Prey (AKA Alien Prey) (1977)

Considering the three films are very similar in tone, content and atmosphere - even disregarding the fact that two of them share the same director in the gloriously misanthropic Norman J. Warren, a man for whom the term 'the cinema of cruelty' could have been coined - it seems grossly unfair that everyone of a certain age remembers watching Xtro (1983) on video and almost as many people remember going along to their local fleapit to see Inseminoid (1980), yet hardly anyone has even heard of Prey (1977), a quirky-as-you-like low-budget melange of softcore lesbian couplings, reluctant cross-dressing, off-kilter character study, wonky science-fiction malarkey and good old-fashioned blood-belching flesh-munching shock horror. This is doubly odd, seeing as it was released on video on the marvellous Vampix label (whose employees included Starburst's Alan Jones) of Death Weekend fame, and it narrowly missed ending up on the Department of Public Prosecution's shit-list of seventy-two so-called 'video nasties', but thanks to a couple of above-average DVD releases (most recently from Odeon, who released it as a rude-to-say-no twofer with Warren's earlier Satan's Slave) and the occasional screening on the Horror Channel, Prey is slowly but surely gathering a devoted cult following - and it's taken long enough, because if ever a film had 'cult classic' stamped all over it from day one, it's this one.

Consider this. A film that went into production before the screenplay was even completed, was shot in just over ten days on the backlot of Shepperton Studios, and whose main location was 'the old house' that the Who's drummer, Keith Moon, had once planned to make his home after his bandmates bought a share in that doughty British institution. Doesn't grab you? Well, consider the cast - Barry Stokes of Ups and Downs of a Handyman fame. Sally Faulkner of Vampyres fame. Glory Annen making a strong debut showing, shortly before she won the hearts of randy film buffs the world over with her scene-stealing turns in Felicity and Warren's saucy sci-fi comedy Spaced Out. Then there's the script - a genuinely whacked-out, predictably uneven grab bag of schizophrenic hysterics, misplaced kindness, fish-out-of-water misunderstandings, raw screaming hatred and punter-pleasing plasma-drenched histrionics that also manages to cram in side-swipes at health food nuts, man-loathing militant lesbians and Radio One DJs. I haven't even mentioned Ivor Slaney's score yet, suffice to say that the phrase 'once heard, never forgotten' barely does it justice.

The plot is simplicity itself. Kator, an extra-terrestrial visitor, arrives somewhere in England and has to assume human form in order to carry out some unspecified research mission. He promptly slaughters the grouchy male half of a necking couple in a parked car, only to assume the identity of the dead man and bump off his girlfriend too. The scene shifts to a nearby isolated house, where a lesbian couple go about their daily business. Jessica - cascading locks, cute smile, floaty summer dresses - is clearly the submissive feminine one (even though it's her house), and Josephine - tracksuit top, severe haircut, permanent scowl - is not only the dominant butch one, she's obviously a few bricks short of a full load. They stumble across Kator (who now calls himself Anders Anderson) and invite him back to their place, where he quickly wins their approval by single-handedly capturing the fox that killed their chickens. After a celebration that finds Kator / Anders dolled up like a transvestite Action Man at the behest of his hosts, a game of hide and seek (yes, there's padding - it's a low budget horror flick, what did you expect?) and a near-drowning in a stagnant river (all captured in gut-crunching slow motion and backed by Slaney's uniquely disorientating score), Josephine pitches one fit too many and Jessica announces her intention to leave and take Anders / Kator with her. That's when, to borrow a piece of appropriate urban slang, 'shit gets real' and Kator's mission is finally revealed. Considering the film's occasionally stately pace and dream-like atmosphere, it would have been the mother of all letdowns had the pay-off not been an absolute doozy, but thankfully Prey manages to cram a whole fistful of surprises, twists and sudden shocks into its last reel. The final line of dialogue, and the visuals that accompany it, are particularly spine-chilling.

