Over-sexed taxi driver Joe North is always looking for his next pick-up! All he wants is a quiet life, but he can’t get it, because of his noisy family and because of girls! His ability to pick up passengers is equalled only by his gift for picking up pretty ladies - and they have their own delightful ways of showing gratitude to a handsome cabbie! Then Joe’s taxi is hi-jacked by a gang of jewel thieves and there are some nasty surprises in store when he finds out who is involved with them...

This affordable box set contains all three Adventures... movies, directed by Stanley Long in the late 1970s. The film prints have been cleaned up for this DVD release - but only in the sense of restoring them to their original condition. In terms of adult content, they are of course as filthy as ever!

The Adventures... movies are perhaps a little more explicit than their rivals, the Confessions... films (and certainly more so than the Carry On... series), but one factor remains the same throughout the genre: we Brits seem to find it impossible to make a sex film without sending the whole thing up (oo-er). What does that say about our national psyche, compared with our continental cousins?

The first film in the series is Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976), starring Barry Evans (who had previously appeared in Doctor in the House and Doctor at Large) as Joe North. Joe isn’t a particularly likeable character by today’s standards, as he cheats on his “steady” and is constantly on the lookout for more “crumpet”, including married women. However, the presence of his even more dishonest brother and Evans’s asides to the camera (a device borrowed from Alfie) go some way towards endearing him to the viewer.

Remarkably, considering the sexist tone, the screenplay is written by a woman, Suzanne Mercer. However, in common with the slasher horror movie genre, there’s a semblance of a moral code even in these undemanding romps. The message is: commit adultery and something bad will happen to you! The “heroes” of these films rarely manage to even complete the sex act before the woman’s husband gets home, or the boat they’re in runs into a weir, or the bloke ends up as the captive of a deranged dominatrix.

What is even more remarkable is how the production team managed to recruit so many legends of British comedy. Adventures of a Taxi Driver features the talents of Diana Dors, Liz Fraser (the Carry On... films), Stephen Lewis (On the Buses), Ian Lavender (Dad’s Army), a pre-Citizen Smith Robert Lindsay (fresh from the success of Get Some In!), Brian Wilde (Porridge, Last of the Summer Wine) and Henry McGee (The Benny Hill Show).

Adventures of a Taxi Driver offers a mildly diverting ride.

4

 

Sex and sleuthing go hand in hand for rookie private dick Bob West, assistant to top detective Judd Blake. While his boss is away, Bob gets stuck into some very “private” investigations! Beautiful model Laura Sutton is being blackmailed for £50,000. She must get back some compromising nude photographs or forfeit her huge inheritance. The trail leads to a foreboding ancestral home, Grimsdyke Manor, where Bob’s nocturnal prowling finds him literally stumbling over a dead body...

Unlike the Confessions... series, each Adventures... movie concerns a different protagonist, with a different set of supporting characters. Christopher Neil takes over from Barry Evans as the male lead in Adventures of a Private Eye (1977), playing the wet-behind-the-ears private detective Bob West. He’s immediately a more likeable character than Joe North in Adventures of a Taxi Driver. Yes, he still sleeps with married women, but at least he’s not cheating on a girlfriend this time. The device of soliloquising to camera is dropped from the series once the introductions are out of the way.

Director Stanley Long takes a similar approach to the Carry On... films when it comes to casting, building up a “repertory company” of actors he has worked with on previous productions. Therefore, you see some of the same faces cropping up during each movie, but playing different characters. For example, Diana Dors, Liz Fraser, Adrienne Posta and Angela Scoular (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) appear in both Taxi Driver and Private Eye; Christopher Neil, Willie Rushton and Anna Quayle (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Grange Hill) guest star in Private Eye and Plumber’s Mate; and Stephen Lewis features in both Taxi Driver and Plumber’s Mate (in the latter of which he plays the appropriately named Mr Crapper!).

Adrienne Posta is particularly good in this movie, doing a mean impersonation of Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Her character is called Lisa Moroni! The cast also includes Harry H Corbett, whose comic talents are sadly squandered here, and Jon Pertwee, who gets the best line in the entire film: “You stick with me, and you’ll soon learn to be a successful bugger!”

In fact, this is the funniest of the three films, being a decent comedy in its own right. Indeed, it seems as though the production team sometimes forget that they’re making a sex movie at all, with a relatively low incidence of sex and nudity. However, for the comedy value alone, Adventures of a Private Eye merits investigation.

6

 

Randy plumber Sid South enjoys a profession that offers him ample opportunities to bed sexy young ladies and bored housewives. However, Sid seems to have landed himself in really hot water when he ends up with a huge gambling debt. Then his luck really goes down the drain when he is sent to fit a new toilet seat and accidentally disposes of the old one, which happens to be made of stolen gold! Newly released from prison, the criminal who stole the gold wants it back...

Perhaps keen to demonstrate his acting ability and create a different character to the one he played in Adventures of a Private Eye, Christopher Neil is instantly less likeable as Sid South in the final movie in the series, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate (1978), getting angry and impatient with his latest sexual conquest (Nina West) at the start of the film. He gains some sympathy when it becomes evident that he is heavily in debt to a bookie, and threatened with physical violence by a couple of debt collectors (Arthur Mullard and Jerold Wells). However, Sid’s fear is played too realistically for comfort in what is supposed to be a light-hearted comedy - no comic gulping or Rigsby-style panicking or fainting here.

The title is oddly out of sorts too, as Sid is a plumber, not a plumber’s mate.

At least there’s no shortage of sex and nudity here, including a brief instance of public nakedness for Nina West, Lindy Benson getting her clothes torn off by an errant waste disposal unit, and a nice quartet of tennis players (Suzy Mandel, Tessa Skola, Linda Hartley and Vicki Scott).

However, in terms of comedy, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate is the weakest of the bunch. Talk about plumbing the depths...

4

 

Each DVD also includes the theatrical trailers (the same ones on each disc) and an audio commentary by the director. Long’s comments are a mixture of quite interesting facts (for instance, Adventures of a Taxi Driver took more at the UK box office than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which was released in the same year) and the bleedin’ obvious (for instance, that Veronica Doran’s character in Adventures of a Private Eye is less attractive than Bob had been expecting).

This box set is worth buying for the comedy value of Adventures of a Private Eye and the plentiful nudity of Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate.

Chris Clarkson