Carry on forever!
They’re daft, badly shot and hated by the critics — and that’s why they’re so wonderful. 60 years after the first Carry On film, QUENTIN LETTS hopes they...
FENELLA Fielding’s career ranged from stage classics to smokily sophisticated voice-overs for radio, books and video games.
With her beauty and intelligence she mesmerised dramatic grandees such as Noel Coward, Federico Fellini and Kenneth Tynan. Yet after she died last week aged 90, the headlines simply hailed her as ‘Carry On actress Fenella Fielding’.
Such is the grip of the Carry On films, which mark 60 years this week since they first went on general release in cinemas.
Fielding appeared in only two of the 31 Carry Ons — Regardless and Screaming — but that was enough to tag her as a ‘Carry On actress’. Unfair stereotyping? Or testament to the remarkable staying power of those low- budget, repetitive yet intrinsically British films which continue to be enjoyed long after their higher-brow rivals have disappeared?
Back in September 1958, critics were sniffy about Carry On Sergeant, a knockabout yarn about a man called up to National Service on the very day of his marriage.
His bride talks her way into the military depot’s NAAFI canteen so she and her beloved can spend their wedding night together. ‘Not terribly funny,’ said the Saturday Review. ‘Modest and unimportant,’ pooh-poohed Variety.
Establishment voices have often regarded the films as vulgar.
But a writer in The Daily Cinema 60 years ago spotted potential in Sergeant’s uncomplicated comedy about British institutional life. After all, nearly every man in the country had done time in the Armed Forces, be it in wartime or in National Service, and there was an unmined seam of laughs in barking sergeant-majors and their ilk. Here was laughter in the common experience.
The critic of trade paper The Daily Cinema wrote of Carry On Sergeant that it could ‘not fail to hit the bull’s-eye’ in mainstream cinemas. A bull’s-eye, indeed. THE
film, which cost £73,000 to make, returned that investment eight times over on its British takings alone. A successor film, Carry On Nurse, was quickly made and did even better. It cost £82,500 to make (the wardrobe bill was £475) and grossed $2 million in the U.S. and Canada.
Nurse remained the most profitable British film until Four Weddings And A Funeral four decades later.
What was the secret of this success? Why do so many of us continue to love these dotty and badly shot films? And why do they continue to attract the sort of critical disdain which even in their heyday saw Daily Telegraph critic Campbell Dixon sneer: ‘Here are all the tiresome cliches of British farce. There must, I suppose, be something in these British stereotypes that appeals to the British public — though not, so far as I am aware, to any other — and I dare say some psychologist could explain it all to me. On the whole, though, I’d rather he didn’t.’
There spoke the authentic voice of the remote elite. They’re still with us, in so many ways.
Today’s cultural analysts deplore Carry On depictions of trade unionists as self-serving troublemakers, and argue that a workingclass genre should have been more positive about organised labour. Likewise, the simple- minded gags and innuendo of the films are castigated as low-grade and sexist. As for all that rolling-eyed campery, tut tut.
Today’s bien pensants shudder at such political incorrectness. Yet the Carry Ons go marching on, eclipsing art-house luvviedom and Hollywood epics. How very British. How wonderful.
The cast of Sergeant featured names who would go on to do long service in the Carry On ranks. They included skinny Charles Hawtrey, not so skinny Hattie Jacques, Kenneth Connor, Terry Scott and Kenneth Williams, a flared-nostrilled actor of middling repute whose career was starting to stall in revue comedy.
These actors formed the nucleus of a remarkably democratic (and low- paid) ensemble which included Bernard Bresslaw, Peter Butterworth, Joan Sims, Barbara Windsor, and Sid James, owner of that cheerfully dirty chuckle.
When these actors appeared, audiences knew immediately what their characters were about.
Was that stereotyping? Or was it cartooning — i.e. the efficient, speedy portrayal of an easily recognised exaggeration? Cartoons are a good way of piercing the pompous and powerful.
The original script for the film that became Carry On Sergeant was a sensitive tale about two ballet dancers separated by military service. Producers wrenched it into something more saleable with a title which echoed the parade-ground habit of senior officers to drawl, ‘ Carry on, Sergeant’ after they had done a cursory inspection of the troops.
This reflected the eternal truth that the boss-class seldom knows what is going on and leaves most of the work to the lower ranks.