Norman J. Warren is one of those film-makers you either 'get' or you don't. Considering that, by all accounts, he's a remarkably affable man, described elsewhere on the net as resembling a good-looking supply teacher, the best films of his career - the batch of low-budget oddities he made during the late seventies - are notable for their absolute refusal to allow the audience a happy ending. Even Spaced Out, a light-hearted sci-fi sex comedy, ends with four of the main characters perishing in a jarringly abrupt spacecraft explosion. There's a genuine, seething misanthropy bubbling under the surface in his films, a frisson similar to the so-called 'paperback nasties' of James Herbert and Guy N. Smith (and later Shaun Hutson) that were being published around the same time. Relationships are festering, open sores. Hopes and dreams lead to nothing. If nothing else, Warren's films sit neatly alongside those of his fellow Brit-horror rabble rouser Pete Walker (Frightmare, Schizo) as potent reminders of the more unsettling side of the let-it-all-hang-out seventies when the country's post-war optimism and the feelgood vibes of the sixties were washed away by economic uncertainty, social divisions, political chicanery, strikes, scandal, hooligans and terrorism. Unlike Walker, however, Warren chose to clothe his more provocative works in the distracting robes of fantasy - Satan's Slave is essentially a Hammer Horror with a contemporary setting and more graphic violence (including a still-impressive eyeball impaling), Prey unfolds like a fever dream (and it must be said that Stokes' alien make-up, whilst functional, remains slightly laughable), Terror never pretended to be anything other than Dario Argento's Suspiria relocated to the home counties and Inseminoid's disarmingly cut-price vision of outer space was shot mostly in Chiselhurst Caves and a collection of sets that looked like leftovers from Blake's Seven and the Goodies. The nagging but inescapable sense that Warren was over-reaching himself eventually brings him closer to such US schlock-masters as Fred Olen Ray than any of his British peers and contemporaries, but the world of home-grown horror would definitely be a poorer place without him.

In summing up, then, Prey is not without its faults - the slow pacing will most likely put the multiplex off within the first fifteen minutes - and the odd allusions to artiness are increasingly sacrificed on the blood-and-breasts altar of B-film exploitation, but it's so much more than the sum of its parts. Ultimately, it works simply because it's so unusual - and considering it arrived three quarters of the way through a decade when the majority of domestic cinema product consisted of the (enormously profitable) pedestrian vulgarity of the home-grown sex comedy, that was a pretty ballsy move on the part of its makers.

What's Up Nurse! (1978)

Derek Ford must have had some talent at some stage. During the sixties, he was a prolific writer for television and radio, and - along with his brother Donald - he crafted the screenplay for the awesomely tasteless yet really rather brilliant Peter Cushing shocker Corruption (1968), directed by the underrated Robert Hartford-Davis. Sadly, when he turned his hand to writing and directing - with a series of schlocky exploitation flicks in the seventies - his limitations became all too obvious. Outside of a genuinely fantastic psych-pop soundtrack, Groupie Girl is a fairly miserable experience, and whilst his sex films (among them the Sexplorer, allegedly one of Quentin Tarantino's favourites, and Diversions, which was notoriously available in a far more transgressive extended cut for overseas audiences) have their admirers, to me they look every inch the work of someone who simply left the camera running and buggered off, hoping something interesting would happen in his absence. Then,of course, there are his sex comedies. Oh dear God, his sex comedies... where do we even start?

What's Up Nurse! seems as good a place as any, as it's surely one of the most universally reviled British films of its age, a shabby and bedraggled attempt at dragging the moribund Carry On series up to date with bollock-naked frog hunting, grotesque homosexual stereotypes, unsuitable objects wedged up the fundamental orifices of unfortunate gentlemen, casual racism, a stalwart cast of reliable comedy actors struggling with a script that isn't so much end of the pier as the arse end of nowhere and a ton of gratuitous nudity. Add to this the production values of a public information film and a wretched score by Roger Webb, and you have a film that had no business being made in the first place.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a young doctor (Nicholas Field) arriving at an understaffed seaside hospital where he immediately clashes with the head surgeon (poor old John Le Mesurier) - as you'd expect, when he's wheeled into casualty with the head surgeon's daughter's vagina clamped around his penis. Graham Stark's befuddled porter notes that 'I've heard of this sort of thing happening to dogs', whilst a student nurse practices her ballet moves in the corridors, apparently to facilitate an extremely weak pun about pirouetting. If none of this seems funny to you, think yourself lucky - you're only having to read about it. I actually watched it.

