Nicholas and post-Girly Vanessa Howard plotting the murder of a pensioner to the sound of thumping glam tunes from Carl Davis, appeared to have come from the same source. If you get to see it, check out the nightclub scene and see if it reminds you of a certain establishment just off Oxford Circus! You might have difficulty though, as neither of these last two films have ever been officially released on PAL disc anywhere, their domestic video release was limited at best, and it’s been a sod of a long time since either appeared on television.


Paul Nicholas himself, however, was never off our screens in the ’70s and ’80s. He had actually struck his first blow for fame in the late ’60s as pop idol Oscar, without much success: but that false start was more than compensated for by his subsequent ubiquity. Whether playing any number of dodgy pop stars in The World Is Full Of Married Men, Nutcracker and The Jazz Singer, or belting out his own hits both on Top Of The Pops AND his own show (this bloke was seriously famous), you just couldn’t escape him. A decade before landing his best-known role as womanising bookie Vince Pinner in Just Good Friends, he cemented a friendship with both Ken Russell and Roger Daltrey that led to two iconic appearances: first in Lizstomania (uberprog soundtrack courtesy of Rick Wakeman) as a vampiric Wagner, and then of course, as Cousin Kevin in Tommy.


If one may take a liberal definition of “horror”, then Pete Townshend’s macabre rock opera might be the first “scary movie” I ever saw, possibly even predating my experience with Dracula AD 1972. It gave me the heebie jeebies anyway, thanks in no small part to Nicholas’ towering, sadistic, grinning, leering performance, which definitely did NOT include the phrase “‘ello Pen”.


The experience burned into my consciousness 46


a memory-by-association of films featuring troubled youths victimised by their more able-bodied counterparts, and there were a lot of them in the ’70s, such as Scum, Child’s Play, Equus, Unman Wittering And Zigo, The Class Of Miss MacMichael, Bloody Kids (starring a post-Heavy Metal Kids Gary Holton) and the fantastically grim Absolution, starring a folk singing, banjo strumming Billy Connolly as the nemesis of Richard Burton’s haunted headmaster-priest. These films are all intrinsically different, yet somehow, they form a subgenre of their own, further linked by their connections to rock music. And why is it that whenever I read an article about any of them, I find myself humming Who songs?


Daltrey’s horror connections didn’t end with Russell: he dies a gruesome, sticky, aaarg- bloody death in The Legacy (’78), helped further into the annals of pop culture by its cheesy-yet-captivating theme song from Kiki Dee. Legend has it that after several fallings- out with the singer, John Entwistle took to amusing himself by replaying this particular


scene over and over again: one can only wonder. Shortly after the crime biopic McVicar, Rog starred in another violent, exploitative and largely unknown Brit film by the name of Murder: Ultimate Grounds For Divorce: I still haven’t seen it, largely because I refused to pay £40 to an unscrupulous Brighton shop owner for the privilege.


Films like these may have found their largest audiences via the small screen (as did most British films from ’73 onwards, thanks to the trouncing they received at the hands of worldwide competition), but let’s not forget the contributions made by television itself. Although maligned as an art form by pretentious critics, TV was a baptism of fire for many of us, and some of its most bizarrely evocative moments are right up there with anything ever seen at the flicks.


These include Take Three Girls (for which Pentangle famously composed ‘Light Flight’, their only hit), Adam Faith’s Budgie (with


Robin Askwith leads Kipper through an explosive performance in Confessions Of A Pop Performer


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