Whatever Happened to the Likely Lasses?

Top: Brigit Forsyth as Thelma Ferris (née Chambers) 

Bottom: Sheila Fearn as Audrey and Anita Carey as Susan  

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (BBC TV 1973-74)

 

I was saddened to hear about the death yesterday of Scottish actress Brigit Forsyth, who played Thelma, Bob's fiancée and - after their marriage in episode 13 - wife, in the hilarious British sitcom Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973-74), written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

Thelma, a rather prissy librarian who wished to enjoy a respectable, lower middle class life in suburbia, was in some ways intended to be an unsympathetic character and yet, as the series unfolded across 26 episodes, it became clear that she was a warm and loving woman. 

 

And, looking back now, she also strikes me as sexually attractive (or hot as people like to say today); particularly when dressed as Peter Pan in the Christmas special at the end of season two, or wearing her short black nightgown whilst on honeymoon in episode 14.

 

In fact, as one's desire becomes increasingly tied to nostalgia, it seems to me that the series was full of beautiful actresses playing memorable characters - not just Brigit Forsyth as Thelma, but also Anita Carey as her sister, Susan; and Sheila Fearn, as Terry's sister, Audrey; or Pamela Conway, who played Gloria, the barmaid; Elizabeth Lax, who played Bob's secretary, Wendy; Juliet Aykroyd, who played Anthea, Thelma's assistant at the library ... 

 

Even Sandra Bryant (as Glenys) and Margaret Nolan (as Jackie) appear in one episode entitled 'I'll Never Forget Whatshername' (S1/E5).  

 

Sadly, several of the above are now no longer with us [1]. But, thankfully, we can still watch them on film and remember them in our hearts; a special generation of women, born in the 1940s [2], who lit up my childhood in the 1970s and continue to enchant today. 

 

Why don't women - and, indeed, men - born after 1979 have the same allure? 

 

'Eras produce certain faces', says Mark Fisher [3]. And he got that right. 

 

Unfortunately, the present era seems to produce fresh-faced (or photoshopped) faces lacking in all character: almost ugly in their perfection (just as faces in the past were often beautiful in their imperfection).       

 

Notes

 

[1] Anita Carey died in July 2023; Elizabeth Lax died in June 1996; and Margaret Nolan died in October 2020. Some readers may recall I published a post expressing my admiration of the latter on 5 Nov 2015: click here. 

[2] Elizabeth Lax is the exception to this, born as she was on 8 Feb 1950. 

[3] See Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, (Zero Books, 2022), p. 74. 

Taking a Trip Through The Beauty Jungle

Press ad for The Beauty Jungle (1964)

The most colourful and exciting film of the year

The good people at Talking Pictures TV have found another absolute gem of a movie: The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964), starring (60s and 70s stalwart) Ian Hendry as local journalist Don MacKenzie and (lovely Lancashire lass) Janette Scott as the typist-turned-beauty contestant Shirley Freeman.

Also putting in appearances are Tommy Trinder, Sid James, and a 21-year-old Maggie Nolan as just one of the mulitude of leggy-lovelies gracing the screen, so obviously a film with instant appeal for viewers like me (although it's interesting to note that promotion for the film was aimed primarily at a female audience in the belief that it was the sort of film women will want to see; the sort of picture women will want to talk about).   

Essentially a moral tale - or, rather, a sexploitation movie masquerading as a moral tale - it purports to expose the sordid and corrupt world of beauty pageants. MacKenzie, acting as a manager and image consultant to Shirley, is desperate to also become her lover. Unfortunately for him, having left her home, her job, and her boyfriend and transformed from a happy young brunette into a glamorous and ambitious blonde, greedy for ever-greater fame and success, she isn't interested and spurns his advances.         

Of far more interest to Shirley are playboy filmstar Rex Carrick (played by Edmund Purdom) and sauve international beauty pageant promoter Armand (played by the French actor Jean Claudio). She tries to seduce the former, only to discover he's either gay or asexual; and she (mistakenly) agrees to sleep with the latter in the (vain) hope of becoming Miss Globe (a title that goes to Miss Peru, played by a former Miss Israel, Aliza Gur). 

Having failed to make it to the top, Shirley is reduced to working as a celebrity judge back on the local beauty contest circuit - until, that is, she sees her younger sister paraded before her (and under the management of MacKenzie). This forces her to walk away from the industry for good and presumably back into a life of obscurity and nine-to-five normality; just another victim of the beauty jungle and its brutal, primitive law (though one who was happy to be complicit so long as she was winning). 

What feminist critics or members of the #MeToo generation would make of such a film heaven only knows; one imagines they'd be triggered (perhaps rightly) by the unabashed sexual objectification and abuse of young women by powerful and unscrupulous older men.

But the film has such quirky British charm - not only, as I said earlier, do Tommy Trinder and Sid James appear, but Lionel (Give Us a Clue) Blair and cheeky chappie Joe Brown also pop up on screen - that such sleazy behaviour is normalised, humanised, and made entertaining. Maybe that's the thing with vice and immorality - we find it so damn seductive (and excusable) if it's carried out by people with a twinkle in their eye!

And, what's more, I fully appreciate why girls like Shirley Freeman set out on the path to fame and riches, prepared to do whatever it takes in order to escape being little Miss No One from nowhere - for who wants to peel potatoes and scrub floors when you can drink champagne and travel the world in style?


Notes

To watch a trailer for The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964): click here.

To see the astonishing press kit released to help promote the film visit the William K. Everson Archive (NYU): click here.

Kitchen Sink Kink

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Margaret Nolan: Artist, Actress, Object

Margaret Nolan (IMDB)
Photo © 2011 Silver Screen Collection 
Courtesy of gettyimages.com 

The case of Margaret Nolan, the London-born glamour model turned actress become artist, interests for a number of reasons, not least of all because she is a woman who has struggled to take control of her own image and personally confront the issue of sexual objectification.

Miss Nolan started her career - as many aspiring young actresses do - by stripping for the camera and she soon became a popular pin-up within the amorous imagination of the early 1960s, often featuring in magazines under the name of Vicky Kennedy (her pseudonym serving to disguise her identity, preserve her modesty, and distance her from the industry in which she worked; she wasn't a nude model per se, but merely playing the part of such).

Gradually, her more legitimate acting roles increased in number and importance and she appeared in many theatre productions, films, and television shows, under her real name. This famously included playing a masseuse called Dink in the James Bond movie Goldfinger (1964).*

For some of us, however, Miss Nolan is most fondly remembered for her roles in several of the Carry On films, including Carry on Girls (1973), in which she (predictably) plays the buxom beauty Dawn Brakes and is involved in a rather convincing - and at the time controversial - catfight with the Barbara Windsor character, Hope Springs.

But of course, such scenes are now long behind her. Today, Miss Nolan works as a visual artist, producing interesting (sometimes vaguely disturbing) images assembled from cut-up publicity pictures; a somewhat naive attempt to deconstruct the socio-sexual stereotype she embodied and challenge the male gaze to which she was made subject throughout her modelling and acting career. Naive, but something for which she should nevertheless be applauded.

Margaret Nolan: My Divided Self 

This and other works can be found on her official site: 

margaretnolan.co.uk 

* It might also be noted that it was Miss Nolan - and not Shirley Eaton - who appeared in the film's title-sequence by Robert Brownjohn, wearing a bikini and painted gold. This image immediately became iconic within popular culture, but, unlike some (mostly male) art critics and film theorists, Miss Nolan denies there was - or is - anything liberated or liberating about it. The fact that it served simply to secure her a shoot for Playboy would seem to confirm her view.