Field comes across as a priapic Frank Spencer, a bumbling, accident-prone naif who's unable to turn down the chance of a quick leg-over whenever one arises. This should have been a decent springboard for some funny stuff, but the arrival of long-serving Dave Allen stooge Ronnie Brody with a jam jar wedged up his rectum immediately tells you what kind of level this thing is working on. Worse is to come when the 'secret lemonade drinker' from the old R. White's adverts turns up as a chronically constipated gay man who is convinced he's pregnant. Yes, they do the old 'those suppositories were useless, I might as well have stuffed them up my arse' joke. Ford's screenplay duly scrapes the bottom (no pun intended) of the bad taste barrel when an escaped chimpanzee from the circus finds its way into the constipated man's bed, and when he wakes up, he thinks he's given birth. British smut expert Simon Sheridan notes that this is a nasty scene, played with utter contempt. I think he's being too kind.

Around this point, the film - literally and honestly - seems to get bored with itself and starts rambling on like a lunatic. There's a pointless set-piece in a restaurant with a fire eater and Andrew Sachs plays a slightly more aggressive variation on Manuel. They do the 'prick his boil' gag, which was ancient even when it was on one of the old Bamforth's postcards. Regular Spike Milligan stooge keith Smith turns up as a man with a frog in his throat, which naturally leads to a spot of nude frog-hunting, before Smith decides he's got rabbit DNA or something and hops off. Olive from On the Buses, Frank Williams from Dad's Army and Bullet Baxter from Grange Hill contribute thankless cameos. Saddest of all, Peter Butterworth and Jack Douglas turn up as the local bobbies, before the whole thing is summarily wrapped up with a truly insane (but still desperately unfunny) happy ending involving a king-sized bed and a merry-go-round. Roll credits, and another rusty nail gets hammered into the coffin of the British film industry. Cardew Robinson at least had the good sense to get his cameo over and done with before the opening title sequence.

Amazingly, What's Up Nurse! does have its admirers, I still get the feeling that anyone who actually praises this thing with a straight face must be gritting their teeth so hard that they're in danger of showering anyone in the immediate vicinity with enamel chips. Yet the film was sufficiently successful to spawn a sequel, What's Up Superdoc, in which dear old Harry H. Corbett makes an arse of himself and Hughie Green talks about wanking. It's as classy as it sounds. As for Derek Ford? With his surly bruiser's face, he would have made a good partner in crime for the villainous Cliff Brumby in Get Carter. Ford directed his last film, Attack of the Killer Computer (AKA Urge to Kill) in 1989, and it was never properly released, though an iffy VHS-quality bootleg did leak out on the internet. Remembered by his colleagues as 'generally miserable', Ford spent the last few years of his life chasing work in America (where he sought to gloss over his grimy past) and writing detective fiction. He died of a heart attack outside a branch of WH Smith's in 1995.

Q Volume 1 (Q5, Q6 and Q7) DVD review

Since finishing Pauline Scudamore's excellent biography of the Goonfather himself, I've been thinking a lot about Spike Milligan - the phrases 'tortured genius' and 'complex individual' seem barely adequate descriptions for someone whose influence was as pervasive as it was far-reaching. Certainly, he was a reassuring presence during my formative years - growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, the well-stocked libraries at my otherwise grim and joyless schools were stuffed with books bearing his name, from his gloriously silly children's books to the often farcical, sometimes harrowing autobiographical volumes he wrote about his part in Adolf Hitler's downfall, and whenever he turned up on television - usually as a guest on other people's programmes by that stage, though his final BBC series, There's a Lot of it About, remains a vastly underrated treat - you were guaranteed a few welcome laughs. Spike didn't believe in the rambling, discursive, slow-burning silliness of his former colleague Michael Bentine; his comedy was a powerful kick up the arse, guaranteed to shock a reaction out of everyone in the vicinity, whether you liked it or not. Discovering his 'straight' album the Snow Goose revealed another side to his personality - there are no silly voices here, no broadsides or buffoonery, just a haunting musical adaptation of Paul Jellicoe's affecting novel of the same name, with Spike checking his jester's hat at the studio door to deliver a hypnotic narrative around which the orchestral music ebbed and flowed.

The quality of Milligan's work is perhaps inevitably variable, given just how prolific a writer and performer he was. It's very telling that he often wished he was 'ten people at once', because he found the delegation of tasks almost impossible. As a result, he frequently spread himself too thin, and even his staunchest admirers would grudgingly admit that some of his later books left rather a lot to be desired. Which brings us onto his longest-running and most substantial work for television, the six series he made for the BBC between 1969 and 1982 under the umbrella title of Q. 

