Carry On revisited
Why we still love the comedy films, 60 years after they began
Sixty years ago this week, one of the most successful British film franchises launched in cinemas across the country. Carry on Sergeant,a knockabout caper following a group of bungling army recruits, was the first of 29 films over a 20-year period that together became a national institution.
Everyone knows the Carry On films, rich in innuendo, mild titillation and briskly directed slapstick, and everyone knows the stars: leering Sid James with that filthy laugh; preening Kenneth Williams combining high-camp with hauteur; Joan Sims as the shrewish, suspicious wife and sexpot Barbara Windsor wiggling her bottom to camera. The Carry Ons were never subtle and often faced the wrath of film critics, and yet audiences loved them and still do.
The series, produced by Peter Rogers, arrived in the middle of a boom for British cinematic comedy. There were the socially minded Ealing comedies, which saw the little man taking on the big corporations; the Boulting brothers, who took potshots at institutions such as the trade unions in I’m All Right Jack (1959) and the middle-class Doctor films starring James Robertson Justice and Dirk Bogarde, based on Richard Gordon’s novels, which exuded an almost literary quality. But the Carry Ons had their own particular appeal.
“Their humour was broad and appealed to the man on the Clapham omnibus,” says Dick Fiddy, consultant at the British Film Institute. “They were aimed at a middle market, they weren’t satirical, and there were no pretensions of grandeur. They were like the later Airplane movies – there just to make you laugh.”
But do the Carry On films still make us laugh? The wink-wink-nudge-nudge innuendo hardly speaks to our emotionally unfettered age, nor does the constant ogling of nubile women sit comfortably at a time when we are reappraising how women are represented on film. In short, in an increasingly censorious era, can we carry on loving the Carry Ons?
Stand-up comic Sam Avery, who wasn’t born until 1978 (incidentally the same year as Carry on Emmannuelle, the last of the original series’ run), is perhaps proof that their appeal endures. He has loved them ever since he watched Carry on Camping at the age of eight. “I remember very clearly Barbara Windsor doing exercises and her top flying off,” he says. “I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen. I didn’t understand sex, but for an eight-year-old boy that was titillating.”
It was when Talbot Rothwell took over from Norman Hudis as the series’ writer (with Carry on Cabby, in 1963) that the tone, the sauciness and the innuendo that we know today, was set. Of course, sex, or at least the promise of it, is key to the Carry Ons, but the fact is that no one ever succeeds in having it. As Gyles Brandreth, a lifelong devotee, puts it: “It’s not like the sex you get in Bodyguard. It’s Hattie Jacques chasing Kenneth Williams.”
And that is perhaps why no one has wagged a finger at the Carry Ons. There is an innocence, a family friendliness to them that is essentially harmless. In fact you might even argue the gender politics were ahead of their time. “The women always get the upper hand, even the women who are being objectified,” says Avery. “It is the men who are made to look silly.”
Aside from the breezy naughtiness, the Carry On films’ popularity endures for other reasons. Brandreth believes the films initially inspired a strong working-class following because in films such as Carry on Nurse (1959), all life is there – from the doctors who rule the wards to the patients. “You don’t have to see it through the prism of middle classness – in fact the British class system is illustrated brilliantly,” he says. “They are a fascinating guide to the society of that period.”
It’s easy to think of the Carry Ons as part of a homogeneous group, painted in broad brush strokes – cinematic versions of saucy seaside postcards – but the fact is that they evolved over the years. The early films (Nurse,
Teacher, Constable) focused on various professions, while in the mid-sixties they started to pastiche James Bond
(Spying), Hammer Horror (Screaming) and epics such as Cleopatra (Cleo, one of the first Carry On histories, which would also include Up the Khyber,
Henry and Don’t Lose Your Head). These are among the most fondly remembered.
“Richard Burton, who was in
Cleopatra, told me that Carry on Cleo was infinitely better,” recalls Brandreth. “And my wife, who was a historian, told me that the history in Cleo is marginally more accurate than it was in Cleopatra.”
Of course, the Carry On films are not wholly palatable for the modern viewer. In Up the Khyber some of the actors are “blacked up”, while the camp characterisations of gay men (although the characters are never explicitly gay), offered by Williams and Charles Hawtrey, are unacceptable today. Equally problematic is, paradoxically, the Carry On films’ determination to move with the times, as Fiddy explains.
“From Carry on Girls [1973] onwards, they lost their way. They are trying to be more explicit sexually, and the innuendo seems crass not funny. You can watch the early films guilt-free, but the later ones seem harsher and crueller.”
The later Carry Ons were competing against the dubious soft-porn charms that dominated Seventies cinema, such as the Confessions… films, and the final, limp entry in the series, Emmannuelle, was a pastiche of the famous European erotica franchise. Brandreth recalls talking to Williams, who became a close friend, about it.
“He said it was utterly disgusting. The girl [Suzanne Danielle] was a friend of ours, a great beauty. And [in the film] she disappeared under the table to pleasure Kenneth and he thought: ‘so this is what my life has come to’.”
After Emmannuelle, the series was laid to rest, but revived unsuccessfully in 1992 with Carry on Columbus, which Avery saw as a teenager. “The style just didn’t work,” he says. “It was like a relic from a bygone era.”
Without the brilliantly eclectic ensemble of the original Carry On team it was clear that the magic could never be recaptured. There have been other attempts to bring them back – notably a project called “Carry On London”, which, with the death of Rogers in 2009, now seems unlikely.
Avery considers the idea of that style of comedy now: “People don’t mince their words in modern comedy, so innuendo has to be done in the right context. But it can be great. ‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me’ [from Cleo] is a beautiful line. I was speaking to somebody at the BBC the other day who said nobody is writing comedy shows for primetime BBC One. Everyone wants to write for the fringes, but that sort of innuendo should live in the mainstream, where all the family can watch it.”
Brandreth, who is watching the films with his seven grandchildren, who are aged between six and 14, draws the line at any idea of a revival, principally because almost all of the cast are dead.
“If only they were here to do Carry on Brexit. Can you imagine? Let’s cast it. We’d have Kenneth Williams as Mark Garnier, Hattie Jacques as Mrs May, Sid James as Nigel Farage and Charles Hawtrey as Jacob Rees-mogg.”
Carry on Cleo will be shown as part of the British Film Institute’s Great British Smut celebration on Nov 10; bfi.org.uk Sam Avery’s The Learner Parent tour begins on Oct 16; thelearnerparent.com
‘It’s not like the sex you get in Bodyguard. It’s Hattie Jacques chasing Kenneth Williams’