James reviews Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense on Talking Pictures TV, Olympic Games. Day 1 on BBC1, and Saucy! on Channel 4

Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the twenty-eighth episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’ 

This is where I review upcoming Freeview programs. Go to IReviewFreeview.com to search, listen, or indeed read and/or comment on all my reviews. And if you want to see what I’ll be reviewing next time, visit the page ‘What’s up next.’ That’s IReviewFreeview - all one word - dot com.

In this episode, I will review:

Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (S1 E2: Last Video and Testament) on Talking Pictures TV, Friday July 26, 9:10pm

Olympic Games. Day 1: Tonight at the Games on BBC1, Saturday July 27, 10:20pm and

Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy on Channel 4, Sunday July 28, 10:00pm

In an attempt to change the scheduling, I’ve taken a couple of days off! Lazy I know, but I do have a life outside maintaining this podcast. Well, that’s the theory. In practice, I’ve been catching up on loads and loads of housework (that’s 30 minutes of my life I won’t get back) and watching Meatpie the tortoise doing tortoisy stuff.

Anyway, this time I’ve gone for what I’m hoping is a creaking old schlock-horror film from way back, a highlights program of something in which I have absolutely no interest: higher, faster, stronger? Who wants to know? And - possibly -  a fun and raunchy look at a genre of brit films which - or so I’m told - were very popular 50 odd years ago.

By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:

a curvy girl wearing a mini-skirt is carrying an Olympic torch while a large black bat swoops overhead.

Well now: AI has a distinct problem whenever you want to get a bit of oomph into it. Or menace, or indeed anything remotely able to rouse the senses. My first effort was something like ‘a mysterious, threatening figure, carrying an Olympic torch, looks through a window at a girl in a bath.’ I was snittily told: ‘One or more words may not meet User Guidelines and were removed.’ The words in question were probably ‘threatening’ and ‘in a bath’ as the resulting image was of an ancient granny wearing a sheet looking through a window at a prim girl staring away into the middle distance.

(Ha!)

Well, working with a budget of zero, what can you expect? No sense in over pudding the egg.

So: here we jolly well go….

Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (S1 E2: Last Video and Testament) on Talking Pictures TV, Friday July 26, 9:10pm

Oh grief, it’s another ‘fess up time. I just read the first two words of the title - Hammer House - and - like any Brit over a certain age on seeing the word ‘Hammer’ on a screen - filled in the rest: ‘Hammer House of Horror!’ I had visions of witches, gory deaths, moonlit graveyards! Creepy stories featuring ghosts, ghouls and things that go slurp in the night. (Oooo)

But it wasn’t ‘Hammer House of Horror.’ Nope. It was ‘Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.’ Not a vampire in sight. Instead of bats, mists and skimpily clad girls running through dark forests, we got cars, airports and people in offices. Even Concorde made an appearance.

All in all, a great disappointment. But I soldiered on. I watched it all. That’s 90 minutes of my life I won’t get back.

Oh, and a quick spoiler alert: I give the whole plot away in the next couple of minutes. Mind you, if you can’t work out the basic story line within the first 5 minutes and how it ends within 10 minutes of it happening, then .. well, I don’t know what to say. Good luck in your future job as a conservative MP, I suppose. 

So, we’ve got grey haired Victor, who owns a world wide tech corporation, and his lovely wife Selena. Every so often he goes arrgh! and clutches his chest, so she gives him some pills. 

Needless to say, she’s beautiful and about a million years younger than him.

Victor suffers from claustrophobia, but in quick succession gets locked in a closet and stuck in a lift, so he freaks out and is rushed to hospital. But he’s a game old bird, leaves early and goes home. He’s relaxing in his high-tech hidey-hole, complete with security monitors and a computer that plays chess, when wife Selena arrives with handsome Derek, an ambitious manager. They go straight to the bedroom, kiss and start undoing buttons. But don’t get excited, this is family show: they just shed a couple of outer layers as if they were in a shop window on Peckham high street.

More importantly, they have the sort of conversation hung-over script writers write when the director says ‘OK, we need to get the audience in on the plot.’ So Selena and BF tell each other things they already know, as in ‘next time we’ll have to do better than locking him in a closet or a lift’ And to make sure everyone’s in the loop: ‘once you own the corporation you can make me managing director.’