The Q series divided hardcore Milligan fans - which is to say, those who had grown up with the Goon Show on the wireless - as fiercely as it divided the critics. Even Spike himself had mixed feelings about it - catch him on a good day, and he'd tell you he thought the programmes were 'fucking good'; catch him on a bad day (of which there were far too many) and he'd rail against the complacency or the uselessness of the BBC, remarking that he never stood a chance against, for example, the Monty Python crowd, because they had six writers and performers, and the Q series was 'just me and a load of second bananas'. To this day, there are several comedy experts and professional reviewers who simply cannot stomach the series, complaining of 'ordinary old chestnuts' and 'bouts of charmless corn' marching hand-in-hand with moments of surreal brilliance and idiosyncratic humour. (The fact that Q was rampantly politically incorrect, even in the seventies, doesn't seem to help matters.)

The review on the That's Not Current website, however, sums it up beautifully - 'Watching [Q] in 2016 it still feels as important as it ever was. To use a common phrase, they just don’t make them like this anymore. When you look at the current BBC rota of comedy programming, you just won’t find anything that comes close to being this edgy, rebellious and socio-politically on point (or in poor taste). With Milligan and Shand, you get the impression that they weren’t doing this to carve a successful career for themselves; this was their way to artistically express themselves and give the middle finger to the establishment while venting their disdain for their network. In the current climate of political correctness, Q wouldn’t be touched with a ten-foot pole.' And there's the rub - this was a comedy series with no frontiers and no boundaries. It was a wild ride through the imagination of a man whose own psychiatrist considered him clinically insane, an unfettered expression of his inner complexities filtered through his own Dadaist surrealism and gleeful, child-like sense of mischief. 

Simply Media's release of Q Volume 1 (Q Volume 2 is due to be released next February) features the remaining three episodes of Q5 (four of them have been wiped and presumably lost forever, two exist only as monochrome telerecordings and only one is presented here in colour), all six episodes of Q6 and all seven episodes of Q7. Among the sketches featured here are a grandmother-hurling contest live from Beachy Head, World War One in a trunk, 'physician heal thyself', the Cock-a-knees, the Jehovah burglars, the Pakistani daleks, a holiday in the Bermuda triangle and Star Trek in Catford. There's four hundred and eighty minutes' worth of material to get through, which means the lack of extras in this bare-bones release is no major drawback. One episode of Q5 and the entirety of Q6 and Q7 has been mastered from the original BBC tapes, so they look as good as they're ever going to look until someone pushes the boat out for a full restoration job. The black and white episodes of Q5 are as good as can be expected for low-res monochrome recordings of a colour broadcast.

If you want to piss and moan about the less savoury aspects of Spike's comedy, you can do so here, and you'll be in very good company. If, on the other hand, you're in the mood to watch something that was absolutely miles ahead of the pack at the time (and continues to be so today, particularly in this climate of the cosy, unthreatening, arena-cramming likes of Peter Kay and Michael McIntyre), then you could do a lot worse than setting a few evenings aside for Q Volume 1.

A Winter's Wail

Donovan Winter in happier times. Or maybe not.

As Thoughts of a Gemini, the self-published memoirs of former It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum star Don Estelle prove conclusively, the ramblings of a has-been (or even a never-was) can make for perversely entertaining reading, even if the book itself isn’t much cop. Throughout this slender example of vanity publishing at its most deluded – Estelle having long been reduced to slogging around the country doing personal appearances in shopping centres and indoor markets, selling his records out of a suitcase whilst dressed in his trademark pith helmet and shorts – the artist formerly known as Lofty doggedly repeats himself, writes himself up blind alleys populated by numbing trivia and pointless facts and figures, rants long and loud about how television has been ruined by all those horrible people who, for some baffling reason, don’t find the idea of the wanton abuse of homosexuals automatically hilarious, tells some of the least impressive celebrity anecdotes you’re ever likely to read (riding in Ursula Andress’s beach buggy, appearing in pantomime with loveable wife-beater Jim Davidson) and unambiguously sings the praises of lard-arsed paedophile MP Cyril Smith. The book’s undoubted comic highlight arrives when Estelle falls down a hole whilst ogling a woman’s breasts There’s also a photo of Estelle in the elevated company of Sir Jimmy Savile. It’s that kind of book.

