Those of you old enough to remember when Barbara Windsor wore significantly fewer clothes should now be beaming at each other over your muesli. This is the first bit of news to cheer us up since George Osborne threatened the winter fuel allowance. For the best of these films have deservedly acquired classic status.
And for many this will be a chance to reminisce about how you used to look forward to your regular dose of Carry On cheekiness, in the days before Channel 4 replaced harmless sauciness with — well, let’s not go there shall we?
Going strong: Barbara Windsor stars as Goldie Locks in a famous scene from classic Carry On Again Doctor
Younger readers — people for whom the name Churchill conjures up nothing more than an extremely annoying insurance-touting bulldog — may be wondering what I’m wittering on about. Read on, I say.
Between 1958 and 1978, 29 Carry On films were produced. The saga started at a time when Britain finally emerged from the grey post-war gloom. In fact, the first film, Carry On Sergeant, is about a National Service platoon, as compulsory military service wasn’t abolished until 1960. It was never intended to be the first of a series but it was a surprise success, and producer Gerald Thomas wasn’t stupid.
In the film Sergeant Grimshawe, played by William Hartnell (who became the first Dr Who), is about to retire. But he has never achieved his dream of training the champion
platoon, and the motley crew of raw recruits he is about to take on is unlikely to help him fulfil this ambition. Does he manage to overcome all obstacles, inspire his men and win the prize? Of course he does, silly!
Carry On Sergeant was shot in black and white, and was a gentle character comedy, with little of the outrageous sauciness of the later films. However, the cast included several future Carry On stalwarts, including Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Connor and Hattie Jacques.
And for many fans (this one included) it is the cast of the Carry On films that gives them their special appeal.
I refer to the ‘cast’ rather than the ‘stars’ because the Carry On films were team events, with each actor adept at fulfilling particular roles.
Kenneth Williams could play a haughty hospital consultant type, insulting people down a noseful of impossibly flared nostrils. Or he could do what he called his ‘snide’ character, an annoying nasal know-all. He used this character to telling effect in Hancock’s Half Hour, too.
In fact, Tony Hancock grew so fed up with the laughs Williams was getting with his ‘Stop messing about’ catchphrase that he had him removed from the show. Tellingly, Hancock — not a team player — never featured in the Carry Ons.
If Williams was usually the baddie, Sid James was the Carry On heroic lead. A gravel-voiced South African, he employed a cockney accent in the films — whether playing Henry VIII or Dick Turpin — and when you revisit the movies, you’ll rediscover what a fine comic actor he was.
Timeless: Carry On Dick was the hilarious 26th film of the series
My personal favourite, though, was Charles Hawtrey, who appeared in nearly every Carry On film. A spindly, bespectacled man with a liking for gin and sailors, he usually played inept and put-upon characters — though he could be amusingly cast against type as a brave knight in armour or a lusty French lord.
His real name was George Hartree but he changed it so people would think he was related to celebrated Victorian actor/manager Sir Charles Hawtrey. In fact, he was the son of a car mechanic from Hounslow. Oh well, that’s show business. The first half-dozen films were written by Norman Hudis, and they shared much of Carry On Sergeant’s gentle humour. Hudis later emigrated to the U.S. to work on TV shows such as The Man From Uncle and Hawaii 5-0 — two shows which would have made great Carry Ons in spoof versions.
In 1963 Talbot Rothwell took over writing duties and the Carry Ons entered their golden period. Like Hudis, Rothwell had been in the RAF. Unlike Hudis, Rothwell was shot down and taken prisoner, so it was in a PoW camp that he started his career in comedy, writing skits for his fellow prisoners — one of whom was future Carry On squad member Peter Butterworth.
Apparently, the laughter from Rothwell’s fellow prisoners helped to cover the sound of escape tunnels being furiously dug.
Rothwell soon got into his stride. Already an established screenwriter (he’d worked with the Crazy Gang and comedian Arthur Askey) and had a good instinct for the kind of naughty, quick-fire humour that variety audiences loved.
