Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004)

 

Director: Andy Humphries

Screenplay: Andy Humphries

Cast: Johnny Vegas as Dave; Mackenzie Crook as Ferris; Mark Gatiss as Jeremy; Annette Bentley as Linda; Julia Davis as Shelley; Lucy Davis as Ruth; Evie Garratt as Joan's Mum; Robert Harrison as Kevin; Nick Holder as Gordon; Dominic Coleman as Tolly

Ephemeral Waves

 

You've upset the Gherkin man!

Ace of Spades by Motorhead is not what I expect opening a British sex comedy, particularly one about two guys in Birmingham delivering potatoes to fish and chip stores, but this is one of the most infamous British films of its time period, forgotten except how it was negatively dog piled upon. Likely greater controversy came from the fact it proudly wares being funded by the UK Film Council, a fund for British cinema production that was contributed to from tickets bought for the National Lottery¹; this means as well family of mine, who bought lottery tickets at this time, may have paid for this among others. The tale of Dave (Johnny Vegas), a slubby guy kicked out the house by his wife for being lazy, and Ferris (Mackenzie Crook), whose allure to the women (even the mother-in-law of his ex he is stuck living) is also his tragedy, alongside a series of other characters at the potato firm in vignettes - it is a bizarre film to return to, and not in a good way for me, just surprising it ever even got made in the first place. Beyond the non-metaphors for sex from the get-go, like "Fishy Fingers" the chippie to unsubtle pickle jar labels, it is gross from the get-go too on purpose, with the fixation of one side character, because of his old girlfriend's fetish for using strawberry jam in the bedroom, of said jam and fish in inappropriate ways. It is also far too niche and peculiar in its humour and tone to have ever appealed to anyone with hindsight, those not on the same wavelength with its gags, but the entire thing for me as a viewer also felt off entirely for other reasons.

It is immediately meant to be confrontation in the gross out humour, but its tone feels like it is missing what British director Jim Hosking got with The Greasy Strangler (2016) a decade on, a notoriously vulgar and twisted film in its gross out, but with the more gleeful edge of wittedness, and a John Waters influence clearly there, to lead it to being a success for a viewer like me. Sex Lives... is just peculiar and actually dour, even when the point is to find humour in the sexual neurosis of its male characters, the intent of its writer-director². The problem is as much because it is not really a sex comedy but plays to the tone of one as, whilst there is enough lewdness to warrant only 18 year olds seeing this back in the day in a British cinema, with the exception of one scene in a sex shop and nude photos on background walls, there is no nudity or explicit sex even as a gag onscreen like in a Confessions... era seventies sex comedy, but it is a lot of gross out comedy rather than playing to the deadpan nature of its series of men struggling with their libidos either. It de-eroticises sex, set in the council estates, reducing it down to shabby men and their existential crisis, replacing the flamboyance of a Carry On sex comedy with just saying "shag" instead, but without necessarily enough wit or just being vindictive in a funny way about the material.

Even in terms of just having as much sexual language as possible to be crass, even Judge Dread, to make an ultra obscure British-only reference, was a lot more elaborate than this, an English ska and reggae musician who, in the seventies especially, gain traction for taking the likes of fairy tales, and making songs around them with sexual innuendo and double entendres alongside just songs about sex. Considering Judge Dread was not subtle either, but more flamboyant on a song like Big Six in his big pun, that pretty much sets up the tone, although considering this film ends on someone wishing to kill a panda to have sex with it, because they would not be able to alive without being attacked, we are in a film which, directed and written by Andy Humphries, is idiosyncratic in a way that I look with a perverse form of admiration in for going to this level, but also never really running with it in anything more perversely clever or so twisted until it goes full circle into inspired. It never tries to go further, and speaking of the John Waters reference earlier, to really got bad taste this should have gone further until it became subversive and gross, rather than gross and merely crass. It is peculiar, in how it really does not follow a plot and falls into a series of vignettes, the closest things to this in tone and shock value being Freddy Got Fingered (2001) and Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (2012) for American equivalents, non-sequitur films where the humour is mostly bodily humour or weirdness at one tone, in which there is a tangent on everyone wondering how bees make honey (or if wasps do), or a young Mark Gatiss as an incel stalker that has not aged well. From The League of Gentlemen to some, Sherlock for others, and for me a series of horror documentaries on horror cinema and culture, Gatiss is one of the few mostly rewarding aspects, trying him damndest with the performance, and having one joke that lands, the failed attempt to kill his interest's dog by placing him on a chopping board on the kitchen top and threatening him with a knife.