Which brings me to the unpublished memoirs of the recently deceased exploitation film-maker Donovan Winter, unearthed by the folks at Nucleus Films as a bonus PDF document on their exceptionally fine DVD release of Winter’s final film, the 1978 home invasion thriller Give Us Tomorrow. As with Estelle’s book, it’s a rambling, discursive beast, apparently written in one marathon session without a break (or the benefit of an editor or proof-reader), but it’s not without interest – if only because of its author’s dogged sense that the entire world is endlessly conspiring to make his life miserable. But be warned – not only was Winter a poet maudit in the Adrian Mole (rather than the Philip Larkin) tradition, he was also – and there’s really no easier way to put this – a bit of a cunt.

The book starts amicably enough…

At 11 years old I gained a scholarship to the local Boys County Grammar School - not a girl in sight - where the word ‘drama’ was never mentioned and nobody, to my knowledge, ever contemplated putting on a school play. There were twenty six boys in the class, the register starting with Alcock, Barrett, Brooker, and my bringing up the tail with Webb, Williams and Wood. All good old Anglo-Saxon surnames, apart from the odd Jewish name like Margolis, and not an unpronounceable one amongst them.

I had seen friends dive in and take the plunge up the first available skirt but I found I could not work up a hard for any girl who did not match my ideal.

Too much information, Mr W. And don’t get him started on those bloody Yanks…

Personally I have never been enamoured of American girls. They may enjoy a glamorous image – sexy and attractive, yes, but in a hard and common way, with very little softness and warmth. Beneath all that surface glamour I find a cold personality, very demanding and aggressive, not to mention intimidating, and I can never feel at ease with them. Always suspicious of their motives one has the feeling that one is being led to the scaffold with a toothy smile. The very thought of their oversized vampiric porcelain capped mandibles ever seeking a succulent bite on a juicy penis is positively frightening. Moreover I can never relish the thought of waking up in the morning to be greeted by that harsh throaty invective which is characteristic of the American voice - probably the result of all the shouting and screaming they do as children.

That’s every American woman in the world, ever, according to Don – hard, cold, common, always shouting and ready to bite your cock off at the drop of a hat. So, that’s half an entire country’s population written off in a paragraph, what’s next?

A visit to the Royal Court theatre to see John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger…

I was incensed by the torrent of abuse that issued from Porter’s mouth. His choking monotonous diatribe of phlegm ranting against the evils of society I found tedious and I could find no compassion for him.

Bear that paragraph in mind, especially when you read some of the later excerpts.

I have never felt comfortable amongst homosexuals. I have always found them duplicitous in character. Many, of course, have a spiteful and abusive tongue. One moment they can be quite charming and effusive, then suddenly they will turn vicious, both verbally and physically, displaying a mental kink in their make-up.

Wow. Just… wow.

Rightly or wrongly I determined that there was some resentment against me by other producers.

Can’t think why…

No amount of urging, asking, or pleading brought forth any offers from the myopic and obtuse British executive dead-heads more concerned with protecting their own positions.

Ah, that’ll be it.

On the classic cycle of British ‘kitchen sink’ dramas of the early sixties…

Social realism was all very fine but truth to tell I was not at all comfortable with these coarse characters. I am sure I was not meant to be. But these brash un-mannered North Country yobboes whining their miserable lot surely deserved no better than they got. Maybe I am a traitor to my class but I could not empathise with them. If that was the way they behaved “oop thar” then they had best stay there, I felt.

On screen violence…

Personally I deplore and abhor the mindless violence and wanton destruction depicted in some films. Even as a youngster I had never found those ‘cartoons’ of Tom and Jerry, and Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, battering each other flat, funny. It puzzles me why children laugh at them.

Perhaps because children have a sense of humour?

It actually comes as a blessed release when Winter interrupts his harangues with this slice of life…

(At this point my typewriter literally went up in smoke. For almost 20 years my small portable Imperial had served me well, typing all my scripts and hundreds, nay thousands, of letters, angry and otherwise.)

