The Best Pair of Legs in the Business

When I saw the cast and the date the film was made, I thought we were in for an 'On the Buses' spin-off, with all the usual crudity and low-grade gags and slapstick. In fact it turned out to be quite a touching story from which I found it impossible to tear myself. It suffers from having the cast it does, as it screams 'cheap 70's low-rent production', but there's a surprise in Reg Varney's portrayal of the holiday camp drag act who is losing his looks and his wife as he stubbornly clings to the life he knows, despite his new boss making his life a misery. Reg turns in a very good performance, although he does over-do it from time to time. Diana Coupland is her usual excellent self in her role as the long-suffering wife who eventually can take no more. A good film. Not great, but good.

Caught this on Sunday morning TV in New Zealand and was taken aback by its rather grim examination of a cross-dressing musical hall entertainer at the end of his career even though he doesn't know it. With a son who despises him and a boss who has no loyalty to anyone Kevin Laffan creates a tragic character in Sherry Sheridan. Mention of Mike Leigh in another comment isn't far off the mark - this is emotionally hard hitting piece that only gets the tag of comedy because the characters are comedians by trade and people seem to think people with cockney accents must be funny - there's nothing funny off stage here.

Very weak British comedy. Reg Varney acts well to hold together this flimsy and to be quite frank quite uninspiring tale about a failed drag-act comedian who suffers illusions of grandeur. This film tries to mix drama with comedy and unfortunately fails to do either with much success.

Reg Varney gives a genuinely affecting performance in this comedy drama. Seeing him, i expected it to be a cheesy 70's sex comedy but it wasn't at all. The film gives women some credit, and is not about nudity. Without the overuse of unsubtle "emotive"music it would have been better, perhaps like a Mike Leigh movie. Still, some parts were rather melodramatic and visually it was boring. Reg Varney deserved more credit for this effort.

I have to disagree with the earlier comments on this film. Having idly switched on the telly when I ought to have been doing something else, I found myself unable to switch off as Reg Varney's performance as the tragi-comic Sherry impressed me more with each scene. The combination of comedy and drama worked very well, to my taste, being written and performed with real empathy and what-not.

I particularly enjoyed the horrid owner of the caravan park where Sherry has been living and working - in one scene she has overheard Sherry's wife and her lover planning to run away together, and, rather than breaking it to Sherry in a kindly fashion, she simply tells him to move out of his two-bed caravan so that she can have it : he protests that the other caravan has only one bed, to which she replies, "Well, you'll only be needing one bed now that your wife is leaving you."

The scene where Sherry and his wife (Diana Coupland) go to tea with their son's upper-class fiancee and her parents is a classic unravelling of self-conceit under pressure, and quite painfully funny. (A very young Jane Seymour plays the part of the fiancee).

I found the ending a little anti-climactic, but on the whole "The Best Pair of Legs..." might not be the very best film of all time, but it really wasn't that bad either.