The same can be seen in the repeated Carry On plots about hospitals and the medical profession. Surgeons and administrators were fools, but the nurses were generally angels. The institution of the health service itself was not attacked. The mockery was reserved for those who were in command of it.
Another reason Carry Ons have lasted is that they seldom contain references to current affairs or party politics. Their take on authority figures is more universal than that. The main names in Carry On Sergeant were Bob Monkhouse, who played the romantic lead, and William Hartnell (later the first Dr Who) as the brisk sergeant-major.
Neither Hartnell nor Monkhouse appeared in another Carry On, not because they were bad but because they were too prominent.
When producers experimented by casting big- shot American comedian Phil ‘Sgt Bilko’ Silvers in Follow That Camel — a Beau Geste satire, unusual in not having Carry On in its title — he stuck out like a sore hoof and was shunned by the usually friendly troupe.
Kenneth Williams thought Silvers a frightful windbag. Maybe he and the other British actors were also cross that the American actor was being paid a £30,000 fee, about ten times more than the rest of them.
The Carry Ons were generally celebrated for the camaraderie in their production teams, although the bibulous Hawtrey was a cold loner.
The other star to cause trouble in Follow That Camel was the dromedary, which was hired from Chessington Zoo for a couple of days. On the drive to the desert location — Camber Sands, near Rye — the camel was nearly arrested by police because its head was sticking out of the pantechnicon and it was causing havoc with the traffic.
When the animal finally made it to the beach, it took one look and went on cud- chewing strike. Having been born in captivity, it had never seen sand before and would only walk on concrete.
That Camber Sands location was a rare outing for the Carry On team. With costs kept sharply under control by producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas, filming was nearly always done at Pinewood Studios and to a rigorous timetable. Work began at 8.30am and ended at 5.30pm. DURING
lunch, the studio was locked, to prevent thefts and to ensure that no overtime ever had to be paid. Rare outdoor locations included Snowdonia for the Himalayan mountain scenes in Carry On Up The Khyber; not glamorous, but even so the Welsh hills made Joan Sims dizzy (she was bad with heights).
When the Indians attack the stagecoach in Carry On Cowboy, the cacti-ridden Arizona badlands are, in fact, Chobham Common in Surrey.
In a Carry On you are not transported by lingering camera work. The closest you get to a character-baring close-up is the celebrated moment in Carry On Camping when Barbara Windsor’s bikini top goes flying — a scene
engineered with an out-ofshot fishing rod and string. There were fears that the Board of Film Classification would remove it (the scene, not the bikini top). However, in a moment of rare clemency, the official censor said: ‘I don’t think Barbara Windsor’s right bosom is going to corrupt the nation.’ Here was someone who understood our nation’s historic and healthy appreciation for a little slapstick and tickle.
Bawdiness and cheekiness have been part of our comedy since at least the 13thcentury’s mystery plays.
Not that Princess Margaret approved. When she visited the set of Khyber, she was miffed that the character Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond (Sid James) wrote a letter to Queen Victoria with the opening ‘Dear Vicky’.
Without getting too pretentious, the Carry Ons can be seen as part of a comedy line stretching back to Greek dramatist Aristophanes and the Restoration comedies, which flourished in the late 1600s and gave vent to a sense of liberation after the rule of Oliver Cromwell.
Maybe we continue to embrace Carry Ons because they celebrate a time when life was so much less fencedin than it is today by identity politics and the joyless disapproval of social media.
Aristophanes, who tweaked the pomposities of 5th century BC Athens, had a weakness for puns and double-entendres.
He’d have recognised lines such as, ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!’ in Carry On Cleo, or the king in Carry On Henry asking about one of his women, ‘Has she been chaste?’ and being assured by Thomas Cromwell, ‘All over Normandy, sir’.
In Carry On Camping, after Mrs Fussey says, ‘I’ve got sore misgivings’, Sid James’s character retorts, ‘You ought to put some talcum powder on them’.
In Cowboy, James’s sharpshooter complains he once tried to talk amicably to the Sioux but it proved impossible. ‘One minute it was peace on, the next — peace off.’
Puerile and vulgar? If you say so. But vulgarity is another word for unashamedly broad appeal. It worked 60 years ago, and it continues to amuse many of us.
Six decades on, it’s surely a case of Carry on Carry On.