But pretty soon, it’s business as usual. On the women’s lib movement…

These snarling ugly dragons, many of them lesbians I feel sure…

On trying to sell Give Us Tomorrow to the television companies…

I knew it was hardly to the taste of the BBC with their superior and snooty approach. While they showed an obsequious devotion to the self-indulgent erotic frolics of Dennis Potter and his tiresome labyrinthine twisted emotions…

On Leslie Halliwell, of Halliwell’s Film Guide fame, who committed the grave sin of not wanting to buy Give Us Tomorrow for a screening on the ITV network…

He was a devoted fan of old black and white movies and his world ceased to exist in 1960 when the industry switched exclusively to making films in colour. According to the gospel of Halliwell colour was the ruination of film art. Nothing pleased him more than to discover a long forgotten pre-war movie. So he unearthed libraries of these awful old melo’s [melodramas] most of which would have better remained buried and left them as a legacy (he died in 1989) to the television audience. Well, I suppose they’re good for a laugh now…

The industry switched ‘exclusively’ to making films in colour in 1960? Well, that’ll come as a bit of a shock to anyone who’s watched Raging Bull (1980), Ed Wood (1994), Eraserhead (1977), the Elephant Man (1981)…

Things were seldom better on Channel Four…

They burdened their tiny audience with such pseudo-intellectual nonsense as a Zed and Two Noughts, one of Peter Greenaway’s tendentious diatribes, the sorry Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and the sordid Rita, Sue and Bob, Too.

What? Rita, Sue and Bob, Too ‘sordid’? Well, fair comment, I suppose. But it’s still one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen.

Surely Winter retains a soft spot for the city where he was born?

London is now a city of slobs, sluts, and scum. Shysters prevail. Junk food shops proliferate and discarded pop cans litter the squalid streets which stink of hamburgers, onions, and hot dogs. Rats grow fat on the piles of decaying garbage and will soon outnumber the human population. As the infrastructure of London collapses the air grows ever more polluted and it is only a question of time before it finally reaches meltdown. It is a bleak outlook for the 21st. century. What to do? Well, most native Londoners have already left the city anyway, driven out and replaced by an ever growing amorphous polyglot of foreigners.

I can’t help thinking Winter missed his true vocation. Never mind writing and dirtecting films, he should have been one of those half-senile reactionary high court judges, spouting antediluvian nonsense whilst stoked to the gills on sherry. He’d have been good at that.

Did I mention he was a horrible old racist too?

Manners maketh the Man, aye… and they display the wretchedness of man. It is surely no coincidence that the major decline in manners can be dated back to 1973 with the large influx of Arabs, Asians, Iranians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, and other refugees into the country. It has been argued that this influx of foreign nationals is beneficial and healthy because it gives us a cosmopolitan society to enrich our cultural horizons. But apart from new and exotic foods introduced to these shores it is difficult to identify what other benefits we have enjoyed. More significantly these immigrants brought their own manners and habits with them and it has not proved a happy mix. Rather than accept British traditional standards they would attempt to impose their own customs upon the indigenous population by injecting an alien culture into the community. Intent upon perpetuating their own ethnic customs and religions they show little sign of any willingness to integrate. And it is surely the height of impertinence to expect the incumbents to change their habits to accommodate new cults and creeds. Ethnic rivalries and traditions breed dissension and unrest and instability ultimately threatening the very security of the country. Why, for instance, should we be obliged to tolerate incomprehensible graffiti of political plaints foreign to the English character gratuitously daubed on our buildings? Such a multifarious society does not blend and integrate harmoniously, only causing friction, animosity, and inter-racial hatred inviting simmering resentment often leading to violence and social disintegration. So as Britain becomes more heterogeneous it becomes more secular and divisive and that cannot prove of benefit to society and the nation. A polyglot society simply does not work. Thus do good and tried old British values and traditions crumble and collapse.

Remember the old Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch with Rowan Atkinson as a bigoted Tory MP saying ‘I like curry, I do… but now we’ve got the recipe, is there any reason for them to stay’?

Amazingly, he then goes on to write –

Violence has no respect for talent or nationality.

Begging your pardon, but you don’t seem to have an awful lot of respect for other nationalities yourself.

On modern television –

We hear strangled vowels and glottic stops sprayed generously throughout the media.

I think you mean glottal stops?

In the name of entertainment for the mass audience (ratings) the English language is reduced to gutter level and we regularly hear the clone of Jimmy Tarbuck, Danny Baker, and Sue Pollard, Janet Street-Porter and Cilla Black, murdering the English language, setting a poor example for the young.

The clone (singular) of five separate people? Who is this person? Does he or she even exist? I’d love to meet him, or her.

Why has Mr Winter never married?

