Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush
1968
Directed by Clive Donner
Screenplay Hunter DaviesFrom the novel by Hunter Davies
Additional dialogue by Larry Kramer
Music arranger / editor – Simon Napier-Bell
CAST
Barry Evans- Jamie McGregor
Judy Geeson – Mary Gloucester
Angela Scoular – Caroline Beauchamp
Sheila White – Paula
Adrienne Posta – Linda
Vanessa Howard – Audrey
Diane Keen – Claire
Sally Avery- Cath
Moyra Fraser- Mrs McGregor
Michael Bates – Mr McGregor
Maxine Audley- Mrs Beauchamp
Denholm Elliot- Mr Beauchamp
Christopher Timothy- Spike
Nicky Henson – Craig Foster
Allan Warren – Joe McGregor
Roy Holder- Arthur
George Layton – Gordon
Cavon Kendall- Michael the curate
Erika Raffael- Ingrid
The Spencer Davis Group – group at the church dance
The 60s retrospective series
Release dates: UK- January 1968, USA – March 1968
It was based on Hunter Davies’ 1965 novel. Hunter Davies says in the BFI booklet that he was inspired by his wife, Margaret Forster, the author of Georgy Girl, to turn it into a film. It was filmed in Stevenage, a new town in Hertfordshire, one of the London overspill towns that sprang up in the 1950s. The Stevenage setting was a major strength, providing a welcome view of much of England rather than film preference for either the grim terraces of the North or the stately Georgian terraces of London.
Hunter Davies: I had hoped the film would be shot in Carlisle where (the novel) was set, but then it was decided there had been enough gritty movies set recently in the North or Midlands, such as A Taste of Honey, and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. Much better, they thought, to set it in one of our gleaming new towns in the South, which no one had then used in a feature film.
BFI booklet to blu-ray release.
Hunter Davies points out that Stevenage was just within the union agreed “30 miles from London” which meant they didn’t have to pay overnight allowances for cast and crew.
Here is the brief summing up in the BFI blu-ray booklet:
The film’s approach blends Dick Lester exuberance and psychedelic style with older formats like the bedroom farce, and the Carry On caper, and with the concerns about masculine self-assertion and the negotiation of class barriers that were the staples of Northern NewWave.
Steve Chibnall
I think the comparison with Carry On films is kind, because to me it feels more like the Confessions of A (Window Cleaner) series. I went to see it in 1968, very much hoping to see Traffic (no chance) and Spencer Davis Group (a few glimpses). No wonder I was disappointed. The interior monologue of the central character, Jamie, seemed derived from Alfie, a year earlier.
I have a problem with it as a film, because it’s too close to my own age and situation. Jamie McGregor (Barry Evans) is a second year sixth form grammar school boy from a lower middle-class background, living in a provincial town. He’s even doing History and English A level, which I did. It was filmed in 1967, making him two years younger than me, and so he is my wife’s age. The writer, Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, is eleven years older than me, thirteen years older than his characters so was NOT writing from his personal experiences of being a teenager (that would have been back in 1956). This shows. I’ve also spent much time writing fiction set in the era, and this film never has the ring of authenticity in its dialogue, which is clumsy and brittle. Actually, much is Jamie’s internal monologue.
I have another problem. I can’t stand Barry Evans, who plays Jamie. Not his fault. My problem carried over from something outside this film. He was the teacher in the lame TV sitcom Mind Your Language from 1977 to 1986. It was about an English Language Teaching (ELT) evening class – ELT was my job. It got everything wrong. The students sounded wrong, the script was silly and I was confronted with funnier things every day. It was racist. We used to do lots of nationality jokes in our stage show Welcome To England, but that was to an audience of the nationalities we were lampooning, not to a British audience who’d barely met a foreigner. A lot of my reaction may be envy or even spite. Karen and I had spent a happy summer holiday in 1976 working on the pilot of a sitcom based in ELT and were about to start submitting it just as Mind Your Language hit the TV screens. Scrap that one then. I don’t like Judy Geeson particularly either, as she comes across as the poor man’s Julie Christie in this film.
