HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH: revisiting the 60s minus the rose-tinted glasses

The travails of teenagerdom and the pursuit of that elusive first shag are given a limp psychedelic twist in this British coming of age comedy-drama from 1968.

25 year old Barry Evans is physically implausible as 17 year old Jamie MacGregor who spends all his time lusting after girls and obsessing about sex and whether he's ever going to get any. He's got a real hang-up about losing his virginity which he ruminates about at length (making copious use of words like "birds" and "blokes" and "cor!") as he rides through town on his employer's delivery bicycle. 
Director Clive Donner chooses to illustrate some of Jamie's musings with short fantasy sequences shot in the style of a silent movie on speed. The effect is less than enthralling. His second 'innovation' is to switch the picture to a negative image at random moments and douse it in bright green or bright red. This clumsy effect is completely baffling since it never coincides with Jamie doing drugs, getting drunk or frugging to 'hippie' music - the three activities internationally recognised by filmmakers in the swinging 60s as warranting the use of such film processing trickery.
The explanation may lie in the film's location. Despite his affected working class accent, half hearted rebellion against his parents, and his hankering after sex without consequences, Jamie's not on the make in happening London but in the far-from-swinging Stevenage, a drab provincial town notable only for its characterless shopping precinct and housing estates. In place of drug fuelled orgies in Soho, and achingly cool fashion boutiques on Carnaby Street, he has to make do with a dance at the church hall, and an after hours party in a furniture store. In such a soul destroying environment fiddling around with the picture's colour is the only way to generate excitement. Its depressing for Jamie and depressing to watch. 
Even with the presence of The Spencer Davis Group and Traffic the film succeeds in failing to generate a decent music soundtrack, but it does offer three redeeming features. There's a thoroughly entertaining turn from Denholm Elliott as the demented wine tasting dad of one of Jamie's birds; it reminds us that Barry Evans had a career before "Mind Your Language," and it serves as a valuable time capsule illustrating that regrets over missing out on growing up in the supposedly cool Britannia of the 1960s are really not something worth losing sleep over..