The Ups and Downs of a Handyman

This film has recently been given what I would describe as a sneak showing on a local TV channel. It was shown at a normal evening viewing time and was just listed as a British comedy, with no mention of sex-comedy or adult film to be found in my program guide. I believe the best British comedies, such as "Passport to Pimlico", are unmatched and I decided to watch it. I was quite startled to find that it was an unabashed and totally uninhibited sex comedy, with at least as much nudity as in any other film I remember seeing. I was recently amused to read a newspaper report about an author who has published a book listing nude appearances in films, and detailing their duration and the anatomical features displayed. I found it very hard to credit that someone should spend their time creating such a reference work, or that having done so they could find anyone willing to spend money buying it. However the article was quite serious and the author, when interviewed, reported that he could process most films very quickly - the only one which had taken him a considerable time to review fully had been "Showgirls". It appears that he has never seen this film which features far more nudity than "Showgirls"!

This film is a farce, comparable in many ways with the British "Carry On" series of films. It is probably best regarded as a more modern replacement for the Victorian erotic postcards that used to be so popular a century ago. The main story is of a young couple who have to move to a small country town where work is not plentiful. The husband attempts to make a living as the local handyman, but his shop window advertisement somehow conveys a message to the lonely women who see it, that he is offering other types of services. His role is supplemented by a series of kinky characters including an elderly man who enjoys spanking girls (a very Victorian theme), an amateur glamour photographer looking for models, and an incredibly inept policeman, all are portrayed outrageously to create a comedy with very broad humour. There is no real acting as all the characters are caricatures, but the film is reasonably well made and - if you are prepared to watch this type of humour - is enjoyable to view at least once. My personal view is that such films are far less socially harmful than most of the unnecessarily violent action/adventure films which today hardly ever raise the public's eyebrows. However anyone buying it, or seeing it in a cinema or on TV should be aware of what to expect. Viewers with other expectations are likely to class it as an example of the ultimate turkey.

Normally this would be a film which would leave a viewer with nothing to think about, but in my case I found myself facing the weighty question of whether this film is likely to be released again soon as one half of a two feature DVD for home viewing; and if so what could be chosen as a suitable companion film to pair with it? Perhaps "Can you keep it up for a week?" might have made a possible pairing; but although this is in my view a much less successful film, it has somehow already made DVD status on its own.

We enjoy watching British sex comedies - there is great enjoyment to be had watching the comparatively innocent antics of hapless male protagonists trying desperately to get their end away.

The Ups and Downs of a Handyman barely stands up as entertainment even on the undemanding terms of British sex comedies. It is as boring as hell and has production values (and we use the term loosely) that make the Confessions series look like something from the Golden Era of the Hollywood studio system.

Barry Stokes makes for an objectionable protagonist - the arrogant theme song "wouldn't you like to be me" (not, really) gets the viewer off on the wrong foot. Instead of wanting to see Stokes f**k, you just wish he would f**k off. Robin Asquith at least had charm and a likable quality that endeared him to male and female viewers alike, come to think of it, even Jeremy Bulloch as Gil Masters in Can You Keep it up for a Week? was a more sympathetic character than Barry Stokes' Bob.

This was released on video with the cash-in title of Confessions of an Odd-Job Man, but the title fooled few people, as this catchpenny knock-off is quite simply appalling.

Avoid it in the same way that you would avoid and aggressive, hydrophobic dog foaming at the mouth.

A recently married young couple arrive in a quaint English village and - through fate - he starts to become very successful as a local odd job man. Although his success has little to do with his skill at fixing-and-making-good!

The above sentence might make this sound like a legit film like The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption, but can I quickly dismiss such thoughts. Indeed consider the thought shot-down-in-flames. This is a straight out, head-on, show-me-the-money, no prisoners taken, attempt to exploit money from a soft-core sex romp.

(What the comedians call a "cold weather film" - you want to turn your collar up as you leave the cinema!)

The sex film is unique that it doesn't need any plot device or central theme. Indeed we reviewers get embarrassed by such omissions and try and pretend to see one ourselves.

Here the lead is a male Emmanuelle - someone who falls victim to other people's agendas: Unlike so many of cheap guy-trying-to-cop-off British sex comedies he never takes the sexual lead.

However when the housewife strips off, lays across the bed, mimes a quarter to three with her legs our hero catches on that there may be more to the job than fixing the bed leg. Like the household dog who sees a wild rabbit - he returns to his primitive self. However in post coital bliss he turns to his former state as the slow affable moron.

To link together and scenes and fill time we have weak comedy in the form of a spank happy Lord of Manor and a snooping policeman - who has nothing better to do then watch the antics of our bumbling hero. The village, obviously, being crime free.

(Bob Todd and Chic Murray - Lord and Policeman respectively - were respected character/comedy actors in their day, although long gone to the great music hall in the sky.)

The director (John Sealey) hardly worked again and you can see why! Is there anything more depressing than third rate dialogue captured on a genuine 35 mm film camera? It is almost a crime against cinema itself. This should be on Super 8!

For a moment I dream, and in this dream I win the lottery and move in to this village of sex starved zanies - where behind every door is a frustrated wife or a horny daughter with the IQ of a fish and the dress sense of a desperate stripper. If only such a place existed and I could move in - or even take a two week a year holiday.