Karen will add that it was a hard part to do, being so fresh-faced and innocent. The interior monologue is a swine to do and she felt Barry Evans carried it off perfectly.
SEX and CLASS
It’s alleged to be a sex comedy, but watching in retrospect, it may be the most social class obsessed film in a genre … Swinging Sixties … which is always class obsessed. The comedy in Jamie’s quest to lose his virginity comes from social class every time. The divisions run along fine lines. You have to be at least British, but possibly restrict that to English, to appreciate them.
When I was seventeen or eighteen, at an all boys grammar school in Bournemouth, it should not surprise readers to know that much of our time was spent discussing the opposite sex. My friend George and I spent our school library time in the hidden corner section with the Encylopedia Britannica researching conception and contraception assiduously while we were supposed to be annotating Hamlet or revising The Corn Laws. So I am aware of the myths and mantras that Jamie and his pal Spike would have recited to each other. These are reflected in the film. I apologize to readers for restating these highly sexist and certainly erroneous prejudices:
We believed that in general, working class girls from secondary modern schools didn’t. Of the few that did, they definitely didn’t with boys from snotty grammar schools, and as they often had large and aggressive boyfriends or brothers, it was best not to try.
Girls from our parallel girls’ grammar school, the ones we met most often, probably didn’t, but just about might if you were lucky. But then a lad in our class who found one who did, ended up expelled and working for her dad and was a father at eighteen. A dire warning we all knew and worried about.
Rich girls from private fee-paying schools not only did, but did with all and sundry like rabbits.
These were the myths and Hunter Davies largely repeats them in Jamie’s encounters. I guess it’s set two years later than my sixth form days, when the pill would have been impossible for girls to get in a provincial town.
Linda, played by Adrienne Posta, by far my favourite actor in the film, is secondary modern, working class, lives in a council flat. OK, but I really think making her a far dumber than average dumb blonde was at the extremes of classism.
Paula (Sheila White), the girl who spends all her time at the church youth club would be Jamie’s nearest social equivalent.
Let’s note the class difference between Jamie and Mary (Judy Geeson), the girl of his dreams throughout. They went to the same school at thirteen. That means either Jamie’s school is mixed, or that like some towns they had a Thirteen-plus exam for entry to grammar schools – Bournemouth was Eleven-plus. Mary has an RP (Received Pronunciation) accent, while Jamie has what we’d now call an Estuary accent- the Greater London suburban and satellite town accent. The fact that her accent is posher than his is not unusual – girls in general aspire to a less marked accent than boys. However, while they appear to live in the same area of newish houses, she lives in a corner house on a larger plot (four bedroom rather than three) and her father has a Jaguar. The board outside her house seems to read FRCS (Fellow of The Royal College of Surgeons). Therefore she is from the “professional” class, or upper middle. Though in Bournemouth the two of my peer group whose dads were surgeons lived in much posher houses than this one.
Contrast Caroline Beauchamp (Angela Scoular), who is so upper middle class that she is somewhere between very wealthy, “county set” ranging to aristocracy. Even the name is aristocratic. That’s why she appears stupid and says things like “Super!” all the time. Hunter Davies shared his prejudices with the lads of our school.
The Jaguar was a mark of professional status in 1967. Later, Jamie’s mum sees a car outside their house and says ‘Is that a Jaguar? I can’t tell the difference between a Jaguar and a Ford.” A few months ago I parked between a Jaguar SUV and a Ford SUV and made the same remark – from the side view they’re identical. Common platforms. Times have changed.
THE ERA
Jamie (Barry Evans) on delivery bike. Do not try this on the road.
