Duncan Aitchison, my film quiz running-mate (and uncrowned TEAM LEADER) suggested a bunch of great stuff, including this mighty scene of a young Oliver Reed DANCING from Edmond T. Greville's seminal sixties juvie melodrama BEAT GIRL, which will also provide our Quote of the Day (a Shadowplay first!).

Fiona says Ollie Reed dances like I do, which I take to refer to his lack of co-ordination, weirdness of movement, and marked tendency to respond to unknown music in his own head rather than to the soundtrack provided for us mortals by John Barry and his Seven.

This is right before Barry started scoring Bond films, and his style has evolved from the rather random imitations of different commercial pop styles, and the annoying pizzicato noodlings of his earlier work. What we have here is just a hair away from the full-on Bondian torch-song brassy blast, and I FIND IT MAGNIFICENT.

Oliver Reed's dancing makes me feel PROUD TO BE BRITISH. I think his only other connection to the medium of dance is his tiny cameo as a camp ballet dancer in Basil Dearden and Bryan Forbes' marvellous crime caper THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN. Nobody's idea of a gay prancer, Ollie stepped into that role at the last minute and made it his own.

"Do you want Moody 1, Moody 2 or Moody 3?" Ollie would ask Michael Winner, and it's that lowering Heathcliffian menace that he's been hired for here, not his terpsichorean dexterity. I like how he manages to preserve his essential Rugged Solemnity even while capering like a loon.

BEAT GIRL stars Gillian Hills, a sort of Brit-brat-Bardot, as the daughter of awful architect David Farrar (best known for riding a TINY DONKEY in BLACK NARCISSUS: his feet touch the ground when he straddles it, so he can make it go just by walking above it) who falls in with beatniks and strippers and Adam Faith (who exudes Proletarian Adenoidal Suavity -- a STAR).

Sleaze is trowelled on by a nubile Christopher Lee and the reliably button-eyed psychosis of Nigel Green, both of whom I love more than oxygen. Plus there's those strippers. Most of the onstage undressing is very mild and half-hearted, certainly less impressive than the same year's EXPRESSO BONGO, but one number, by "Pascaline", is a sizzler. Perhaps thinking that the dancer's dusky complexion would render her gyrations safely asexual, in the way that naked National Geographic "savages" were the only kind of photographic nude permissable for years, the filmmakers let this former Crazy Horse artiste unleash her pelvis like a randy bronco, all over our screen. Alas, the censors fairly fell over themselves to truncate Pascaline's masturbatory movements, but in these permissive naughty naughties, the film has been restored with all this previously unseen frottage.

But my other favourite favourite thing in this film -- no, not a FILM exactly, more a PAGEANT OF ASSORTED MATERIÉLS, is David Farrar's CITY 2000 -- of which more anon.

Footnote: Duncan has chosen this scene because of his nostalgic-patriotic love of a particular British sleaze/romance, as embodied by his favourite line in David Cronenberg's SPIDER: Gabriel Byrne's silky come-on: "You wanna go down the allotments?"