Driver more engaging and attractive than many
of its contemporaries.
Trivia
- Other familiar faces in the cast include On the Buses star Stephen Lewis in a brief cameo as a strip club doorman and Jack Haig, who’d later become best known as useless spy LeClerc in ‘Allo, Allo!, uncredited for his tiny role as a priest.
- The film begins with a spoof documentary-style celebration of the London cabbie, with a voiceover from David Brierley, who’d stand in as the voice of robot dog K9 for the 1979-80 series of Doctor Who.
- Michael Armstrong, who wrote most of the film’s script uncredited, appears briefly as a customer of Joe’s, while another key figure in British sexploitation, Pete Walker, has a cameo as a Rolls Royce driver.
[1]
Several other young cast members from Here
We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, including Christopher Timothy, Nicky Henson
and the above-mentioned Diane Keen would also turn up in 70s sex comedies,
though as with Robert Lindsay in Adventures
of a Taxi Driver they were stopping off on the way to more respectable TV
fame.
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