Ray Brooks enjoyed “a certain success with the ladies” in Richard Lester’s 1965 comedy The Knack... and how to get it.
In 1966 the breathless trailer for the second Doctor Who film declared that Ray Brooks was “The boy with the knack… who doesn’t find life so easy in the year 2150 AD!” The pun referred to the 1965 hit The Knack … and how to get it, a hip comedy in which Brooks had starred alongside Rita Tushingham and Michael Crawford.
Richard Lester directed The Knack in between the two movies he made with the Beatles. Various members of the Fab Four would show up on set, Ray remembers, and the film took him and his wife Sadie from their four-quid-a-week flat to the luxurious Cannes Film Festival in May 1965, where it unexpectedly won the Grand Prix.