(Ha!)

But of course Victor has got great big security cameras all over the place, including the bedroom. We get a helpful shot of it: up near the ceiling, by a wardrobe. Unaccountably - except for plot reasons - neither Selena nor handsome Derek notice it.

Meantime Victor, faced with irrefutable evidence he’s just another elderly cuckold being dumped in the reject bin, looks sad. (Ummm) But really: old man, young wife, rubbish film: what else did you expect?

But lawks a mercy Mrs Jones, what happens next?

Well, he doesn’t confront them, but flies to the USA to see a heart surgeon. We see Concorde taking off. Oh, the glamour!

A couple of days later, Selena gets a VHS cassette, express delivery from the states. it’s Victor, propped up in bed and attached to tubes various, giving his last will and testament. If he dies during surgery he’s going to have his body preserved and all his wealth put in a trust fund. Selena will get the money when she’s the same age as he is now.

The lovers think, ‘Oh, Rats!’

A bit later, another cassette arrives: a codicil, taped after surgery. It hasn’t gone well and Victor’s expecting to die. But now, Selena gets to choose if his body is preserved or immediately cremated. I think it was more complicated than that, but by then I’d stopped taking notes and gone off to make toast. 

Unsurprisingly, she chooses cremation. Then she and lover-boy go into the hidey-hole (Why? Oh God, I don’t know.) And get locked in. This isn’t an accident. Victor - no more dead than the dodo is not alive - is controlling things through his mastery of tech. 

First he taunts them, then kills them both using some vibrations of a frequency that makes their cells disintegrate. Or something like that.

The movie ends with Victor dancing on his dead wife’s tombstone.

(Poof!)

One day, I shall take more care with my watching. I might even read the blurb. But that’s straying dangerously close to the Grimpen Mire of my comfort zone, tempting me to only review stuff I’d probably watch anyway.

Admittedly, there is a perverse delight in actively choosing programs I’d normally avoid, and sometimes, just sometimes, I find a little gem. ‘Dress to Impress’ for instance. Everything I thought I hated laid out for me to despise but … it was great fun. Hurrah! A couple of my prejudicial pigeons shot down. Conversely, I watched ‘Gladiators’ expecting to hate it, but it was worse than that. I loathed it.

Ho hum, back to the stodgy old ‘Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.’ 

(Long indrawn breath.)

On second thoughts, let’s not.

Instead, let’s hope to be surprised by liking:

Olympic Games. Day 1: Tonight at the Games on BBC1, Saturday July 27, 10:20pm

Oh dear, the Olympics have arrived. Like the ghastly Wimbledon and last year’s wretched coronation, it barges into the daytime schedules like a rampant warthog on heat. Crucially, Bargain Hunt is shoved around as if it were a discarded bin bag, sometimes vanishing altogether. 

This randomness severely - severely! - affects my lunchtime snooze. Doesn’t the BBC realise? I’ve never watched Bargain Hunt all the way through. Within 10 minutes of it starting, I’m comatose, awaking refreshed about 40 minutes later, just in time to be depressed by the news. Disrupt this timing at your peril, BBC! how else would I get the energy to watch an evening’s TV?

(Poof!) 

As you may have gathered, I’m not much into sports, although, like many, I make an exception for footie. For my non-existent US fans, that’s soccer. Mind you, mine is a pretty lowkey fanship. I’ve never been to an actual match - that’s way way too expensive both in time and money - but I do listen to the commentary when my team is playing and feel miffed when they lose. As they do much of the time. It’s all small scale with little real involvement.

But the Olympics now: that’s another kettle of fish. Many years ago, on our grainy black and white small screen tellies, the Olympics resembled a rather big school sports day, albeit with audiences more numerous than a few mums and dads nervously waiting for the parent’s egg-and-spoon race.

But now, it’s in colour and is A BIG THING, and getting bigger every time. And when you think sport is best defined as an activity so trivial it can be taken seriously, the Olympics equate to a gigantic waste of time, effort and money. 

I was gobsmacked when London put in a bid to hold the stupid event, and utterly depressed at the jubilation when they hosted it in 2012.

