Lisa Taylor

In the 1970s Lisa Taylor was a ubiquity of British soft and hardcore sex cinema. Although an adult, her petite body and 'tarty' voice gave Lisa an air of 'jailbait' about her. It was a persona that was aptly used in the blue movies (i.e. hardcore short films) of John Lindsay like Juvenile Sex (1974) which resulted in an obscenity trial for Lindsay on the 22nd of October 1974. In the ensuing case much was made of the fact that Juvenile Sex was filmed at Birmingham's Aston Manor secondary school and starred Lisa, the school's 19 year old former head boy David Freeman and 'Colin the Caretaker'. Even more infamous is Jolly Hocky Sticks (1974) which casts Lisa as a part of a troika of schoolgirls (i.e. adult actresses in uniforms) who go on a lusting spree, with their teacher and two men as targets. Lisa was also cast as the underage set in the 'spanking' shorts of former _Naked as Nature Intended (1960)_ director George Harrison Marks, appearing in such typically 'English' titles like 'Lesson for Lolita', 'Tea and Crumpet' and 'Rawhide'. Like Marks' nudist films made years before, his spanking films - usually based around a corporal punishment theme - provided titillation but eschewed any suggestion of sex in order to feed a guilty audience the delusion that they weren't dipping their feet into pornographic waters. Lisa's big break from the under the counter world came with a micro-sized role in Marks' sex blockbuster Come Play with Me (1977), which was originally shot with hardcore sequences only to have the raison d'etre of these scenes removed from the release print. Lisa's once hardcore scene with the fifty-something Derek Aylward who was at least twice Lisa's age, is probably the best of Come Play with Me's loop like narrative asides, due to the great pairing of Lisa's teasing against Aylward's caddish dirty old man performance, a routine Aylward had made his own ever since the days of Pete Walker's School for Sex (1969). On the back of this a couple of softcore roles followed for Lisa, casting her as nudists or housewives and shying away from her less socially acceptable 'underage' image. Lisa is funny and sexy in Let's Get Laid (1978) and her running joke appearances in the film are by and large the best thing this lavish, big-budget sex farce has going for it. However by the time such career breaks arrived the British sex film had pretty much run its course and Lisa's potential, particularly for comedy, was never really fully realised. Her last film, if it can be called a film at all was The Great British Striptease (1980), a videotaped striptease contest filmed in Blackpool and compered by the notoriously 'toxic mouthed' blue comedian 'Bernard Manning'. Utterly staged, The Great British Striptease is little more than a concert film for secondary sexploitation stars performing strip acts. Evidently appearing with Manning was enough to put the dampeners on any girl's showbiz aspirations, as Lisa bowed out of the limelight soon after.