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Sadly, Long is highly representative of why the British sex film was such a dire, gobsmackingly dull experience. He was personally dismissive of pornography, saying it didn't turn him on, and seemed generally uninterested in sex and nudity per se. This peculiarly British attitude to sex clearly permeated the genre. When director Joe McGrath, once famous for TV work with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, was, in his eyes, "reduced" to making adult comedies, he was known to direct sex scenes with his back to the set, appalled at having to earn his living from such a sleazy activity. This may have seemed a morally justifiable position for him to take, but it didn't do a lot for the films. And almost without exception, every British sex film of the heyday of exploitation is a dreary, embarrassing experience, thanks both to "artistic" attitudes such as this, and the British censors’ penchant for chopping out anything remotely dirty anyway. Still, at least their titles of Long’s films were occasionally inventive - Can You Keep It Up for a Week (1974), Keep It Up Downstairs (1976), I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight (1975), Let's Get Laid (1977).

Critical dismissals aside, low-grade British smut, with its perfunctory flashes of tits, ass, and pubic hair, was a sure-fire domestic money-maker in the early to mid-’70s. Most successful was the Confessions series (1974-77) starring Robin Askwith, generally crass reworking of saucy postcard coitus interruptus scenarios with a pop youth feel. Distributed by Columbia, these also attracted the involvement of fairly distinguished TV character actors; perhaps they seemed like the only legitimate films in production at the time.

Long's Adventures series - Adventures of a Taxi Driver (75); Adventures of a Private Eye (77), and Adventures of a Plumber's Mate (78) - were cheap cash-ins on these Confessions films, themselves hardly a yardstick for quality filmmaking. Each episode finds a cheeky young Romeo getting into all sorts of subpornographic situations thanks to the nature of his job. Parochial, unfunny, unsexy, they now make for depressing rather than affectionate viewing. But, if you've not seen one, try and dig one out - sociologically, they are at least illustrative of both the state of British filmmaking in the late ’70s, and the collective mindset of the nation with regard to sex. Nevertheless, they now make The Benny Hill Show look like I, Claudius.

The success of this short blast of "permissiveness" was, however, short-lived. The Confessions and Adventures films had petered out by 1978, and the theatrical sex film struggled on for only two or three more years, when it was annihilated by the advent of home video (at the time unregulated.)

But 1980 also marked the virtual collapse of the British film industry, and the certain death of the British exploitation film. Along with the new threat of video and the gradual reduction of exhibition due to economic recession, he newly-elected Conservative government decided to turn off the genre's life support machine. The Tories took one look at the films benefiting from Eady Levy money and promptly abolished it. This Draconian measure represented more than the characteristic Conservative outrage at salacious material; it was also the first move of a government that was hostile to any kind of subversive artistic expression, especially if it was state subsidized. So, in one move, the British exploitation film, already gravely ill, was dealt a swift dose of euthansia by the Thatcher administration.

Two years later, a new source of film finance did come into operation that may have benefited the committed populists of Poverty Row. But television’s Channel 4, which established itself as the only real source of low-budget funding for feature films in Britain, adopted a practice of refusing to commission anything remotely "popular," let alone exploitative.

Channel 4 started interestingly, but films such as Walter (82), P'Tang Yang Kipperbang (82), and Giro City (82) looked too much like what they really were, TV plays on film. Also, their theatrical distribution was severely limited: some Channel 4 films had no theatrical distribution; others might play for a week in London and then premiere on broadcast television 18 months later. As a self-styled "minority" channel with a remit to feature experimental and artistic material, Channel 4 could be dangerous but more often remained resolutely politically correct. There was no way Pete Walker or Stanley Long were likely to get commissions from such an organization. Over the next ten years, Channel 4 films were, at best, filmed TV plays (The Ploughman's Lunch [83], Rita, Sue and Bob, Too [86]) or self-consciously experimental affairs (Peter Greenaway's ’80s films). The occasionally unclassifiable film, such as Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985; a musical horror spoof about snooker!) looked like it was trying too hard for cult success. However, much of Channel 4's ’80s legacy consists of stuffy and tedious little TV films, many of which have gotten even duller with age. By 1984, then, the British exploitation movie looked as far away as the days of silent cinema.

It was 15 years before attitudes to popular cinema began to relax a little in Britain. During that time, exploitation films were few and far between. Veteran Poverty Row practitioner Norman J. Warren delivered an Alien cash-in (Inseminoid, 1981) as well as the forgettable Bloody New Year (1986), but Stanley Long (finally moving out of the sex film) only managed to patch together three horror shorts for video release (Screamtime, 1983). Other attempts to revive the horror genre were made with Dream Demon (88), Beyond Bedlam (93), and the Hellraiser series, and even Ken Russell seemed determined to carry on with his early ’70s agenda with Lair of the White Worm (1988) and Salome's Last Dance (1988). But most of these films, none made with Channel 4 funding, suffered, as usual, from apathetic distribution and failed to kick-start the genre.

In the mid-’90s, however, Channel 4 had become a more commercially biased entity, and began to relax its commissioning procedure: Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), although reputedly "greenlighted" because of the "worthy" balance provided by the funeral itself, was an innocuous popular hit despite its necessary dose of gloom; and Trainspotting (1996) was, domestically at least, massively successful in reinvigorating British youth cinema, despite its best efforts to hammer home "drugs are bad" message.

Indeed, Trainspotting's success, and the establishment of filmmaking arms of other terrestrial television channels such as BBC Films, has led, in the last few years, to a kind of domestic resurgence of popular British cinema. This quickly veered towards the crime film, and, in the wake of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), something of a new British exploitation emerged: the "cool Britannia" gangster film - Gangster No. 1 (1999), Love, Honour and Obey (1999), Essex Boys (2000), Sexy Beast (2001).

As there are only about 55 handguns in use in Britain, the British gangster film looks moronic and somewhat embarrassing. Similarly, it is already suffering from the distribution problems that plagued popular British cinema in the 70s and 80s, albeit with a more secure fallback on video and satellite television.

Still, British gangster pics are not to be totally sneered at. Their very awkwardness puts them on a par with the defiantly tacky popular films of 30 years ago, and some of them attempt stylistic flourishes that do show imagination and ambition. Like the exploitation films of the 1970s, they are largely dismissed by the critics and (often) the public at large. Like the films of the 70s, they are imitative projects, begging for exposure and for attention in the shadow of mainstream commercial hits. And if they seem bluntly anachronistic now, or somehow unnecessary and embarrassing and unworthy, then perhaps in 20 years time they will have something to offer for the retrospective enthusiast.

As far as horror and sex is concerned, however, we have to concede that the British exploitation film is showing no signs of life, and isn't likely to until some innovative exhibitor realises that not everyone wants a sanitized evening out at the multiplex, where MPAA-approved entertainment is washed down with corporate junk food. We have to live in hope. Exploitation has been a staple of the entertainment industry since pictures first moved. Maybe the Internet or digital TV will present a modern distribution network for a new breed of British exploitation filmmakers. Like the last generation of Poverty Row directors, Walker, Shonteff, Long et al, a part of me still harbours a wild and foolish optimism.