It is a film, and I apologise for having to type this, where "proper fanny flavour" is a phrase used, and especially in mind that term means different things to different countries in slang, I feel embarrassed regardless for using dialogue which feels of an alien logic. For any time it gets the tone right for a crude working class story about horny guys - cutting in Buzzcock's Orgasm Addict, a deeply crude but funny punk song about wanking too much - to surreal non-sequiturs that do work, the nameless but majestic gherkin delivery man who, manly stud to all, is open to being with young women working at chip shops to elderly old women with his body, Sex Lives... can work but those are the narrowest moments where it manages to find itself. Most of the time it is depressing, without bringing even callous humour to the proceedings, merely leaving us to wallow in the lives of Dave and Ferris's characters, discussing wanting to have all the sex they want and wasting their lives in pubs, and not landing at all. It opens up a lot of male neurosis about men who are uncomfortable against sexually aggressive women who are, which is a joke which eventually reveals the female characters are archetypes, including Dave's tired wife, without anything really to them, not even fascinating mirrored distortions of what these men view the opposite sex as, but just two dimensional. The mother-in-law, the women who are just more comfortable in themselves, the woman who has group sex with multiple men, leading to one of the other few good jokes about the guys discussing where they parked their cars outside waiting for the orgies to happen, and the relationship between the chip shop employee and her husband are all there for punch lines which do not work. The later pair especially is kink shaming in parodying a consensual voyeuristic relationship where he likes to hide and she likes to mock-adultery with her boyfriends; strange as it is depicted onscreen, barring the lack of safety on his basement supports to lift him on the ceiling, or getting locked in his own car boot by accident, theirs is at least a healthy if peculiar sex life to theirs worth of a film that would funny weird, icky but funny in a sex positive way.

A film could be gotten a lot from the awkward reality of trying to have the sex life one imagines in porn, where two guys in a potential threesome with a woman find themselves more concerned about getting an allen key to fix the bed frame beforehand, but instead it cuts to Carl Douglas' Kung Fu Fighting in the middle of the act, which makes no sense and does raise that the song probably should stay in another time period if it keeps being brought out for films like this. Instead of being a world of desperate men panicking about their masculinity, it keeps skipping the more interesting concern here in favour of them going down the pub being meant to be celebratory, or a scene of dog poo being fired through a super soaker. It does not even get into the fact this is sexist, in that ultimately one of our leads, Dave, does not really deserve the happy ending he gets, or that Ferris' character never gets anywhere, not even a cynical gag in this repetition brought in to emphasis this non-conclusion. By the time we have a neon sex sign montage set to an American lounge ballad song, I again wonder how this managed to get produced, simply because even the 2000s, the UK Film Council for all the unconventional films they funded should have found this too niche or not sellable as a sex comedy as it was, rather than provide the money to the production they did.

At the time when the film was being panned, Andy Humphries actually wrote a defence of the film he made in the Guardian newspaper², making it a class argument that critics were middle class and hated the film, taken from real life experiences, for being working class including the cast not being "glamorous" in the idea form. Honestly, speaking as a working class person myself, Sex Lives of the Potato Men is a film, now forgotten, which I find fascinating to witness, but is narrow in its sense of humour, and neither sexy nor a dark comedy poking holes in sexual hang-ups to ever have worked, a form of strange humour like the American films I have mentioned earlier which is the one area of weirdness I can rarely get into. Jim Hosking, who I mentioned with The Greasy Strangler, got on my vibes, with non-conventional body types, crude and disgusting humour, and enough penises onscreen (including fake ones) to fill a sex shop, but it was also idiosyncratic and clever in its mix of the banal and the arch, whilst also being well made in its production choices from the music to the location scouting. Even knowing that Humphries made the film as dour on these male characters on purpose, which I have to admire, does not really get past that, for me, it never gets this humour across in a way I was won over at all and was lost as a viewer from early on with.

It is a cruel ending punch line to end this review on what Humphries made next, a documentary named Darts Players' Wives (2005), but his career has stayed in TV documentaries and works about British comedians of the golden eras between the sixties to the nineties, Sex Lives of the Potato Men's lasting effect sadly one unintentionally or intentionally putting him in this era of filmmaking only from then on. The UK Film Council itself, founded in 2000, would last until 2011, with way too many films to name behind their legacy. To just name a few, there is Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), a Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner, Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2006), Armando Iannucci's In the Loop (2009), Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008), Shane Meadow's This Is England (2007), Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001), even genre films like Christopher Smith's Severance (2006), with their last film The King's Speech (2010), which proved a last hurrah for an entire decade of British cinema I grew up in, and for the Council, by winning the Best Picture Oscar at the 83rd Academy Awards. If anyone remembers Sex Lives of the Potato Men, we quote the ending of Some Like It Hot (1959) - "Nobody's perfect..." - but this is a type of weird I do not enjoy. I just return to it, once despising it as "completely obnoxious and moronic", and finding its entire existence bizarre to consider instead with less hatred.

====

1) Sex comedy film grant criticised, published by BBC News February 21st 2004.

2) If it's too smutty, you're too snooty, written by the director-writer Andy Humphries for The Guardian, published February 26th 2004.