“What’s the sodding point?” I wandered around asking. And there was no satisfactory answer. There still isn’t, but it probably comes down to money. Eventually, most things beyond my ken do.

But we are where we are, and here I am reviewing the highlights of the day.

It’s in a nice looking studio, with graphics on the floor, a lit up Eiffel Tower in the background and him and her presenters sitting like chat show hosts on Ikea sofas. First up: the women’s cycling time trials. Of course it is. The BBC is Brit through and through, and we brits won a cycling medal! Hurrah! It was raining so hard there were blobs on the camera lens. The cyclists, going insanely fast, powered along the straights and swooped round corners. Some fell off and got back on, while other fallers immediately got given an identical bike and a bit of a push start.

You could tell who the winner would be almost from the off: the Australian lady. She wore a gold top and was perfectly balanced, all tucked in, as graceful as a swan. You can’t look that good and come second. Our plucky Brit got silver.

And then it was the turn of the men, tootling around the same course. Helmets like pancakes gone wrong, bulging thighs and more spills. Our great hope got a puncture from which he never recovered. Had I been sitting on my sofa waving a small flag, I would have stopped waving it. But I wasn’t, so I didn’t.

I must say, I was already losing interest, even more so when the next sport trundled onto the screen: Rugby 7s. Rugby? That’s a team game. What’s it doing in the Olympics? The French won, scoring their tries as if diving into a pool. They lined up on a podium wider than a house. 

Team games? I sort of knew it happened, but never having really watched the Olympics before, had managed to ignore it. 

Somehow, it doesn’t seem right, but there y’go. I’ve got no skin in this game, so what care I. But it seems wrong, like a countess farting.

Next up it was the ladies’ synchronised diving, with tailored swimming gear not designed for a rear view. You had to admire the athletic grace with which two people can fall off a twangy board at exactly the same time in precisely the same way. We were heading for 4th place but then the Ozzies messed up and we scraped a bronze. Hurrah!

The medallists appeared in the studio. One of them was having a birthday, so a cake was produced, leading to somewhat feeble ongoing cake related banter.

After a quick review of what’s coming, it’s time for swimming. God, of all the giant smorgasbord of sports on display, that looks by far the most exhausting.

Slowly, stealthily, my total viewing experience is morphing into something surreal. The figures on the screen plough relentlessly on while I, on my sofa, well, I’m becoming less interested and more distant by the second. (Ha!) How anyone could ever think this is remotely important, I do not know. But the end is coming. Hurrah! I grip my pencil.

After swimming (did we win a medal? I can’t remember and I have written nothing down but a despairing ‘swimming….’) and volley-ball, they did a quick round up starting with air-rifles and ending with horses.

And, to finish, gymnastics. More muscles. They all looked flawless. Thank God I’m not a judge: fancy having to watch it live, hour after tedious hour, without the ability to pause the action to make tea and toast or have a pee. Even worse, when you’re watching live, there’s no off switch.

(Poof)

Look, I know it’s me. These are just my thoughts, my opinion. And although I find it hard to understand, I do know many people enjoy watching this stuff. Or at least say they do. Or maybe they don’t, and it’s just a giant conspiracy foisted upon us by the Olympic committee and television companies. You end up watching and saying you enjoy it because everyone else is saying they’re watching and enjoying. Maybe the Olympics is like religion: just a gigantic fraud: the ultimate naked emperor parading his non-existent new clothes.

But in a few decades, when climate change has reduced the human race to living in mud huts, eating cockroaches and mining libraries for books to burn, no one, but no one, will care a tinker’s cuss who won what at which games when.

And on that cheerful note:   

Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy on Channel 4, Sunday July 28, 10:00pm

This is a fairly standard Channel 4 documentary. A mixture of talking heads, commentary and film clips, competently put together, but - on the evidence of the first episode - struggling to last the allotted time. It was scheduled for 90 minutes, but was looking stretched after an hour and expired with about 10 minutes left.

It starts with an overview of the late 1960s film industry. The situation was dire. TV was making it so easy to be entertained at home that getting off your backside and going to the local Odeon seemed way too much effort.

Censorship was the strictest in Europe. Anything deemed to ‘deprave or corrupt’ was unacceptable. Debates were had about pubic hair (certainly not!) busts (Nipples? Never!) and how many times a dominatrix could hit her slave (twice.)

