‘Confessions of a Driving Instructor’ or — Checking Your ‘Rear View’?

Watching ‘Confessions of a Driving Instructor’ (1976) last night (my third ‘Confessions’ film in the last five days and yes, my sanity is gradually becoming severely compromised) what immediately struck me about this series of sex comedies is their remarkable continuity and consistency with every entry following the same actors playing the same family who we observe developing and growing over the years, the accumulating detritus of their existence triggering instant recognition which, in turn, binds these movies together into a single cohesive entity so it’s less like watching four separate films and more like consuming one, big, multi-hour epic. This means the ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ movies have less in common structurally with the individually discrete ‘Carry On…’ comedies and more with Masaki Kobayashi’s ‘The Human Condition’ (1959) or Jacques Rivette’s ‘Out 1’ (1971). Isn’t it amazing what you can learn?

This time Timmy Lea (Robin Askwith) is no longer a window cleaner but a driving instructor, something that signals his ascending social mobility. Naturally this comes with the inherent professional risk of every woman he teaches wanting to have sex with him, although Timmy and his brother-in-law’s main concern is their rival, Mr. Truscott (Windsor Davies).

Mr. Truscott is Scottish and the decidedly non-Scottish Davies makes an interesting acting choice playing him: he gives him a brazen Sean Connery accent. Seriously, it’s blatant as hell. Although watching Windsor Davis walking around in a kilt whilst “Shurely shome mishtake”-ing all over the place did raise an incredibly interesting question, and that’s — has there ever been a Scottish sex comedy?

I’ve lived in Glasgow since 1980 so am intimately familiar with Scottish culture — Glen Michael, Tiger Tim, Hipsway, etc — but I can’t seem to recall ever encountering a Scottish sex comedy. Do they secretly exist but no one’s told me? Or, if not, then why has Scotland never made an erotic comedy? Is it because of the cold, the Presbyterianism or having to listen to all that Del Amitri?

Anyway, needless to say a series of various sexual mishaps occur ranging from getting a goldfish stuck down Lynda Bellingham’s bra to having it off on a golf course, this last scenario prompting a woman to ask Timmy “Can you imagine what it’s like being a golf-widow? Every Sunday morning I wake up to the rattle of my husband’s balls going out the front door.” which might be the greatest use and placement of the word “rattle” in any line of dialogue ever written.

Obviously a lot of the humour involves learning to drive resulting in one sequence where one of Timmy’s pupils, Miss Slenderpants, drives the car the wrong way down a busy motorway, something that’s remarkably similar to an identical scene in ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ (1985) and it’s just as dynamic. The thing is a car chase of this intensity is expected in a cop thriller but totally unexpected in a Robin Askwith sex-farce so it hits with a greater jolt meaning that for 10 or 15 brief seconds ‘Confessions of a Driving Instructor’ is fleetingly more impressive than a William Friedkin movie.

Bill Maynard excels once again as Timmy’s father, a man who represents everything appalling about Great Britain. When the family are out dining at a fancy Italian restaurant the waiter asks him if he’d like an aperitif to which Maynard replies “Yeah, I’ll try anything once. Give me a pint of that.” before looking at the menu and grumbling “There’s only one English thing on here and that’s spaghetti.”

Is this a joke looking down on this poor man for his lack of refinement and class? Oh god, yes. But then we realise this guy would’ve voted for Brexit so screw him.

‘Confessions of a Driving Instructor’ demonstrates that these movies possess an astonishing level of consistency. Sure, that level is frequently somewhere between god-awful and bloody terrible but it’s consistent nonetheless. Yet the saving grace of these films is their pacing with the gags coming fast, and some of them might hit you harder than you expect… or maybe even care to admit?