Jamie is a sixth former with a part time job delivering groceries. This was done with a cardboard box on the front carrier of a sturdy black delivery bike. Delivering groceries was a job which was to disappear until the Covid-19 pandemic where it has become one of the great essential social roles. Actually, I think it had disappeared by 1967. When I was very young, early and mid 1950s, my mum would walk to the grocer’s, queue for half an hour, give her order to the grocer, then the boy on a bike would deliver it home (only about 400 yards) in a cardboard box … much as David Jason’s character Granville does in the sitcom Open All Hours. Round us, I reckon that had gone by 1960, as small self-service local supermarkets, Spar or Co-Op, had opened everywhere and gave you green stamps. The grocer taking orders in a brown dustcoat had gone. Yes, I can remember when “self-service” was an exciting buzz word. In 1962 I worked in a motor parts distributor in the summer, and they had a boy on a bike for town centre deliveries. I worked there in 1963, and his job had gone. So I’ll put that down to Hunter Davies’ different half-generation.
The other thing that’s wrong … we see Jamie assembling the box of groceries, and the store is definitely self-service NOT a traditional grocer.
PSYCHEDELIC?
Psychedelic? The credits are. As are some single colour fantasies of Jamie, and the Traffic and Andy Ellison parts of the score. Otherwise, no.
THE PLOT
Jamie’s on his delivery bike and goes into a fantasy of a bus full of scantily clad girls. Then delivers groceries and runs into Linda (“runny Linda”).
LINDA: I was in Miss Hoskin’s class when you were in Mr Allwright’s …
That would have been primary school. We had exactly the same division. Miss Stanton’s Class 9 were grammar school or GCE stream at a secondary modern. Mr Holland’s Class 8 next door, were definitely destined for secondary modern B or C stream. It hammers home the class point, but then Jamie muses that she’s “only” a secondary modern girl, so not suitable for a grammar school boy. That would never have occurred to me at that age. I’d have felt lucky if Adrienne Posta had even deigned to talk to me.
Mary (Judy Geeson)
Jamie hankers after Mary Gloucester, and speaks to her, then she’s boarding a sports car driven by a bloke (Triumph TR4).
Jamie dreams of being invited into the house of a randy 28 year-old housewife while doing his deliveries. When he is asked to put the groceries inside by a woman in a housecoat his hopes rise, but there’s the husband having breakfast. That connection to seaside postcards (Has the plumber got his tool in his hand? Ooh, missus!), or the Confessions series, or Benny Hill singing Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West) is right at the start. It sticks in the mind right through the film.
We see Jamie at home with mum (Moyra Fraser), dad (Michael Bates) and his younger brother, Joe (Allan Warren). Joe is only sixteen but staying out all night and more successful with women than Jamie. I found the bookshelf poignant – full of neat book club and condensed book editions. His mum’s a keen reader, which is why the family aspires for Jamie to go to university … in Manchester, as we Southern kids were advised to go to Northern universities as being away in a different region was part of the experience. True in my home too.
Jamie muses:
JAMIE: The whole country’s having it off and I’m like a leper.
In the chippie. A wary Jamie (Barry Evans) and Linda (Adrienne Posta). Note the pickled onions. She orders “Four sixes and three fish.” (Four sixpenny-worth bags of chips and three fish of unspecified variety).
Jamie meets Linda, then she has to go to the chip shop to get fish and chips for her dad first. He goes with her. She’s lost a bobble and he suggests that if they go for a walk they might find it. She is distracted and complains it’s cold.
JAMIE: Your hands are warm. I thought you said you weren’t warm … cold hands, cold crotch.
LINDA: Never heard that one before.
Trouble is he sees Mary in the distance and is off into a fantasy:
JAMIE: (thinks) I could be with her, and here I am stuck with this runny thing!
Linda trips over, falls on her back and giggles, and for the first time she gets interested … but he has lost himself in thoughts of Mary.
The next girl on the list is Paula (Sheila White). She invites him to the “church rave” at the youth club. This is a well done sequence, even if I thought that the church youth club tended to be fourteen to sixteen, rather than eighteen. I guess Paula is sixteen and Jamie feels a little out of place. This has the requisite seats along the sides for wallflowers, the band on stage (Spencer Davis Group) and dancing. Every time the lights go down, Paula throws herself into a fierce passionate snog with Jamie, only to resume demure dancing once the lights go up. This is what everyone is doing. Paula’s friend Cath fancies Jamie.