It never ceases to amaze me why people are so sanctimonious about this genre of film (the Radio Times is just the same). I loved it! It's packed with all the classic seaside postcard humour that made Carry On and Benny Hill (yes, the late comic genius Benny Hill - Charlie Chaplin thought so) that makes films like this so watchable time and again. Yes, it's lightweight, but that's its triumph: it's just a story about a jack-the-lad having a good time with the girls. I'd swap with him!!

By the way, any film featuing Valerie Leon is worth watching for her alone. Her beauty is simply out of this world.

Mind you, the theme tune is absolutely awful........

Forget all those Confessions films if future generations ever need to know what a British sex comedy was look no further than The Ups and Downs of a Handyman. Every cliché home grown smut will be remembered/reviled for gets an airing in this world of 'comically' speeded up sex scenes, music hall derived farce, randy heroes, horny housewives, lower than lowbrow humour and Bob Todd. These days you're either likely to find it entertaining, embarrassing, cringe-worthy or somewhere in-between the three.

Double-entendres feature heavily in Derrick Slater's screenplay and John Sealey's 'final screenplay' even before the opening credits the film exhausts every sexual pun in the book- ('Aren't you up yet', 'Keep him at it', 'Are you under him already'). The subsequent plot as if quotes like those and the title doesn't tell you everything you need to know, finds newlyweds Bob and Maisie relocating from the hustle and bustle of the big city to an inherited cottage in a 'quiet' Surrey village. While the cottage is a blessing for the cash strapped couple Bob finds work hard to come by and turns his hand to being the village odd-job man. A mistake in the advertisement Bob places in the window of a newsagent gives the impression to many a frustrated housewife that Bob's offering a very different kind of 'service'. Cue much misunderstanding as Bob comes knocking on their doors looking to fix a bed or a bath only to be practically raped by his customers. Soon the subject of 'exhausting' the handyman becomes the most hotly talked about gossip at ladies lunches (an alternative title was 'The Happy Housewives'). Their husbands remain, of course, blissfully unaware of whats going on behind their backs, simply because they're too busy with their own little kinky pastimes, there's Arthur the newsagent whose a nudie-photographer on the quiet, Mr.Wain the secret transvestite, the butcher who has a taste for flagellation, and most perverse Bob Todd's bottom fixated Squire who goes out 'hunting' for women to spank and chase around. The Handyman's nemesis is Fred the bungling policeman who for no particular reason makes it his mission to drive Bob out of town, but whose attempts to find incriminating evidence (i.e. catching Bob behaving like a rabbit) usually ends with him falling off his bike or getting caught on fences. (Pete Walker's 'comedy' School for Sex uses a similar clumsy copper running gag with even more dire results). Things go from bad to worse when Maisie, worrying that her husband has been overdoing it at work, hires a senior citizen stand-in to do the handyman jobs, leading to charges of 'false pretences' from the women and angry fist-waiving from their husbands- still in the dark about the sort of work Bob's been up to that his old geezer replacement can't provide. But there is no problem that can't be resolved by that old Benny Hill mainstay the speeded up foot chase, as poor Bob gets pursued across Surrey by the housewives inevitably leading to women's clothes accidentally falling off and the policeman and Bob Todd being pushed into a pool ad-infinitum. With equal groans from the film's one-liners as there are from its handyman hero, on the whole this is a fairly pleasant but minor piece of soft-core slapstick. Although its hard to completely dislike a film that subscribes to the idea that everyone in Surrey is a raving pervert, and no director that assaults an audience with the sight of Bob Todd naked in the shower save a bowler hat spanking a woman about 20 years his junior could be accused of good taste either. Among the women hoping the handyman's brought the right tool are Valerie Leon (wasted in a brief, non-sex role) and Alexandra Dane of 'Corruption' and 'Not on Your Nellie' as the policeman's wife who makes a grab for Bob's crotch only to end up covered in paint. Speaking of Danes, special mention should also go to Copenhagen's own Helli Louise Jacobson- a petite, dark-eyed, actress who plays the newsagent's naughty daughter and features in the bathtub scene- the cleanest and the dirtiest moment in the film. What attributes made Helli so popular among hard and soft-core pornographers (not to mention Benny Hill and The Goodies)? Let's just say she wasn't petite in all departments.

For the ladies, there's strapping Barry Stokes and Surrey's housewife's favourite 1975 had some odd-jobs in his own career as well, from a part in the original incarnation of Crossroads to the ultra-obscure Iberian horror The Corruption of Chris Miller (La Corruption de Chris Miller, 1972). But by far the most memorable Stokes appearance must be in a little film Norman J Warren made called Prey where he played a rat faced, cannibalistic alien terrorizing a pair of lesbians with throat biting, entrail yanking results (The Ups and Downs of a Handyman and Prey would certainly make a curious double-bill). Strangely this film's initial tape releases, retitled in order to bamboozle late-80's viewers into thinking it was part of the Confessions series went unscathed by the British censor, but when submitted under its real name in 1998 and 1999 suffered 1 minute and 17 seconds of cuts. Having seen neither of these recent releases (on the Cinema Club and Arrow labels respectably) what the censors found so offensive twenty or so years after the fact remains a mystery, was the sight of Bob Todd chasing dollies and indulging in 'le vice anglaise' judged likely to deprave and corrupt? the mind boggles. Oh and if anyone out there decides that the world needs a CD compilation of Themes from British Sex films, along with title tracks from The Sexplorer and The Playbirds I'd nominate the particularly gruesome ditty that opens this film. Sung by Mr Stokes himself 'The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, living my life the best I can… up and down all over town, I can make ya smile, I can make ya frown'- it still sends shivers down my spine.