A Boy, a Girl and a Bike

..........and wonderful to do some star spotting with these early post war British films, with the likes of Diana Dors, Thora Hird, Tony Newley, Honor Blackman (just about recongnisable!), Maurice Denham. Megs Jenkins etc. etc. not forgetting my wife's favourite actor Leslie Dwyer - Mr "Punch & Judy" Partridge. : - )

Ahh yes, no traffic to speak of, no yellow lines and quiet peaceful villages - what therapy! How I remember England.

When I first learned during the early seventies that Honor Blackman had starred in something called 'A Boy, a Girl and a Bike', my fevered young imagination had conjured up a fetishistic Kenneth Anger-like fantasy or an erotic drama like 'Girl on a Motorcycle'. But 'The Wild One' this ain't.

This was actually the only feature film produced by documentary maker Ralph Keene, shot on location in North Yorkshire with the youthful Miss Blackman struggling with a northern accent as a mill worker who spends her weekends in shorts on a bicycle rather than in leather straddling a Harley-Davidson.

The film makes the tiny workers' homes (through the windows of which it always seems to be night and there are chimneys perpetually belching out smoke) look painfully cramped, lacking in privacy, and just the sort of places from which to escape into the Dales at every possible opportunity.

It's a measure of the film's incredible age that Blackman was still sweet and demure in those days, and that the Bad Girl is a plump, pouting young Diana Dors ("built for pleasure", as one fellow observes).

This film is a very good representation of a northern England mill town of post WW2. The characters although credible are not typical of the peoples found in the area at the time. This movie was filmed in and around my local town and as a historical aid it is valuable though not wholly reliable.

I saw the film in our local cinema in Paddington in 1949, when I was nearly 13 and a keen cyclist. All of us young boys rated it highly, not least for the unique way the rear brake cable was routed to the brake via a small pilot tube within the bike's top tube. It was the first time that we had seen the young Diana Dors (I think she was 16 at this time) and a real head-turner. Honor Blackman spoke with a creditable Yorkshire accent and I particularly remember the scene when, after having a puncture, she asks John McCullum to "pass the patches and solution". Years later I met Miss Blackman when she was learning to fly at my flying club, Flairavia, at Biggin Hill in 1964 after having just played the part of Pussy Galore in "Gold Finger" - she couldn't remember saying those (to me) immortal lines from the 1949 film! I think the film has stood the test of time and is well worth viewing to remind us how we all lived.

Peter Woodman.

When John McCallum's roadster damages Honor Blackman's bicycle, he takes a liking to the mill girl. However, this annoys her boyfriend, Patrick Holt.

There are a lot of subplots in this story about a Yorkshire bicycling club, and a lot of handsome trucking shots of its members, particularly the ladies from behind, especially eighteen-year-old Diana Dors. the Yorkshire town and its environs are beautifully shot by DP Ray Elton, recently graduated from documentary shorts. He would later become a documentary producer.

Mostly though, it comes off as a paean to post-war prosperity. Like the Huggetts series, it's about the dances and bicycling and good times, now that the war was past, even as Miss Blackman's father wrangles with his mother-in-law about his sweets rations and control of the radio dial. the times are changing, and even though McCallum's parents are old-fashioned and snobby, his interest in Miss Blackman smacks of a new, classless society. Anyway, it's fresh-faced, 24-year-old Honor Blackman, best remembered now for being a Bond Girl and for THE AVENGERS.