Brit comedy going large, by Brian Pendreigh

The Wolf's review of Kevin and Perry Go Large

Cinema attendance was plummeting and film production in decline when a low-budget film came along, saved the British film industry and created a whole new cinema movement.

It cost £90,000 and made over £1 million. And its impact on British film was as significant as Easy Rider's had been in Hollywood two years earlier. Funnily enough it was about transport too, but nothing as exotic as chopper motorbikes.

It is difficult to believe now but On the Buses, an adaptation of the television sitcom about a bus driver, his colleagues and family, was the second biggest hit in Britain in 1971.

On the Buses was joined in the 1971 Top Ten by big-screen adaptations of Up Pompeii and Dad's Army, Steptoe and Son outgrossed Dirty Harry the following year and the floodgates opened with feature film versions of virtually every sitcom on British TV.

They helped keep the British film industry alive until the arrival of Channel 4 in the early Eighties. And yet critics and historians seem reluctant to acknowledge their significance... fearing perhaps that it might happen again.

This was the golden age of British sitcom, but film versions ranged from disappointing to mind-blowingly awful, as scriptwriters struggled to expand formulas devised specifically for half-hour slots.

When stuck, the last desperate throw of the scriptwriter's dice was to pack the characters off on holiday. Which brings us to Kevin and Perry Go Large, a distinctly belated addition to the series of films adapted from British television comedy.

John Alderton and 5C went to school camp in Please Sir!, criticised in Monthly Film Bulletin for its "laboured mugging and gross caricature" and use of "illiteracy, race and imbecility as primary sources of humour". It was one of the biggest hits of 1972. It was downhill from there.

Reg Varney became a bus driver in a Welsh holiday camp in Holiday on the Buses, The Likely Lads went on a touring holiday in 1976, and John Inman and the staff of Grace Brothers visited the hilariously-named Costa Plonka the following year in Are You Being Served?.

Quarter of a century later, Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke are following in their footsteps as Kevin and Perry, two horny teenage boys in pursuit of sex on their own Spanish holiday, foregoing the dubious pleasures of Costa Plonka for Ibiza's rave scene.

The cycle of big-screen adaptations was already drawing to a close by the time Are You Being Served? arrived. Johnny Speight had adapted Till Death Us Do Part in the Sixties, but it was the success of On the Buses that signalled the real spate of TV/cinema transfers.

There were no fewer than nine films based on TV sitcoms in 1973 alone, including Nearest and Dearest, in which pickle factory-owners Hylda Baker and Jimmy Jewel go on holiday to Blackpool, and the infamous Love Thy Neighbour, which treated racism as a joke, but lacked Speight's wit and irony.

The popularity of sitcom films quickly fell away as producers scraped the bottom of the barrel, though Porridge made it to the big screen in 1979, and even secured an American cinema release under the title Doing Time.

While Hollywood turned increasingly to TV for ideas for both comedy and drama during the Eighties and, particularly, the Nineties, Only Fools and Horses, Absolutely Fabulous and Men Behaving Badly had to settle for the status of small-screen classics.

John Cleese had perfected the sitcom form when he stuck four characters in a Torquay hotel. But he resisted the temptation of a Fawlty Towers film and instead made A Fish Called Wanda, a more appropriate cinema vehicle for his comic genius, with the emphasis shifted from situation to a more conventional narrative plot.

It took Rowan Atkinson and Bean to revive the practice of transfering British TV comedy to the big screen in 1997. Bean is the third highest-grossing British film ever, behind Four Weddings and The Full Monty, but owes more to Charlie Chaplin than Reg Varney.

Guest House Paradiso, in which Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson provided variants on their Bottom characters, was a disaster a few months ago, and one feared the worst for Kevin and Perry Go Large.

If writers struggled to expand a half-hour sitcom, what hope was there for a film expanded from sketches lasting only a few minutes on Harry Enfield and Chums? Throw in a Spanish holiday and it seemed a paella recipe for disaster. Quarter of a century after Are You Being Served? and Fawlty Towers, Kevin and Perry Go Large is still poking fun at the Germans. But it is saved from disaster by Enfield and Burke's precise observation of teenage boys, with their wonderful mix of self-importance, insecurity and inconsistency.

As with Bean, and the best of the Saturday Night Live film spin-offs, the writers had characters with a proven track record, around whom they could spin a plot. But they were not restricted by overly elaborate situations - there was very little sit in these coms. Freed from the need to include references to pickle factories and buses, the writers have been able to create proper feature films.

Kevin and Perry might have seemed like the thin end of a very undesirable wedge. But, not only is their film surprisingly enjoyable, Tiger Aspect, the company behind both it and Bean, has no other TV comedy adapations in the pipeline.

Rowan Atkinson has no plans for a Blackadder feature and the BBC is following the John Cleese line and directing writers towards original film ideas rather than trying to adapt TV hits. We are therefore unlikely to see any repeat of the years when the film charts looked like the TV listings, and the phrase "Get your motor running" was a prelude to a trip on a double-decker bus.

Brian Pendreigh