Handjob’s Half Hour (Morning Glory, 1970-73)

DIRECTOR: HARRY HANDS. RUNNING TIME: 75 mins. VIDEO: BALD MOOSE. PRICE £9.99 CERT 18

One of the unlikeliest of porn stars, Percy Peaslin traded on his remarkable resemblance to the late British comedian Tony Hancock to make a series of short films under the name Tony Handjob, which were basically porn versions of the popular 1960s TV series Hancock’s Half Hour. Usually dressed in a homburg and raincoat, Handjob was basically a frustrated working class-type with aspirations to culture and grandeur. Forever thwarted in his attempts to bed various glamourous women, Handjob would frequently take refuge in elaborate masturbatory fantasies. Often a film would climax with him being rudely interrupted just as he was about to shoot his load, to find that he was actually standing in the newsagents/barbers/dentists waiting room, etc, with his John Thomas in his hand, whacking off over a picture of some model in a magazine. He would inevitably be beaten up and thrown out by an irate shopkeeper or policeman, as a buxom receptionist or shop assistant looked on in disgust. A similar format was used more recently in the cable porn channel series The Adventures of Walter Clitty. Handjob’s frustration is made worse by the fact that his coarse beer-swilling friend Sid (Roger Wagstaffe in full Sid James mode) beds a seemingly endless stream of top-heavy young ladies. Handjob is also forever spurning the advances of his roly poly female next door neighbour (Heidi Van Neck in Hattie Jacques mode) and camp postman Kenny (Oscar Lear – eerily like Kenneth Williams).

Originally shown in Soho peepshows and specialist cinemas in the early 1970s, three of these films are now brought together for the first time on video. The first has Handjob complaining to his newsagent that the last two pages of his artistic erotic photo-story magazine are stuck together with jism, and being forced to fantasise the ending – with obvious results. The second is the classic Sperm Donor episode, which seems to exist solely for Handjob to utter the line “A pint, that’s nearly a scrotum full!”, when asked to fill a bottle with jism. The tape’s final offering is entitled Handjob’s Half Hour and is actually a solo piece in which Handjob sits alone on his sofa and masturbates for thirty minutes, all the while holding that characteristic hangdog expression on his face. Excruciatingly dull, its a relief (in every sense) when he finally ejaculates. Shot on grainy black and white film, this video gives a good idea of just how furtive and smutty British porn was in the 1970s. Sadly, Handjob’s far superior feature film, The Rub Off (shot in colour in 1975), in which he plays a frustrated peep-show ticket-seller who runs off to Paris to become a rent-boy in the artists quarter (and inadvertently founds the ‘penile’ school of art after he ejaculates onto a canvas), remains unavailable.