 |
based on the screenplay by Sid Colin and Ian La Frenais Percy's Progress
Sphere, London, 1974
The blurb on the back:
Since the famous operation Percy had found you can have too much of a good thing. So he took to the sea. Alone.
Raymond Hitchcock’s novel Percy, about a young man who loses his penis in a car crash and has a new one grafted on, became a hugely successful British movie in 1971, despite the fact that it really wasn’t very good at all. It did however star the ever-wonderful Hywel Bennett, featured an impressive supporting cast, and benefited from a soundtrack by The Kinks, and it had a certain rude charm, at least in retrospect. The quality of the 1974 sequel can be judged by the fact that it replaced Bennett with Leigh Lawson, which doesn’t exactly count as trading up (though he did later marry Twiggy), and replaced Ray Davies’ music with that of Tony Macauley. Most bafflingly of all, the screenplay was written by Sid Colin and Ian La Frenais (of Up Pompeii and Porridge fame respectively), but Raymond Hitchcock was then brought in to do the book. So he’s writing a novelization of a screenplay inspired by a novel he wrote earlier? Yep, that’s about the size of it. I don’t know how shocked you’re going to be by this, but the result is nothing for anyone to be proud of. And it’s not helped that the plot about a virus rendering men impotent had already been done by Ian Rosse in The Droop a couple of years earlier. One other thing: according to IMDb, Raymond Hitchcock was the father of the very, very wonderful Robin Hitchcock, my favourite British songwriter this side of David Bowie and Luke Haines. Is that right? Is that really the author of Percy on the cover of the Soft Boys’ classic album Underwater Moonlight? 'He was white and she was white as only statues are...' - that's him? Cool. ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 1/5 HIPNESS QUOTIENT: 3/5
 There's a Girl in my Soup  Ian Rosse, The Droop
home |
