‘The Amorous Milkman’: The awful British soft-core porn comedy
The sex comedy has always been viewed largely as an American thing, with countless Stateside capers having found enduring status for their raucous, rowdy, and ribald shenanigans. That’s not to say British cinema hasn’t tried, but the results, more often than not, have been flaccid at best.
Even in the post-millennium boom, when Hollywood was knocking out American Pie, Road Trip, The Girl Next Door, Not Another Teen Movie, and countless other tales trading in sexuality and promiscuity, the most notable the United Kingdom could come up with was Sex Lives of the Potato Men, which gained notoriety for entirely different reasons.
The expanded collection of Carry On films did prove massively popular at the height of their popularity, but they were largely the exceptions that proved the rule. Smut has never been a thing closely associated with the distinctly stiff upper lip of British sensibilities, something writer, director, and producer Derren Nesbitt sought to upend through 1975’s The Amorous Milkman.
As shocking as it is to discover, the title is entirely descriptive of the storyline, which sought to outline its salacious nature without running afoul of the censorship board by putting a cat on one of its posters alongside the tagline, “If your pussy could only talk”. In fact, the entire marketing campaign was similarly near-the-knuckle, with another one-sheet featuring Brendan Price’s titular horny calcium dispenser and the promise that “he gave ’em much more than a pinta!”
Price’s Davey lives what must have been the dream of at least one milkman since the invention of pasteurisation by being invited in by various women on his delivery route and bedding them. However, he ends up engaged to a pair of them at once and falls afoul of the local criminal element after a fearsome gangster discovers his missus has been cheating on him with the sexually charged slinger of glass bottles on doorsteps.
In a story development that stands out as galling through a modern lens but was played entirely for laughs in the mid-70s, Davey even ends up being charged with sexual assault when one of the housewives he’s been sleeping with gets found out by her husband, who then seeks to make the milkman pay for his wife’s extramarital infidelities by trying to convince the courts it was rape. Quite how this was supposed to have audiences rolling in the aisles with their sides split in two remains unknown, but Nesbitt’s passion project – in more ways than one – didn’t take off among its target demographic.
The decade was hardly a hotbed for cinematic scintillation hailing from Great Britain – no offence to anyone who got a kick out of Keep It Up Downstairs, The Wife Swappers, or Adventures of a Taxi Driver – which all sought to seize upon the headlines grabbed by 1973’s No Sex Please, We’re British and weaponise it for their own gain. Almost none of them succeeded, but few turned out to be quite as easily forgotten and soundly dismissed as The Amorous Milkman.