Losing her top: Barbara Windsor and Sid James share a scene together in the 1973 film Carry on Girls
Up The Khyber: The sixteenth Carry On film brought more hilarious antics in British India
His Carry On scripts had a lot in common with saucy seaside postcards: sex was sometimes funny, but just as often it was terrifying. Just recall Hattie Jacques’s huge hospital matron looming hungrily over Kenneth Williams in Carry On Doctor, which includes the wonderful clinch between the pair.
‘No, no, matron! I was once a weak man,’ implores the weedy Williams, recoiling from Jacques’s long-suppressed yearning. ‘Once a week’s enough for any man . . .’
The Sixties was, of course, a decade of relative prosperity and hope. British fashion and pop music ruled the world, and in the aftermath of the Lady Chatterley trial, our national queasiness concerning all things sexual started to recede.
The Carry Ons reflected these changes in society. Carry On Camping was the highest-grossing British film of 1969, and the clip of Barbara Windsor’s bra flying off during a
vigorous bout of P.E. has probably been seen by everybody alive today.
Carry On At Your Convenience, which dealt with the issue of a strike at ‘W.C. Boggs Ltd, toilet factory’ (nobody said these films were subtle), was a box office flop, perhaps because the strikers were ridiculed in a way that alienated working-class cinemagoers. The producers were on much safer ground with films that used historical events as the basis for the Carry On mix of slapstick and sauce.
The 1966 film Don’t Lose Your Head, which for arcane legal reasons didn’t have ‘Carry On’ in the original title, is set at the time of the French Revolution. It stars Sid James as effete English nobleman Sir Rodney Ffing (pronounced ‘effing’, of course) who — in his secret guise of the Black Fingernail — rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine.
His enemy is evil French revolutionary Citizen Camembert, played with gusto by Kenneth Williams at a time when few of the audience had ever set eyes on any kind of French cheese.
Champagne sir? Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques
Sid James was probably a little too old for all that swashbuckling, for shortly afterwards he suffered a heart attack. In the following year’s film, Carry On Doctor, the producers kindly cast the recovering James as a hospital patient so he could spend most of the film in bed. But by 1968 Sid was well enough to play Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, CO of the Third Foot and Mouth Regiment, whose task is to hold Afghanistan for the British Empire in Carry On Up The Khyber. (Of course, nobody involved could have imagined that 40 or so years later our soldiers would once again be carrying out this duty.)
It’s one of the finest historical Carry Ons — the locations and costumes of Up The Khyber are lavish, and I was astonished to read later that the mountains of Afghanistan had actually been recreated in Wales. Strong support comes from Kenneth Williams as Sir Sidney’s nemesis the Khasi of Kalibar (I know, I know . . .), and Joan Sims as Sir Sidney’s feisty consort Lady Ruff-Diamond.
Then there is Carry On Henry, which many fans think one of the best of the series. Sid plays a version of Henry VIII, who was billed as ‘a great guy with his chopper’. The film makes no attempt to honour historical truth. Indeed, it is more like the Carry On team blowing a huge raspberry at costume films that take themselves too seriously.
As the Seventies rolled on, the Carry Ons started to lose much of their audience appeal. Perhaps some of the films coming out of America were now so sexually forthright that the mild smut of the Carry Ons no longer titillated audiences.
The Women’s Movement was also starting to attack the Carry Ons for their sexist portrayals. (Talbot Rothwell hit back with Carry On Girls, in which Women’s Libbers disrupt a beauty contest.)
Rothwell’s health started to fail, and 1974 saw his last Carry On: Dick (Turpin, of course).
He had written 21 Carry On screenplays in just 11 years — an output unimaginable today, when it can take 11 years to get one screenplay approved.
It’s easy to underestimate the Carry Ons. But as well as entertaining us, they remind us of a time when there was a genuine British industry turning out large numbers of films specifically for British audiences.
On revisiting them I’ve been surprised how well many compare to what’s on offer today. What’s more, compared to many of the ‘gross-out’ movies coming out of Hollywood now, the Carry Ons seem almost innocent. ( dailymail.co.uk )
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