There are many ways you can pass the time with your partner once you settle into that certain stage of life, and here is Stanley (voiced by Bob Godfrey) to tell you all about his suggestions for keeping your marriage interesting. Certainly such activities as taking holidays together will sustain the relationship, but what he is most interested in is what happens in the bedroom, where innovation and invention have added a lot of variety to his sex life with his willing wife Ethel (L.J. Dickens), and as a result allowed their union to continue across bold new frontiers. Let Stanley guide you through his instructions for ensuring you will never be bored with your partner, even if your partner may have eventual misgivings about you...
Animator Bob Godfrey will be best known nowadays for his work in children's television, creating beloved cartoons such as Roobarb and Henry's Cat, as well as underrated items like Noah and Nelly in the Skylark, that were eccentric enough to lodge in the memories of millions. But his prolific output did not begin and end there, for during the nineteen-seventies he observed the sexual revolution and could not resist sending it up with great enthusiasm, often depicting unlikely lotharios going about their carnal interests, like Henry 9 'til 5 who spends all day dreaming about sex, or the chap in the Oscar-nominated Dream Doll who fell in love with his inflatable sex doll (this was Oscar-nominated as well!). Stanley was different in that he had a real woman to indulge his fantasies and we are led to assume he was doing the same for her, at least until the short's punchline.
Penned by regular Godfrey collaborator Stan Hayward (the man who gave us Henry's Cat), there were also contributions from British comedy stalwart and QI creator John Lloyd, which amounted to a succession of gags that appeared on the screen, Stanley (you imagine that name was not unintentional) and Ethel acting out a variety of ridiculous sexual positions such as play acting Tarzan and Jane (our man swings right into his spouse), coupling while going up the down escalator, or being strapped into a huge stapler that is struck by an equally huge mallet to offer the desired effect. This was all cheerfully absurd, and the fact that it was inspired by the genuine arrangements in the actual Kama Sutra was about as seventies as it could get for the type of humour that would show up in the supposedly self-justified and would-be worldly pages of Mayfair or whatever other gentlemen's publication took the reader's fancy.
Mere mention of the Kama Sutra was enough of a signifier of its era; there was, for example, to be an advertising campaign for vodka that informed readers "I thought the Kama Sutra was an Indian restaurant until I discovered Smirnoff" which was ditched when the agency did a survey and discovered most people did indeed think it was an Indian restaurant. There was the dilemma for this decade's British grown-ups in a nutshell, all of a sudden you had to be sophisticated about sex but you would rather be chortling at Robin Askwith in Confessions of a Window Cleaner instead. Godfrey and his team were happy to increase the creeping sense that this brave new world of sexual enlightenment was actually a sham, and it was masking the fact that many people just wanted a shag without any pretensions, so with that in mind this effort was highly amusing. More or less a gag delivery machine, it certainly impressed one Stanley Kubrick (again, that name) who personally chose it to support A Clockwork Orange on its initial release in the United Kingdom. The humour here was more generous and harmless than in Kubrick's controversial science fiction movie, though of a piece with what the nation was laughing at in private. Seeing it on a cinema screen must have been an experience.