Passion and infatuation give way to indifference and hate and few first marriages survive the early lustful overtures, doomed to disaster from inception. Marriage is an aging process and no state of grace. Growing old together is a slow path to death.

Plus, he’s afraid of women biting his cock off. Why has Mr Winter never fathered any children?

Babies are for women to nurse. They merely make me uncomfortable.

Holy shit, Don. Not even Jerry Lewis would say something as cold as that, and he’s basically the biggest arsehole who ever lived.

Of his past conquests…

There was the optimum virgin (not easy to find!) sent to me by a music critic who thought I was best equipped to break her in.

Who said romance was dead!

It has always amazed me how some of the most attractive girls become enamoured of the most awful scoundrels and no-goods.

He doesn’t much like old people either…

I find the old to be inflexible and intractable and I am uncomfortable in the company of age.

The pot and the kettle are doubled up on the floor together, united in helpless laughter. So that’s something.

Then there was the girl who didn’t like having her bottom slapped. Well, ‘slapped’ is probably an exaggeration and too harsh a term. I had a habit of lightly stroking her derriere when I found it in an inviting position. In today’s brittle climate that would probably be deemed sexual harassment but thirty years ago nobody would have thought to give it that interpretation. It was merely an innocent gesture of affection offered in a light-hearted way, certainly not aggressive. In a Latin country a woman expects a pinch on the bum as a sign of affection and indeed would be offended if she did not receive it. But this girl saw it differently.

What, a woman who objected to being sexually molested? Ungrateful bitch!

Time and time again, Winter singles out 1973 as his annus horribilis, even singling out that year as the cut-off point when women stopped being attractive!

Rarely did a passing dolly in the Street rate a second glance anymore.

I’m sure they were all gutted, Don.

A 'dolly', 1973.

The British are an inherently mean race without any abundance of generosity.

Says the man who, just a few pages earlier, complained long and impotently about Britain being taken over by bloody foreigners.

Let nobody cross me badly because something terminal will happen in their life shortly afterwards.

Seriously? Have you any proof of that?

Halliwell died comparatively young…

Yeah, that karma’s a bitch, isn’t it!

With civilisation steadily decomposing Armageddon approaches and the inevitable Apocalypse beckons. You reflect upon the past. When young you look forward optimistically. You want to be liked. Experience proves that that is not so important. You are going to be fucked around whatever you do, always at the mercy of the fuckers. So fuck you too, mate!

I’m beginning to think Don, not Vivian Mackerall, was the real inspiration behind Bruce Robinson’s Withnail character.

The working classes can also suck Don’s balls…

The working man is not interested in Art and never gives it a thought. His only interest is in his paypacket which buys him his next beer and hamburger and chips, and wondering whether he will fuck his worn-out dreary wife tonight…

‘I have never been truly happy’, whines Winter in the final chapter, which has the charming subtitle DAMN YOU, DAMN YOU, DAMN YOU! Maybe it was ghost-written by Stewie from Family Guy, another young fogey-stroke-closet case-stroke-misogynist.

So, there it is. Donovan Winter – actor, writer, director, producer, cunt. In case you were wondering, Give Us Tomorrow is probably his best film – and it didn’t even get a proper cinema release. I think that says a lot.

The Amorous Milkman (1974)

One of the most widely reviled films in cinema history, and certainly one which most of its (now sadly deceased) participants would most likely have rather forgotten about, the Amorous Milkman - written and directed by Derren Nesbitt, who had made a bit of a name for himself playing villains, heavies and Gestapo officers, before an unsavoury domestic incident (see below) pole-axed his career - is a singularly depressing piece of work. Imagine if a low-brow, old-school, blue-collar comedian, whose regular gigs on the holiday camp / working men's club / end of the pier circuit had long since dried up, was asked to take a snapshot of his tortured, moribund soul, every last shred of human decency and sensitivity cruelly decimated by years of reducing all human experience to the level of a bawdy joke. My guess is that you'd get something very similar to this woeful offering.

The Amorous Milkman was very much a labour of love for Nesbitt, who sold his yacht to finance its production. Even more surprisingly, the screenplay was adapted from the novel of the same name, though I can't find any proof anywhere that the novel was actually published. The nearest I can find is this self-explanatory entry in the long-running Confessions series of paperbacks...

