OH! WHAT A CARRY ON

THE CARRY ON FILMS ARE TO BE RESURRECTED AND EVEN REMADE. BUT TRYING TO RECAPTURE THE SPIRIT OF THE ORIGINALS WOULD BE POINTLESS, ARGUES BRIAN BEACOM

IN 1968, my cousin Jim and I pushed through the decadent art deco doors of Paisley’s Kelburne Cinema, with the taste of excitement in our mouths.

This was not just in anticipation of the Kia Ora and Creme Egg combination we were set to enjoy. We were about to watch Carry On Up The Khyber, the 16th in the series of comic misadventures, and one hour and 28 minutes later we weren’t disappointed. Oh, how two 12-yearold schoolboys laughed at the daft plot as the 3rd Foot and Mouth Regiment took on the Afghan Burpa tribe. How we chuckled at the absurd character names, such as the waspish Kenneth Williams’s Khasi of Kalabax, and Cardew Robinson’s The Fakir.

Now, 42 years on, it’s been revealed the Carry On movies are to carry on with screenings of the originals and two new movies, Carry On Doctor and Carry On Campus. But why were the Carry Ons so successful in the first place, appearing before our eyes more often than Barbara Windsor’s embonpoint?

Jim and I, with our Cadbury brains, had no theory at the time, but our pubescent minds, it seems, were processing more than the silliness, the puns and the innuendo. What we didn’t realise was that the Carry Ons had arrived in the wake of the kitchen sink dramas of the 1950s and early 1960s, and movies such as Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, which mirrored society’s mores, throwing audiences’ lives right back in their faces. The underlying theme of the kitchen sinkers was sex, or rather the prohibition of it in the pre-Pill era. In films such as This Sporting Life and Alfie, men couldn’t have any without marriage, while women were defined by the compromises they had to make.

What the Carry On films did was continue this theme, but the sexual frustration was given a comedy backdrop and a variety theatre sensibility. The early Carry Ons worked because they captured the mood of the period, the emotionally confused zeitgeist.

Jim and I were still reading the Hotspur at the time so we didn’t quite grasp that the Carry Ons had tapped into Freudian theory, which explains the psycho-social relationship between sexually inhibited male desire and censorship. We had little realisation that frustrated virgins in the audience were watching themselves up there on screen, as indeed were the married men who felt trapped by marriage. The repression we felt, but didn’t quite comprehend, was represented by phallic symbolism and innuendo.

We didn’t quite grasp that to underline the theme, the characters were drawn in thick black ink: the men as sex-starved inadequates and the women as either coquettish tease-pots or chastity belt-wearing dragons. Nor did we realise that the series’s writers (the same seven were used consistently over a 20-year period) knew exactly what they were doing in terms of scripting the psychological dilemmas being played out.

Films such as Carry On Sergeant, Carry On Teacher and Carry On Cruising all featured psychoanalysis as a sub-plot. In Carry On Matron, Doctor FA Goode (Charles Hawtrey), hypnotises himself with his own watch, and in 1964’s Carry On Spying, the evil Doctor Crow (Judith Furze) uses hypnosis to create the ultimate “being with the characteristics of both sexes” – by manipulating people’s minds.

Many of the Carry On storylines in fact feature men who can’t make love to their wives. And many of the laughs these stories generated were recognition laughs. Yes, the women were viewed through the prism of sexism but the men were the real butt of the jokes, all too often flops who wouldn’t know what to do with a lady. In Carry On Sergeant (1958), for example, when Horace (Kenneth Connor) is told to strip down to his underwear for examination, he runs back out clutching his trousers to his breast and screaming: “Why didn’t you warn me?” His terror? Recruitment officer Captain Clark had turned out be Hattie Jacques, every inch a woman.

Sometimes females actually won out. In Carry On Up The Jungle (1970) the ladies are empowered. Sort of. The Amazonian-like members of the Lubby-Dubby tribe of course had to look like Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC in their fur bikinis, but nevertheless, they were in control of society. They chose the men they bred with, and the men failed to satisfy these gorgeous creatures. And teenage boys laughed at this because if we weren’t enjoying the delights of carnality, why should they?

The punchline was perfect. The only man who could make these awesome women happy was little, weedy, Tonka The Great, played by Hawtrey, giving hope to every weedy man and boy in the audience, which represented most of Scotland at the time.

Yet, there was even more psychological manipulation of the audience going on than the two little crew cuts in the back row could have realised. We’d seen Carry On Cleo (1964), and laughed when Kenneth Connor’s character couldn’t make love to his domineering wife because she reminded him of his mother. But of course we had no idea of the Oedipal trajectory of the narrative.