The other award winners

The Carry On Team oldie keep calm and carry on award

The Carry On films were like an oldfashioned resident repertory company, presenting a different play every week. There were the leading men and leading ladies, a set of juveniles, the character actors and the soubrettes. Occasionally there’d be a guest star (Phil Silvers or Frankie Howerd) to boost the box office. There was always the same director (Gerald Thomas) and producer (Peter Rogers), who kept costs down and pocketed any proceeds.

Sixty years after the first ( Carry On Sergeant), we think of the films chiefly in terms of the core team – Sid James cackling and ogling, Kenneth Williams sneering and braying, Joan Sims being shrewish, and Barbara Windsor always bubbling. Hattie Jacques was born to play the imperious matron. Bernard Bresslaw was adept at soft oafs or looming villains. Charles Hawtrey, a real-life Sir Andrew Aguecheek, stole every scene he was in.

But a wealth of other stars did their duty, pitching up at Pinewood for a pittance. One of the pleasures of looking at the films is to spot future celebrities in cameo roles, being good sports. Warren Mitchell and Jon Pertwee are there, in togas. Dandy Nichols sits by a hospital bed, Cecil Parker is dressed as an admiral, and Patrick Cargill was a Spaniard. Joan Hickson, pre- Miss Marple, is on show, as are Wendy Richard, Judy Geeson, Windsor Davies and Melvyn Hayes.

I feel a bit sorry for Penelope Keith, as she’s identified in the credits as ‘Plain Nurse’, and Anna Karen – the sainted Olive in On the Buses – was a ‘Hefty Girl’.

None can forget, however, Amanda Barrie (pictured), sexier than Elizabeth Taylor, as the nympho of the Nile, in Carry On Cleo. The late, great June Whitfield was a shrewish Augusta Prodworthy in Carry On Girls. Leslie Phillips perfected his randy ‘Ding dong!’ catchphrase in the series – his truncheon veritably quivers in Carry On Constable. Sheila Hancock (see opposite page) featured as Senna Pod in Carry On Cleo; Nicholas Parsons was in Carry On Regardless, the one about the employment exchange; and, at the end of Carry On at Your Convenience, about a sanitary ware factory, Kenneth Cope’s mother spanks his bottom.

It is a vanished England that is on view – before being appreciative of feminine beauty (the crumpet) was criminalised, and when people pulled together and went on camping holidays or a charabanc trip to Brighton, and abroad meant filthy food and broken plumbing. Roger Lewis Listen to Amanda Barrie on the Oldie App

Desmond Morris oldie creative ape of the year

As a zoologist, surrealist painter, broadcaster and author, Desmond Morris has written books and created television programmes that have made him a household name in Britain for nearly 60 years.

Who could forget his bestselling work, The Naked Ape, the 1967 book that examined the evolution of human behaviour, from tree-dwelling fruitpickers to urban tribalism? Not only did it have a cover that daringly featured naked human bottoms (for many a 1970s child, its chapter on sex was a top-shelf eye-opener) but it gave its millions of readers a whole new way of looking at themselves as a species, the hairless apes, and at the deep-seated animal instincts that govern our attitudes and actions.

If Homo sapiens has survived through brain power and adaptability, Morris himself, who turned 90 in 2018, is the embodiment of a human polymath. He has published a book almost every year since 1963, when The Biology of Art brought together his two passions: science and painting. The two themes have run concurrently throughout his life – he once held, simultaneously, the posts of director of the ICA and curator of mammals at the Zoological Society. By the age of 22, he was exhibiting his paintings in an exhibition shared with Joan Miró. Shortly afterwards, he completed his PHD on the reproductive habits of the ten-spined stickleback.

He was the youngest, and is the last surviving member, of the surrealist group, whose antics, both serious and irredeemably silly, he has chronicled in his vastly entertaining book The Lives of the Surrealists, published just last year.

He and his wife of more than 65 years live in the same Oxford house they have been in for half a century, his studio filled with kites, totems and amulets from a life of travel in the stranger byways of human ritual and belief. His paintings, with their eerie dreamscapes, are just about the only thing he won’t talk about: ‘The essence of surrealism is that you don’t analyse what you’re doing,’ he told me in an Oldie interview last year. ‘If it goes wrong, I know but I don’t know how I know.’ Lucy Lethbridge

Judith Kerr oldie tigress we’d like to have to tea

2018 was the 50th anniversary of The Tiger Who Came to Tea, the children’s classic that propelled Judith Kerr to household fame as an artist and writer. Her story of Sophie and her mother – whose teatime is interrupted by the arrival of a hungry tiger which consumes everything in their kitchen – was one she had often told to her daughter, Tacy. The book’s exciting climax – Daddy takes them in the dark to have supper in a café

– sealed its appeal for three generations. Even the stage version of the book has been running for 10 years, and, whenever she sees it, Judith, 95, says, ‘There are 200 three-year-olds watching enraptured, and there’s not a sound.’ Judith and her family escaped in 1933 from Berlin, where her father, Alfred Kerr, had been a famous drama critic whose books were burned by the Nazis. The story was told by Judith in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit – another modern children’s classic.

