"Grossly Obscene and Primarily Erotic!" Swedish Sex Education in 1970s Britain

Last weekend I gave a paper on the censorship and legal problems around two Swedish sex education films which were released here in the mid-1970s. I came across this story as it involved Jacey cinemas and the Fancey family, both of whom I had been researching.

The paper was part of the Sex and the Cinema conference at the University of Kent. It was an excellent conference and I met some interesting people. I also had very positive feedback, which is always nice. It's also reassuring to see other people's papers and realise that the areas in which I'm researching are also of interest to other academics, and that I'm not misjudging this whole thing.

You can read the paper on my Academia.edu profile here.

Cannibal Holocaust podcast

Alan Yates (Carl Yorke) and Faye Daniels (Francesca Ciardi) in the green inferno

I was recently invited to participate in The Bloody Pit podcast with Rod Barnett. The subject of our discussion was Cannibal Holocaust. I feel a bit of a personal connection with this film because I interviewed the director, Ruggero Deodato, at Cine Excess in 2011 when he received a lifetime achievement award. This interview went well and was published in the magazine Diabolique. As I explain in the podcast, that was the first time I had ever seen the film, and it made a very strong impression on me.

Ruggero Deodato (right) with Italian actor
Giovano Lombardo Radice, who was providing translation.

This photo was used (without my permission) on the back of a Shameless Entertainment box set of Ruggero Deodato films. They sent me some free stuff by way of apology, so we're all cool now.

In the summer of 2015 I attended a film conference in Rome and was lucky enough to meet up with Deodato again, where he was pleased that I was asking to sign a DVD of his personal favourite, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man.

Also, when I was a fresh-faced innocent at Cine Excess 2010 I had the opportunity to meet Cannibal Holocaust star Francesca Ciardi, the ill-fated Faye Daniels.

So as I said, I feel like I know Cannibal Holocaust and it's participants personally. I'm even friends with Carl Yorke on Facebook, who played Alan Yates. I wished him happy birthday last week.

If you would like to hear our in-depth discussion, where we cover the highs and lows of this powerful and provocative film, you can find it on iTunes or click below to visit the Bloody Pit blog.

Blood Baths and Bloody Brides

The conference in Lincoln went really well. It was good to present some new research, but even better to meet other academics in the same field. One particular stroke of luck was meeting Emma Petts who presented on some research she has been doing into British cinema audiences. This is exactly the kind of research I have been looking for, and hopefully when her own project is finished I may be able to use some of it.

However, another week, another conference. This week I have been writing about the UK reception and marketing of the giallo, ready to fly off to Rome in a few days. I'm very excited to be going to my first overseas conference.

The organisation behind this conference looks amazing. There will be 35mm film screenings, plenty of directors and cast members available for panels, plus two full days of papers being presented by far more knowledgable people than myself. I'm hoping my relative lack of experience in the giallo does not become too noticeable. I'm not writing about the genre or its most famous stars as such, so I ought to get away with it. I'm on the much safer territory of discussing who was distributing these films in the UK and what happened with the BBFC. I'm a little worried that I'm becoming a one-trick pony with all this distribution and censorship stuff. I will probably take a year off conferences after this, so next time I will be have some different (to a point) stuff to present.

This was the first UK release of Mario Bava's Bay of Blood in 1980, eleven years after it was first released in Italy. It is one of the examples I will be discussing in this paper. It was distributed by my old friends New Realm.

Dario Argento's seminal The Bird With the Crystal Plumage on the other hand got away with no BBFC-imposed cuts at all in 1970, but did suffer from this somewhat lacklustre new title.


I will no doubt come back from Rome with an even bigger enthusiasm for all things Italian. Before I first started my PhD back in 2012 I knew or cared very little for Italian horror, and even less for the giallo. It was all about Hammer and Roger Corman as far as I was concerned. Regular meetings with Dr. Leon Hunt changed all that for me, as I began to realise just how significant the Italian film industry was when considering the presence of international film in British cinemas. Even though I am no longer at Brunel University, I am continuing to expand my Italian film experience, enjoying giallos, gothic horrors and Eurospy thrillers. I finally appreciate the great work of Mario Bava, Antonio Marghereti, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, and I'm even listening to Goblin.

