“It’s the entertainment next.” Paula about to teach Jamie about tonsils.


Davies – perhaps unwittingly – added a charm and accessibility that at once set it apart from other contemporary “yoof” yarns like Poor Cow and Smashing Time.


By ’67 the book had been picked up for filming by United Artists with 41-year-old Clive Donner at the helm. Donner was nearly 20 years into his celluloid career, having edited the classic ’51 filmversion of Scrooge and directed the award-winning ’63 adaptation of The Caretaker. However, it’s safe to say that it was his work on UA’s star- spangled ’65 hit What’s New Pussycat? that bagged him Mulberry Bush, not his way with the wretched silences of Pinter.


With the screenplay being handled by Davies himself and American producer Larry Kramer (soon to screenplay Ken Russell’s Women In Love) and a purposefully young cast of mostly unknown actors on board, filming began in Stevenage in the spring of ’67. The “brash and buzzy with-itness” (according to The New Statesman) of the book proved easy to adapt to the screen with much of the dialogue remaining intact and only a few minor plot diversions lost in translation.


Action!


The main protagonist, Jamie McGregor (23- year-old Barry Evans in his first filmrole), is in the sixth form studying for his A-levels and fills


26


“You wanna play the field. Don’t make it so special.”


At the behest of cocksure schoolmate Spike


(26-year-old Christopher Timothy, late of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company), Jamie then temporarily transfers his dalliances to a series of other “birds” as his sexual frustration, ahem, swells.


Dim-witted “runny old” Linda (19-year-old Adrienne Posta, another Sir schoolgirl and former Decca recording artiste) fails to respond to his clichéd advances until,


the rest of his time fantasising about losing his virginity while running errands for the local supermarket. “Knickers!” he yells as he


freewheels down similarly virgin tarmac on his ant quat


When his dreams of being seduced by an older woman come to nothing (“Where do you find these beautiful, ripe, experienced women of 35 who are letching after young lads?”), he sets his sights on Mary (18-year- old Judy Geeson, fresh from the hugely successful To Sir, With Love) – the elegantly pretty and delectably swoonsome girl from the high school who everyone fancies but no one can get near. A first bumbled attempt to take her for coffee leads nowhere when her toff boyfriend arrives and whisks her away in “father’s car”.


antiiquated pushbike with a basket full of Spam and mushy peas. Doctor Zhivago this ain’t.


exasperated, he slings her on the floor, an act that she mistakes for a come-on. The brashly determined Paula (Sheila White, incredibly just 16-years-old and already a veteran of stage and screen) invites him to a church rave where she sticks her tongue down his throat during the black-outs and bangs on about the “lovely times” her and her interfering girlfriend Kath have there. Next


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