Arriving in London was the making of her and her brother, Sir Michael Kerr, later a Court of Appeal judge. Judith went to art school, became a BBC scriptwriter, and met her husband, Nigel Kneale, author of the Quatermass series.

Kneale died in 2006 but she still lives in their house, now shared with Katinka, cat number nine. Katinka looks not dissimilar to the forgetful cat in Judith’s Mog series. Two schools, in London and Berlin, have been founded in Kerr’s name, and in 2008 she was awarded the OBE for services to children’s literature and to Holocaust education.

Last year, she published Mummy Time in which a mother takes her toddler for a walk in the park, but is so busy talking on her mobile phone that she can’t see what scrapes her little boy gets into. Such is modern life as observed by Judith on her daily walks on Barnes Common. Admitting that ‘motherhood can be wildly boring sometimes’, she understands the telephone addiction.

From her family files in the Public Records Office, she discovered that her art school tutors had recommended her for naturalisation as a positive asset to Britain. As indeed she has been. Valerie Grove

Margaret Calvert oldie signwriter of the times

When you’re driving, the art of Margaret Calvert is probably the last thing on your mind, but her work is all around you. She designed the classic signage that helps us find our way around Britain’s motorways, and those iconic road signs that have become such a familiar feature of our daily lives. Without her subtle artistry, Britain simply wouldn’t look the same.

She was born in South Africa and came to England when she was 14 years old. She was a pupil at St Paul’s Girls’ School and then went on to Chelsea School of Art.

Here she met Jock Kinneir, a visiting tutor (and a leading graphic designer), who gave her her big break. Margaret loved the idea of making practical designs for the general public, rather than esoteric artworks. ‘I dismissed any thoughts of going on to the Royal College of Art to study illustration,’ she recalled. ‘I knew by then that I wanted to be a designer.’

Impressed by her drive and talent, Kinneir hired her as his assistant. She soon became his equal. Her first task was developing the signage for Gatwick Airport, but the job that made her name was redesigning Britain’s jumbled road signs. She came up with a set of simple pictograms, instead of complicated instructions.

Yes, her ‘Men at Work’ sign has been likened to a man trying to open a disobedient umbrella, but we all know what it means.

The main virtue of her pictograms was clarity, but they were also egalitarian. Her ‘Children Crossing’ sign dispensed with school caps (too elitist) and showed a big sister leading her little brother across the road, rather than the other way around.

Her plain motorway typeface championed modernism. Her use of circular and triangular signs was a continental concept.

Like all the best artists, she included traces of autobiography in her work. The girl in her ‘Children Crossing’ sign (pictured) was a discreet self-portrait. Her ‘Farm Animals’ sign was modelled on a cow called Patience, whom she’d known as a child.

If anything, her typography has been even more influential. The New Transport typeface that she created with Kinneir was adopted by the www.gov.uk website, and her font for the Tyne and Wear Metro was called Calvert (a fitting tribute). She worked with British Rail, the Milk Marketing Board and P&O.

‘Design is a service,’ she once said. ‘It’s purely logic, function and aesthetics.’ And yet, as her career confirms, at its best it becomes fine art. William Cook

Sheila Hancock and Peter Bowles oldie silver screen stars of the year

In her 60-year career, Sheila Hancock has conquered the stage and the small screen. She is honoured by the Oldie Academy, though, for her stellar work on the big silver screen.

Today, aged 85, she is still dominating the top line of movie posters, most recently in Edie, where she played the eponymous character, a grumpy widow climbing the mountain she’d always longed to scale during her unhappy marriage. During filming, she became the oldest person ever to climb Suilven in Sutherland, all 2,400ft of it.

Hancock made her West End debut in 1958, going on to work for Joan Littlewood and with Kenneth Williams in the 1950s and 1960s. She has starred in, and directed, Shakespeare at the RSC, and, in her seventies, appeared in the musicals Cabaret and Sister Act.

Then there’s the telly – from The Rag Trade in the early Sixties through to Strictly Come Dancing today, with a thousand performances in between, not least opposite her late, adored husband, John Thaw, in Kavanagh QC. Her energy is limitless, her wit electric – she is, inter alia, a master of Just a Minute.

At 82, Peter Bowles is the oldest leading man in a British movie: Together (2018), also starring Sylvia Syms and Amanda Barrie, Bowles’s fellow Oldie of the Year (see opposite page).

Bowles has recently been playing the Duke of Wellington in Victoria – and was the oldest man in the West End playing the title role in The Exorcist.

He first trod the boards over 60 years ago, appearing in Shakespeare at the Old Vic in 1956. And this year is the 40th anniversary of the first episode of To the Manor Born, which secured 20 millionplus audiences for all its 21 episodes.

How these two stars still twinkle away, illuminating the galaxy of British film. Harry Mount