Review for Percy's Progress

The seventies was a funny time in British cinema. Not ‘funny-ha-ha’ particularly but ‘funny’ in the sense that what had once brought the punters into the fleapits had slowly been replaced by low-budget sex comedies where punters would at least pay to see a few tits and bums. After all, you won’t going to see any of those on ‘Dad’s Army’ and ‘The Generation Game’.

Ralph Thomas and Betty E. Box (wife of Peter Rogers of Carry On fame), the duo behind the fantastic Doctor films featuring Dirk Bogarde and James Robinson Justice (and latterly Leslie Phillips as he nudged them further towards the fully fledged sex comedy) had already enjoyed some (commercial) success with their pretty appalling ‘Percy’ – perhaps most notable for featuring a cameo with George Best in a fantasy sequence. Poor Edwin is a man who has been separated from his ‘ahem’ by a cut-glass chandelier. As a result he gets a transplant. Denholm Elliott (just one of many British actors and comedians prepared to thoroughly demean themselves for a crust at the time) played the doctor who did the business. ‘Percy’, in case you hadn’t guessed it, is the nick-name of the new member and when the Sun get hold of the story it becomes the talk of the town. You get the idea – which was not a great one from the outset. Despite being a horribly low-budget Pinewood knock out it did feature a whole host of known personalities, like Britt Ekland, Patrick Mower, Arthur English and others.

Enjoying some success, it seems that Thomas and Box were happy to knock out a sequel – Percy’s Progress (AKA It’s Not the Size That Counts) in 1974, the same year as a dozen or so other equally awful sex comedies like ‘The Over Amorous Artist’, ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ , ‘Eskimo Nell’ and ‘Can you Keep it Up for a Week’. 1974 seems to have been the veritable wahay-day of British cheeky comedy gone bad.

‘Percy's Progress’ sort of picks up where ‘Percy’ left off although our main protagonist is no longer called Edwin, but simply ‘Percy’. It certainly boasts a reasonably impressive cast with Leigh Lawson, Elke Sommer, Judy Geeson, Denholm Elliott and Harry H. Corbett among them. And if George Best’s appearance was a surprise in ‘Percy’, then maybe Vincent Price’s appearance here will have you scratching your head. Here he (briefly) plays a wheelchair bound shipping magnate who wants Percy to impregnate his wife.


 Determined to conquer his addiction to the opposite sex, Percy takes to the high seas in search of a life of celibacy. Meanwhile, a major catastrophe takes place which has rendered the entire male population impotent... but all is not lost: Percy is being closely monitored by the British Government, and on his return is informed that he is the only male now capable of saving the human race!

He’s also clearly a man very capable of bedding the vast majority of the female population on his own, all of whom are as randy as hell having had no luck with their own men-folk for some time. You get the idea. Plenty of cheeky flashes of bare breasts and bums, occasional and almost subliminal flashes of (female) genitalia and lots and lots or innuendo.

You also get some horribly overplayed stereotypical acting, like tabloid journalists wearing trilby’s and carrying large cameras around their necks.
If you’re a fan of ‘Confessions’ movies then you’ll know what to expect. For me, the whole genre is a sad reminder of how bad things got for films in Britain in the seventies where cosy Ealing style comedies and gentle innuendo fuelled Carry-On’s made the final leap into soft-porn and as a result lost all of their charm. It’s worth noting that what was once an X-rated film has been re-rated as a 15 – this is as soft-core as the genre gets.

The transfer here is really quite excellent . Who’d have thought that these films started out looking this good? Special features include PG rated trailers, an original X trailer, an image gallery and a promotional PDF which this reviewer couldn’t access. (It’s me not the disc!).

If you like this kind of thing, you should definitely get hold of Simon Sheridan’s superb book on the genre, ‘Keeping the British End Up’, a really excellent tome. You should also pick yourself up a copy of this. It’s bad – but in a good way.