Don't Just Lie There, Say Something!

Crown minister Leslie Phillips and back-bench friend Brian Rix are co-sponsoring an anti-smut bill. This has a group of youngster upset, so they kidnap Rix on the day he is to be wed, drug him, and call the papers and police to come visit the orgy and wreck his standing. Meanwhile, Phillips is supposed to be on his way to Scotland, but has arranged for a rendez-vous -- two, as it turns out. All these collide in one large flat into which youngsters, police, fiancees, secretaries, mistresses, and senile Opposition MP Derek Royle are crammed into various doors, closets, and under beds.

I imagine Michael Pertwee's script performed better as a door-slamming stage farce than the movie it was turned into. Valiant efforts to open it up via editing cuts only serve to destroy the sharp timing such efforts need. Still, the ladies, including Joan Sims, Joanna Lumley, Myra Frances, and Nicola Rowley, are lovely, and if you have patience, the second half is better timed for this sort of nonsense, and Rix is quite good, and Phillips (whom youngsters may recall as the voice of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter is always amusing in a fast-thinking, scoundrelly way.

The idea was sorted into a TV show, MEN OF AFFAIRS.

This film showed the sad direction in which the film industry was headed.This film was released at a time when Rank closed hundreds of Odeons and Gaumonts including my local.An acknowledgement that they had run out of ideas to compete with television.Actors agreeing to appear in rubbish such as this was their acknowledgement that they were not going to bother with the quality of the script just play the part and take the money.Brian Rix typically spends most of his time with his trousers off.His type of broad farce doesn't come over well on film and this film represented the tail end of his film career.Most of the rest of his acting career was spent at the Whitehall Theatre

This type of humour had made people laugh for centuries. It's not clever, it doesn't make you think, it's not even got the sophistication of a Carry On film! It's the most basic, simple and innocent type of humour - it's just funny.

Brian Rix had been doing this sort of thing for years so his act was honed to perfection. Likewise Leslie Phillips had played this character so much, it had become his life. They were both phenomenally popular in the 50s, 60s and 70s but today such 'caveman humour' is considered decidedly un-cool.

Despite my preconceptions, within five minutes I was literally laughing out loud. My other preconceptions which was shattered was how 'clean' this was. Although made during the tacky, smutty Confessions of and Adventures of films, this is remarkably nudity free and even swear word free.... it could easily have been made ten or twenty years earlier... or even been a 1930s pre-code comedy.

The highlight of this picture is the living goddess, the impossibly sexy, the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Katy Manning! Yes, that's Jo, Dr Who's companion from the early 70s. Golly, she was pretty and she's pretty funny in this too.

Although you might think this isn't your cup of tea, give it a go; if you don't laugh, just tell St Peter when you get to the Pearly Gates and he'll give your an hour and a half of your life back.

This is bad even for a Brian Rix farce. I bought a boxed set of Leslie Phillips DVDs for £10 in a sale and this one was in it along with 'The VIP' and 'Doctor in Trouble' (both with James Robertson Justice). I can't think why. Phillips did so many much better films and I can't see why anyone thought it worth the effort to transfer this one onto disc. The cast contains some of the great stalwarts of the British film industry such as Joan Sims, Derek Griffiths, Joanna Lumley, Peter Cellier and the Goodies' favourite newsreader Corbet Woodall but even they can't bring it up to standard. Even the worst Carry Ons were ten times better than this garbage. An absolute stinker.

What a dire soul-destroying chore it was sitting through this archaic piece of 'entertainment' from that bleak era when the Confessions films and 'On the Buses' were considered the height of British comedy. The only reason I watched this was because that incorrigible cad Leslie Philips was in the cast and – so I thought – he's always worth a viewing. Sadly, even he can't salvage anything from this mess. A number of people run around a politician's flat (or 'love nest' as The Sun would have it) in various states of undress, frantically trying to avoid one another or engage in extramarital or mercenary sex. It's incredible to believe that a generation just once removed from my own used to find this rubbish funny. Avoid at all costs.