Amazingly, that was published a full two years after Nesbitt's film crept into Britain's fleapits. In the interim, there was a notably unsuccessful pilot episode for a projected television series, Milk-o!, which starred Bob Grant as the titular cheeky milkman with an eye for the ladies. When that series crashed on the runway, Grant apparently threw a hissy fit, vowing never to work in television again - and, outside of a handful of chat show appearances, he never did. This didn't stop London Weekend Television from making one last valiant attempt at reviving the randy milkman trope for their shatteringly awful 1984 sitcom Bottle Boys, which really was as awful as its dire reputation suggests.

From the moment the Amorous Milkman gets underway - with a shot of a novelty alarm clock which takes the shape of a little figure wanking under the covers of a doll-sized bed - you know exactly what you're in for. Subtle it isn't. Then the camera pulls back to reveal something at which the British sex comedy truly excelled, intentionally or not - capturing good old mid-seventies dinge and squalor. Our hero (Brendan Price) lives in a pokey bedsit straight out of an episode of Rising Damp, with a poster of the Incredible Hulk on the door. Even Marwood and Withnail would have drawn the line at spending a night in this hovel. You can practically smell the crinkly tissues stuffed under the bed. The outside world doesn't fare much better, either - all the exteriors seem to have been shot over the same wet, foggy and freezing week in January. This is one British film unlikely to cause ex-pats sunning themselves in the Costa Del Sol to feel even remotely homesick.

Another thing that places this film firmly in the seventies - Roger Webb's awful 'comedy' score, which seems to have wandered in from any one of hundreds of generic sitcoms. Not really surprising, because Webb's most famous (or perhaps notorious) achievement was changing the original George and Mildred title music by Johnny Hawksworth to a bland confection which sounded like a lounge take on 10cc's Art for Art's Sake, right down to the percussive woodblocks.

There's really not much plot to bother ourselves with, suffice to say that Price is the kind of bumbling 'hero' who makes Frank Spencer look like Charles Bronson. The usual complications with dewy-eyed, lovesick fuck-bunnies and screeching suburban harridans ensue, there's a visit to a 'swinging London' nightclub and an orgy which takes place in the inventively-named Stilorgan Road ('I've heard that on a cold night you can't find it') and results in Price, smashed on the host's potent punch, alternating wildly between shagging his balls off and rushing to the toilet to throw up. It's as charmless as it sounds, but what really drags the pedestrian vulgarity up to another level is Nesbitt's decision to intercut the puking and screwing with clips of atomic bombs exploding, members of the Viet Cong deploying flamethrowers and even a brief glimpse of a Nazi rally. Something else that's weird - all this archive footage, as well as the occasional flashbacks, are seen through a variety of primary-coloured filters. At moments like these, the Amorous Milkman is heavily redolent of the kind of film Dr Brodsky in a Clockwork Orange would have showed Malcolm McDowell to break his mind.

This is pretty much how I felt watching the Amorous Milkman.

There's half an hour left to run, and the film has already played all its 'sex comedy' cards, so events take a drastic detour and Price's character is accused of rape after being caught in a clumsily-orchestrated compromising position with Diana Dors' frustrated housewife. Worse yet, the threatening gangster boyfriend of a character we've already forgotten about (despite her being played by the lovely Julie Ege) orders two of his heavies to give Price a revenge kicking for rumping his bit of Norwegian skirt. This they do, and dump him in the middle of nowhere. On his release from hospital, Price is chased around the hospital grounds in a special needs class re-enactment of a bit of standard Goodies slapstick by his clingy fiancee and the end credits roll. Either the money ran out, or the film's makers simply got bored with it, called bullshit and left the viewer to fend for himself.

By this stage, it pretty well goes without saying that the Amorous Milkman is an absolute mess. If Nesbitt picked up any behind-the-camera expertise whatsoever during his extensive career at this point, it certainly doesn't show. I've no complaints about films that are unpretentious, but films that are unambitious deserve everything they get, and this is one of those films that aims as low as it's possible to aim yet still misses its modest targets by a mile. Everything from the performances to the technical credits simply reek of apathy, and it's a terrible shame to see the likes of Bill Fraser, Diana Dors, Arnold Ridley, Roy Kinnear, Anthony Sharp and Fred Emney reduced to appearing in this kind of rubbish just to pay the bills. One last trivial note - according to the British Board of Film Classification's website, this thing had to be cut in order to secure an X certificate back in 1974. I'm not exactly curious to see the outtakes, but something tells me they involved fucking or spewing.