Paula (Sheila White) and the curate (Cavon Kendall)
The creepy curate Michael clearly has his eyes on Paula too. The Spencer Davis Group were not necessarily above usual standards … the bands I saw in various church halls in the mid-60s contained future members of many stellar line ups.
Paula invites Jamie to help at the church bazaar the next week. He goes and finds himself dressed as Peter Pan in a show with young kids. On the way home he sees Mary getting in a smart Alfa-Romeo and roaring off down the road.
JAMIE: This is the way the world shall end. Not with a bang but a Wimpy.
(Wimpy was a British chain of hot dog and burger shops for American readers. The special hot dog was a Wimpy).
He runs into a group of rather richer kids he knows, and describes one as ‘an awful public school jerk.’ Yes, we grammar school kids were prejudiced in both directions of the class ladder.
Caroline (Angela Scoular)
They go to a casino- Mary’s been hanging around with a croupier. Let’s not investigate his chances of getting into a casino of any kind in 1967 without an ID check. Betting shops and clubs only became legal in 1961. Clubs were members only and limited to ten fruit machines. Gambling expanded in 1968. Perhaps the producers anticipated that. Anyway, there he first sees Caroline (Angela Scoular) playing a fruit machine. Super! She asks him whether he plays golf and offers to teach him.
Jamie’s golf lesson with Caroline
Caroline and Jamie go shopping, giving us the biggest chunk of swinging sixties fashion exposure:
CAROLINE: The minute I walk out of here, this lot will be old-fashioned.
Caroline with boots
Jamie in invited to stay at her house for the weekend. There’s a nice domestic scene at home getting his pyjamas – when he gets to Caroline’s house he will discover he’s packed two tops and no trousers.
Caroline’s country mansion. Rolls Royce on the left.
Mr and Mrs Beauchamp settle in for a formal dinner, waited on by the au pair, Ingrid. Jamie of course makes a series of faux pas.
Mr Beauchamp (Denholm Elliot) is a wine snob and a drunk who starts extolling the subtleties of French wine until really pissed when he turns to a cheaper wine:
MR BEAUCHAMP: Clever people with grapes, these Yugoslavs.
Ingrid the German au pair is deeply upset at dinner and runs off. Jamie goes ito one of the psych fantasy sections, with him and Caroline naked and covered in grapes.
Then we’re into the bedroom farce. Jamie is trouserless. Mr Beauchamp AND his son Charles are pursuing Ingrid up and down stairs. Mrs Beauchamp is knocking on Jamie’s bedroom door with hot milk. Jamie’s in Caroline’s room and it looks as if his search for sex is over, but she is so drunk she falls comatose.
Caroline & Jamie in her bedroom
Back at school none of his friends believe he spent the weekend with a girl, until Caroline turns up in her Mini car and tosses his pyjamas to him. He forgot them.
There he is doing his history homework, when Audrey arrives at his house to invite him to a party at ‘Craig’s dad’s place.’
Moyra Fraser as Jamie’s mum. Vanessa Howard as Audrey.
Mrs McGregor: Not too many of those nasty drugs!
The party turns out to be in the bed department of a furniture shop, and is almost an orgy with a game of sardines, beds everywhere and finally Jamie has sex with Audrey. As they finish, another couple emerge from the wardrobe.
He meets up with Mary again. They go swimming in a lake, where Mary strips right off (in the uncensored version anyway). While they’re embracing, a dog starts licking their feet (but only in the uncensored version).
Mary: I’ll show you why they put the game in gamekeeper!
They go away to a hotel for the weekend – no one I knew at seventeen would have managed that. They go out sailing where she announces she is going away with another bloke the next weekend, but can see him the weekend after. That’s too much liberation for Jamie.
We flash forward to the end of summer. Jamie and Spike (Christopher Timothy) have summer jobs as bus conductors. They’re both off to Manchester for university. We end seeing the girls as they will be:
Paula will catch her curate.
