Keeping the British End Up

With the importance of Carry On comedy and Hammer horror to British popular cinema long recognised it was inevitable that sooner or later critical attentions would turn to the sex film, representing as it does something of their natural successor.

Sure, the genre has been important to the likes of Steve Chibnall's Making Mischief – a study of cult auteur Peter Walker, whose career trajectory actually went the opposite way, from sexploitation to horror – and Simon Sheridan's earlier biography of sex star Mary Millington, Come Play with Me, but until now there's been nothing devoted to the British sex film in and of itself.

After scene-setting introductions from Sheridan and sex film star Sue Longhurst, the first of the four main chapters, cheekily entitled Comings – the breezy writing style imitating the best of the films themselves – establishes the contexts within with 25 years of British sex films were produced and consumed.

The first significant dates in the genre's history are 1954 and 58, establishing something of a simultaneity with Hammer – The Quatermass Xperiment was released in 1955, Curse of Frankenstein 1956 – and Carry On – Carry on Sergeant in 1958.

The former year saw the importation of US naturist film The Garden of Eden by distributor Nat Miller. The British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) refused the film a certificate outright, prompting Miller to appeal to the London County Council. They saw nothing objectionable, paving the way for a spate of similar decisions in the provinces, healthy profits for Miller and a quick change in BBFC policy.

The latter year – also marking the point at which Sheridan's year-by-year survey of the peak period in British sex-film production, 1958-83, entitled Doings>, begins – the largest chapter in the book – saw the release of Britain's first homegrown nudist film, Naturist Paradise. (Trivia fans, who will be extremely well served by this book, may want to note that it's the film within the film in Carry On Camping.)

Though innocuous nudie films continued to dominate the scene for the better part of a decade the emergence of mondo exposes such as London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965) indicates that, like their American counterparts' "ghoulies", "roughies" and "kinkies", Britain's sexploitation film-makers soon found themselves straining against the inherent limitations of the naturist film.

The emergence of the permissive society and swinging London brought an influx of younger directors including the aforementioned Walker and Norman J. Warren, willing to push the envelope that bit further with the likes of I Like Birds and Her Private Hell (both 1967). Predictably – and no matter how tame and harmless such films seem to contemporary sensibilities – there was the inevitable backlash, in the form of moral entrepreneur Mary Whitehouse and her vocal minority of neo-puritans, who emerges as one of the few near-villains in Sheridan's even-handed and non-judgemental account.

The 1970s marked the heyday of the genre and parallel shifts up- and down-market.

With the virtual collapse of the British film industry as American attentions and money went elsewhere, the now-traditional sexploitation producers and distributors found themselves competing with the majors, epitomised by Columbia-Warner's backing of Confessions of a Window Cleaner – directed by Val Guest of Quatermass Xperiment fame and the UK's top box office draw of 1974.

Meanwhile, a burgeoning circuit of private "cinema clubs" exploited a legal loophole allowing them to show Deep Throat and other never-get-passed-uncut-in-a-million years (well, 25 or 30) hardcore material. Some producers also took it upon themselves to make their own hardcore; those with the audacity and honesty to be upfront about their doings, such as John Lindsay, inevitably attracting the attentions of the authorities and moralists.

The British sex film was coming of age in all its forms, with 1974's Eskimo Nell – directed by a young Martin Campbell of Goldeneye note – perhaps offering the definitive summation and auto-critique of the form as the makers of the film within the film struggling with the mutually exclusive demands of their four backing interests.

Around this time, another of the villains of the piece appears, in the form of porn mogul David Sullivan. Desperate to get a piece of the action, he bankrolled veteran George Harrison Marks to direct Come Play With Me, featuring Mary Millington and Alfie Bass as representatives of two tendencies in British sexploitation – the porn starlet and the old school thespian/comedian – and noteable for its downright awfulness. But, perhaps proving the old adage that there's one born every minute, Sullivan then proceeded to hype the film as the real hardcore deal within his stable of porn magazines, turning in a tidy profit and establishing the Millington – herself no stranger to such material – as Britain's #1 sex star, for whatever that was worth…

The self-destructive Millington's moment in the spotlight was brief, however, her 1980 suicide and a glut of tasteless tributes and cash-ins setting the scene for the final chapter in the story, Goings.

Broad distribution patterns were changing with the death of independent cinemas and the rise of home video, while the end of the Eady Levy – by which many a 70s sexploitation film basically couldn't fail to turn a profit – and a tightening up of the law signalled the end of easy production money and the established porno theatre circuit.

Worse was still to come, however, with the introduction of the R18 certificate and the "video nasty" clampdown (only a direct threat to a few titles, such as Expose, but nevertheless indicative of a less favourable social climate) together cutting off access to all but the safest – and arguably lamest – material; the kind of thing you're glad Sheridan has watched so you don't have to…

Happily, after a period of execrably poor straight-to-video material, the British porn story has a happy ending of sorts, with the emergence of the sex education video in the early 1990s – where a socially worthwhile premise allowed for the inclusion of harder material than had been permitted for a while, taking us right back to the days of the naturist documentary and illustrating the old plus ca change adage – being followed by a gradual loosening of the restrictions on hardcore and the realisation that – as yet anyway – British civilisation has not collapsed…

The book ends with profiles of some of the most important figures on the British sex film scene, entitled Knobs and Knockers, ranging from the near-heroic – one gets a grudging respect for Lindsay's 'fuck you' attitude – to the sleazy – producer/director David Grant, with a voyeuristic compulsion to watch others having sex on set and whose mysterious disappearance in 1991 is put down to a professional hit – and the tragic – Julie Lee, a zero-acting talent boob-job type who died aged only 28 after sustaining massive burns in a car accident.

Well written, entertaining, informative, and mercifully free of moralising and theorising – or, worse, the former in the guise of the latter – Keeping the British End Up is a must-read for anyone interested in the more obscure aspects of British cinema and popular culture.