(Ha!)

Nudity was smuggled onto the screen in the guise of documentaries about nature lovers, protected by a psychologist intoning away on the health benefits of taking all your clothes off and bouncing - a word I chose with some precision - bouncing around in the altogether.

Or you could buy 8 millimetre short films to show at home, or see in a little booth in a private club. But the projectors were apt to jam, with the hot little films (ha) literally burning up. 

But then came contraceptive pills and the legalising of homosexuality, giving rise to the sexual revolution. Suddenly, everyone, but everyone, was doing it everywhere.

I dunno: I beg to differ. I was in my twenties then, failing as a teacher in middle class, tastefully rural Buckinghamshire, and, like most people, I found rampant sex was always taking place somewhere else.

But, wherever the real or imagined shagging was happening, films - centred in Wardour street - started pushing against the edges. ‘Sexploitation’ became a thing and ‘School for Sex’ appeared in two versions: one for the brit market (Bra and panties on) and one for abroad (Bra and panties off).

Abroad had soft focus erotica, we had simpering, curvy girls in black stockings and suspender belts being leered at by ex coronation street actors playing a delivery man with a parcel too big to fit in the passageway.

After a brief diversion into the sweaty, panting world of the dirty mac brigade (a flea-pit notice of the time said: ‘Patrons are reminded to clean up after their visit to the cinema.’) we had a look at ‘The wife swappers’ with car keys in a pot, and ‘Cool it Carol’ with dark undertones of pimping.

Eventually, the censorship laws buckled under the pressure, the ‘X’ category came into being and the potent combination of sex and slapstick comedy really got under way. The films were the bastard issue from an insane ménage à trois of the Carry On’s ‘Phwoar!’ mentality, Donald McGill’s seaside postcard humour and a young man’s fantasy of being pursued by randy housewives gagging for it.

Culminating - according to this documentary - with 1974’s: ‘confessions of a window cleaner.’

Robin Askwith, the possessor of the bum cheekily on display in a sea of foam, was on hand, making shrewd and humourous comments. And some of the girls - well, a lot of the girls - also appeared.

You got the feeling the whole program had been waiting for this. Indeed, for this episode, Askwith was the only named person in the blurb.

The films were so popular the imminent demise of the British film industry was temporarily postponed. 

So after a quick rundown of the ‘confession’ films and a look at the similar ‘Adventures’ films (‘Adventures of a taxi driver’ out grossed Robert de Niro in ‘Taxi driver’) the program concluded with an extended ‘in the next episode,’ highlighting Mary Whitehouse and her crusade to clean things up, Mary Millington - the Stormy Daniels of her day, and Joan Collins being well, Joan Collins. I presume.

It was noticeable the talking heads were divided into two: crinkly men and wrinkled women, with the latter easily outnumbering the former, reflecting the male-female ratios in the films of many girls, just a few men.

But it was the men who had the power. Excluding the incredible Hazel Adair - who invented ‘Crossroads’ before assuming a load of male pseudonyms and launching herself into the sex film business - all the producers and directors were men.

But - rightly - it was the women who stole this particular show, discussing gender stereotyping and exploitation with a refreshingly cold-eyed frankness. As one of them said, “I did it to pay the taxman.” Who was exploiting who was - as ever - left unresolved.

And - of course - the women - now in their 70s, modestly dressed and sitting on sofas - were juxtaposed with their younger selves from 50 years previously, all got up in a job lot from Ann Summers. Wrinkle-free smooth skin and a raunchy wide-eyed innocence compared with the now of a cheerful chuckling face full of humour and experience.  

Have I put it on series record? Yep, I have. (Ha!) Well, why not? I was too timid to see them at the time and they don’t seem to be on Freeview, so I might as well catch a glimpse when I can.

The sexploitation films, featuring horny women in saucy scanties seducing gurning young men with hairy bottoms might have saved the British film industry, but Phwoar can be hell.

And that misquote from General Sherman concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Don’t forget, contact me via email to contact@ireviewfreeview.com or through the website Ireviewfreeview.com where you can also click on the page ‘What’s up next.’ to see what programs I’ll be reviewing next time.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.