Adventures of a Plumber's Mate (1978)

In the grand tradition of Confessions of a Window Cleaner, Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman, and The Ups and Downs of a Handyman, comes another British sexploitation film about a blue-collar trade.  By the close of the seventies, this type of film (epitomized by the Confessions films) had a run its course, with this entry being among the last.

I read this from a review on IMDb and it couldn't be more true: "The Italians make sex look wholesome, the French make it erotic, the Americans make it dirty but the Brits laugh about it." 

I haven't seen Adventures of a Private Eye yet (which preceded this film), but I hear it's much better.

Sid South (Christopher Neil) desperately needs to get a job.  He's getting evicted and can't pay any of his bills.

 On the bright side, he does quite well with the ladies.  He has Sally (Nina West) over tonight.  She drinks tea nude, amid his wonderful posters.

Sid isn't much on commitments.  He kicks Sally out, but does at least offer her a ride on his bike.  She's clearly wearing nothing underneath, and as her dress flies backward, passerby are comically stupefied.

Sid drops her off, and basically lets her know he won't be calling her again.  She's upset because he told her all kinds of bullshit the night before about how much he loved her.

 He drives off, but Sally's dress is caught on his motorcycle, and rips completely off.  

Sid visits his relative, Crapper (Stephen Lewis), who owns a plumbing service.  Crapper reluctantly offers him a job.

 Sid's first job is to simply replace a toilet seat lid at the home of Janice (Prudence Drage).

 As is standard in these blue collar Britsploitation films, the housewife hits on the visiting repairman.  In this case, Janice has handcuffed herself to the bedpost, and wants to get kinky with Sid.

 Janice receives a phone call from her husband who says he's coming home early.  Uh-oh.  Where have we seen this scenario before?  The catch here is that Janice can't find the handcuff key.

 A pretty funny scene: as we watch the husband make his way home, we also Janice and Sid desperately trying to get to the handcuff key - detaching the bed frame and awkwardly trying to move about the house...

 ... and down the stairs.

 Finally, Sid finds a handsaw and cuts them loose.

 He takes the old toilet seat lid and gets some change by selling it to an antique shop (this will be important later).  Then he goes to his favorite pub and chats with Daisy (Elaine Paige) the bartender.

 At the bar, he's visited by a couple of heavies (Arthur Mullard and William Rushton) who remind him that he owes them money.

 Back at home he's accosted by Janice's husband who doesn't really care what he did with his wife... rather, he just wants to know where's that toilet seat lid?

 Sid tracks the toilet seat lid down and finds that it's made of gold!  Evidently, Janice's husband is some kind of criminal, and he's hidden this valuable object under wood veneer.

 Well, the gold toilet seat doesn't do him any good.  He crashes at Daisy's place.  They don't have sex - which is unusual for Sid - and, instead, talk the night away.  Clearly these two are meant to be together.

 Sid's on to his next job - to repair a garbage disposal.  This housewife, Maisie (Lindy Benson), greets him at the door.

 For once, the housewife doesn't make passes at him.  However, things still get awkward when the garbage disposal sucks her dress down the drain...

 This makes for a compromising position when her husband comes home.

 Sid, basically homeless, uses the bathroom of a tennis club to shower.  While he's cleaning himself, the girls from the tennis court head to the locker room.  Gee - I wonder if this will lead to something.

The girl in the middle is played by the great Suzy Mandell.  This girl was a gorgeous - and in a ton of Britsploitation flicks.

 She takes a shower, not realizing at first that Sid's trying to hide behind her.

 Finally she sees him and screams bloody murder.

 The rest of the girls come running.  I'm sorry, but if a man is caught in a women's shower, this is not how the ladies are going to react.  But it was the seventies after all.

There's a rather repetitive and lame storyline where Sid tries to do con jobs to get extra cash to pay the heavies.  Here, he attends a decadent posh party, and is hired to swap a fake painting and steal the real painting.

 Of course it ends in disaster with Sid having to be fished out of the indoor pool.

 Just when Sid is about to get his ass beat by the heavies, he's rescued.  A man waltzes up and gives Sid reward money for returning the gold toilet seat.  At last, he can pay these guys.

It ends with Crapper humiliating himself and Sid and Daisy laughing.  Ha ha.  THE END

This wasn't bad, but it should have been better. Sid's encounters at the various plumbing jobs are fantastic.  The handcuff scene with Janice, the garbage disposal scene with Maisie, and even the motorcycle scene with Sally and the tennis bathroom scene, are all sexy and hilarious. The film should have played to its strengths and had more of these Benny Hill style shenanigans.

Instead, in-between these great scenes, there is a lot of boring, fast-forward-worthy material - especially the unnecessary plot where Sid has to repeatedly commit crimes to earn cash.  It's just lame.

But I'm willing to overlook the padding, the boring filler and dumb side-stories.  The above listed scenes are just so dynamite that it makes it all worthwhile.

★★★★★★★☆☆☆