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Popular Culture Review
philosophy, he worked as a trainee-journalist and later as a general reporter.
Although already married at age eighteen and with two small children by 1973,
he was eager to leave journalism. In 1974, he quickly penned a hard-boiled
detective novel under the pseudonym “Symon Myles,” selling it as The Big
Needle to Everest Books, a small London publishing company which he joined
that same year. Hoping to create a series hero with the appeal of a James Bond,
Follett wrote two more novels in quick succession for Everest Books, using the
same hero, Apples Carstairs, and employing similar titles: The Big Black and
The Big Hit (published in 1974 and 1975, respectively). During this same
period, Follett was experimenting with different genres and was writing science
fiction stories, children’s books, and stories of jewel thieves. These books were
published under different pen names—one for each genre—but by 1975 Follett
was confident enough in his novelistic skills to publish two novels under his
own name and to hope for a breakthrough with a new series hero, Piers Roper,
in The Shakeout (1975) and The Bear Raid { 1976).
With the exception of Follett’s 1978 television proposal “Numbers Man,” it
was his last attempt at a series hero, and by the time he turned to a new genre—
film—with “Ups and Downs of a Soccer Star,” he already had nine books to his
credit: none of which, as he’s pointed out, were a great financial success but all
represented professional encouragement ( Tuttle Shokai 1).
“Ups and Downs of a Soccer Star” is very much in the style of British sex
comedies of the 1960s and 1970s. Co-written with John Sealey, it was planned
as a sequel to Sealey’s 1975 The Ups and Downs o f a Handyman and continues
the story of Bob Roberts, a handyman now employed by a mediocre soccer club
in a working class neighborhood. The script calls for an opening shot of “an
unimpressive football pitch, with only a decrepit stand to one side. Rows of
terraced houses with gardens back onto the other three sides” (1). Before long,
the comedy (such as it is) gets underway with a domestic role reversal: a
husband who doesn’t understand sports terms washes the dishes while his wife
reads the sports page out loud and is led to believe that a “new striker” is a trade
unionist on strike. There is much running around, with a bevy of buxom beauties
chasing Bob Roberts as the most physically capable man on the team, and
numerous “naughty” scenes a la The Benny Hill Show with clothing caught in
desk drawers, sexual escapades, and an orgy on a bus.
Added to this was a great deal of double entendre and an incompetent police
constable who terms his second-hand Morris Minor “part of the modern,
computerized high-technology police force” (11). The screenplay ends with the
possibility of a sequel to the sequel: Bob, whose soccer career has ended with
the team’s loss, is approached by an agent who offers to make him a pop star.
However, neither “Ups and Downs of a Soccer Star” nor the implied “Ups and
Downs of a Pop Star” were ever produced, as the idea for a series of “Ups” films
was ultimately dropped. Given that the initial film, Ups and Downs o f a
Handyman, has been reviewed as “laughingly bad. ... [and] most remarkable