Monique (1970)

Bill (David Sumner) and Jean (Joan Alcorn) are a modern young married middle-class couple with two young children and a modern home. But Jean has no interest in sex, is bored with housework and irritated by the kids – so she persuades her husband that they should take on an au pair.

They both get all that they bargained for and more when sexy French girl Monique (Sibylla Kay) shows up in the shortest of mini-skirts and knee-high white leather go-go boots.

Bill surveys Monique’s legs while she’s chatting away to Jean in French and awakening a more cosmopolitan side of the bored housewife.

Naturally, the children are impressed – Monique is also a good cook – and it seems they have all got lucky.

Bill gets lucky with Monique first – tumbling into bed with her after she goes on a failed date with Richard (Howard Rawlinson) – but there’s a lot more going on than he knows.

Preparing the house for Christmas, Jean and Monique giggle like schoolgirls while Bill dresses as an unconvincing Santa Claus and Jean wraps presents.

Bill leaves the women to it as he goes to search the garage and when he returns, Monique is alive with naughty energy and smoking a tell-tale cigarette, while Jean is avoiding everyone’s gaze . . .

Later, when Jean goes up to bed, she makes uncharacteristically passionate love to her rather shocked husband. Something has certainly changed.

Returning home early one evening, Bill finds that Jean is also enjoying Monique as much – if not more – than he has been doing. Cue a trip to the pub, a dazed unconsummated liaison with Carol Hawkins, and soul searching all round.

Monique eventually steps in and makes sense of everyone’s feelings over a slap-up dinner, some snogging in the kitchen and a menage-a-trois in the bedroom.

Then the three of them share a post-coital fag while debating the aesthetic merits of a swirly orange abstract painting on the bedroom wall – which looks like it came from Woolworths.

After a bit of horseplay in an F-reg Austin 1100, Monique, considering her work done, chuffs off back to France and leaves the renewed couple to get on with it.

Bill
David Sumner
Jean
Joan Alcorn
Monique
Sibylla Kay
Susan
Nicola Bown
Edward
Jacob Fitz-Jones
Babysitter
Davilia O’Connor
Girl
Carol Hawkins
Richard
Howard Rawlinson

Director
John Bown