E.J. Fancey's Exotic Thrills

Following some deep thought after my last post I realised that trying to write three papers at the same time was more than any sane mind could handle, so reluctantly I dropped the Hammer conference. It will undoubtably be a fantastic event, but I just couldn't do it. Plus it was really straying from my current areas of research so it was purely an indulgence even to consider it.

However, I am going to Lincoln next week to give this paper on the fascinating world of E.J. Fancey. At least, I hope it's fascinating. I've been researching this for a long time, and writing the paper itself has taken me the best part of two weeks. 

I have delved into the Fancey family history to unravel some of the complicated relationships behind his companies, which included S.F. Film Distributors, D.U.K. Films and New Realm Pictures. I have also uncovered original marketing materials and BBFC documentation which highlights the sometimes friendly, sometimes fractious relationship they had with the censors.

I am mainly focusing on the films they distributed rather then their own productions, although they did make several of their own. Largely forgettable is the kindest way of describing them. They did however give Michael Winner his first break as a feature film director, although if you have ever seen Parting Shots (1998) you may not be able to thank them for that.


Karamoja - Land of the Naked People (1965) has to be one of the best exploitation titles of all time. This was actually one of Kroger Babb's films, the American exploitation king who gave the world Mom and Dad (1945) and "She Shoulda Said 'No'!" (1949).



The Fancey's empire, which was eventually run by E.J. himself, his wife, his common-law wife, and his children by both wives, was a major player in the world of independent film distribution in the 1960s.

Edwin's son Malcolm had great success in the 1970s by acquiring the rights to Emmanuelle (1975), and he invested the money into making sex films of his own. In the 1980s he gained notoriety for this little publicity stunt to promote Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981). This backfired when he and partner David Hamilton-Grant were prosecuted for obscenity because they "accidentally" distributed the version refused a certificate by the BBFC. He got off with a suspended sentence whilst his partner went to prison.

The Fancey's are a fascinating and slightly elusive family that I hope to continue to find more on. I have contacted some living members of the family but have had no success in persuading any of them to speak to me. But I will not give up!

Now that this paper is finished I have to start my giallo one for the Rome conference in three weeks. Oh dear...

Conference Papers, and The Tyranny of Choice

I have submitted a proposal for a conference being held in Rome this June. The whole conference is devoted to the giallo, a film genre I have to admit to only now becoming acquainted with. But my desire to expand my academic reach, coupled with the idea of spending some time in Rome again, has prompted me to get on board. I had previously seen The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, and my interest in Mario Bava has been developing for a couple of years now, so it is not impossible that I can find something to say on it! Indeed, I think I have found an angle that fits well with my own research interests, and hopefully will be fairly original for the conference. If I get accepted I'll start presenting some of the research here.

I also found out last week about a three-day conference in Paris on Hammer films. This sounds like my sort of thing too, but writing academically about Hammer is out of my current comfort zone. I wrote about some Hammer films during my degree, but that was a long time ago and I have felt, somewhat arrogantly, that I have "moved on" from Hammer.But it still has a hold over me. By a rough count today I have over eighty Hammer films on DVD and blu ray, and I have written extensively about them for Cinema Retro. I have interviewed stars and directors, and been to loads of Hammer events and conventions. I have had my photo taken with many a Hammer Glamour girl, as well as many of the ageing male stars too. I feel like my problem is that I'm in too deep with Hammer. It is such a vast subject area, that to choose just one small part to present a paper on seems virtually impossible.

Surrounding myself with DVDs today, and looking through the list of suggested topic areas by the conference organisers, I think I have come up with an idea. It has nothing to do with my PhD, but I feel I can justify it by saying I am stretching myself as an academic. If I can speak on a wider variety of subjects, I'm going to get more exposure in the global academic community. This, like I said, is how I justify it to myself anyway. Spending a few hours of a day staring at Hammer DVDs has to be justified one way or another.

So I think I've narrowed it down to The Stranglers of Bombay and The Terror of the Tongs.

I've also submitted a proposal for a conference on exploitation cinema being held in London this May. So I've gone from doing one paper in the past two years to potentially writing and presenting three within a couple of weeks of each other. Fun times ahead.