Audrey is seen in bed with a husband who is struggling to read The Topper (a comic for ten year olds).
My favourite is Linda in the fish and chip shop:
Finally, Mary looking smart and neat.
Overall? It has its moments. Barry Evans was twenty-four when they filmed it, and looks it, but then you wouldn’t get a seventeen year old who could do the part. Judy Geeson was eighteen, so the right age, but she looks late twenties. The support actors are all stalwarts … Denholm Elliot, Michael Bates, Moyra Fraser, Maxine Audley. The girls contrast.
It’s extremely sexist, but then the sixties were indeed extremely sexist. I find it sits awkwardly between the arty end (Blow Up, Georgy Girl, The Knack) and the crap end (Carry On films).
CURRENT BFI Flipside Blu-ray / DVD
The film was heavily cut in 1967, eliminating sexual references and Mary’s naked bathing scene. The cut version was usually shown on TV. The BFI Flipside Blu-Ray and DVD has both versions. We watched the uncensored version, and I hadn’t seen that before. The BFI booklet is 33 pages and comprehensive.
SOUNDTRACK
CLIVE DONNER: Never before has the musical score for a film been created the way this one was. I decided all the background music would be pop songs, performed by top pop groups just as if they were regular discs available to the record buying public … it was a gamble. Not on the songs as songs, because of the talents of the people concerned. But not having a conventional score and an experienced film composer meant I was dependent on their responding to the story of the film, digging the characters and situations in it and writing the sort of material I wanted.
LP sleeve note
So it isn’t the “curated” soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, but songs written to sound as if they were curated songs.
The LP, UK version
The LP: US version. I can’t recall why I have an American copy
Hunter Davies, being acquainted with Paul McCartney, had tried to persuade him to provide the songs. When he was unable to do it, Traffic was the choice. Steve Winwood had just left The Spencer Davis Group to form Traffic, and both bands appear on the OST, as well as Andy Ellison from John’s Children.
The single. Both sides. My copy.
The LP is usually listed under The Spencer Davis Group, as they had the lion’s share of songs. The single was by Traffic, and was released with a then rare picture sleeve and a full front page advert in New Musical Express. The single was issued a full five weeks before the film, a common late 60s ploy, and reached #8 in the charts.
There is a contrast between the Traffic / Andy Ellison pysch tracks and Spencer Davis’s more pedestrian beat fare. Andy Ellisons It’s Been A Long Time is the outstanding track in many ways with its fashionable languid strings and horns. It follows the sitar drenched Utterly Simple by Traffic (written by Dave Mason) with a similar feel. I never much liked the title track, though I did buy it.
I was and am confused by Looking Back which is played by Spencer Davis group in the youth club rave sequence. It’s credited to Davis-Sawyer. Funny, the John Mayall song of the same name and chorus a year earlier is credited to ‘Watson.’
THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …
A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
Girl On A Motorcycle (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)
My favourite line is spoken by mother. As she walks behind each family member, she dumps a ladle-full of mashed potato on each plate. Addressing no-one in particular, she muses “I don’t know why I cook all this nice food for you every day. All you ever do is eat it.”
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Videos of Mind Your Language sometimes turn up my Facebook feed, and they’re grim. At the time it was running on TV (in the late 70s), I worked with a French girl who was attending an EFL school, and she loved it, and said it was very realistic.
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I’m guessing she was at a state college evening class, which we considered highly dubious in the late 70s. They didn’t have a clue. We were asked to do teacher training for the Vietnamese boat people, who were being taught by retired volunteers initially before they employed proper ELT teachers. The local state college … which did evening classes, suggested they photocopy articles from newspapers, which is what they used … with beginners. We phoned round every private language school, and assembled boxes of First Things First (I knew everyone had abandoned it by then, but had copies in cupboards) and took them in. Then OUP donated free copies of Streamline.
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Nobody notices that Denholm Elliott’s own house was used in the film as his address in the film. Ended up as a Montessori school after his death.
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