The Carry On Films

Steven Gerrard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137520043
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137520050
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Saucy, rude and vulgar—the 31 Carry On films remain an important part of the history of British cinematic and low brow comedy. In this book, Gerrard discusses the Carry On roots in the music halls of the Victorians and the saucy seaside postcards of Donald McGill. Made in post-war Britain, these films reflect a remarkable period of social change as the British Empire faded and a nation learned to laugh at itself. Nothing was sacred to the Carry On team. James Bond and Cleopatra were mercilessly lampooned, Miss World competitions and toilet factories came in for a cinematic pasting, while Sid James' laugh, Barbara Windsor's wiggle, Kenneth Williams' flared nostrils and Charles Hawtrey's "Oh, hello!" became synonymous with laughter, merriment and fun. Gerrard's work examines the Carry On films as part of a wider canvas linking both their heritage and tradition to the contextual world they mirrored. The Carry On Films is an essential read for Carry On fans the country through.

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Ding dong! Carry On!

© The Author(s) 2016

Steven GerrardThe Carry On Films10.1057/978-1-137-52005-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Steven Gerrard^{1, 2}

(1)

School of Film and Digital Media, University of Wales Trinity St David, Swansea, UK

(2)

The Northern Film School, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK

End Abstract

1958. The year the European Economic Community was founded. The year in which the Russian spacecraft Sputnik 1 fell back to Earth. The year that saw the Munich air disaster. The year in which the first protest march for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament took place. The year in which a cinematic legend was born.

The unrelenting Carry On movies, loved and loathed as much today as when they were first released, were a series of 31 low-budget, ribald and innuendo-laden comedies that have remained at the cornerstone of British film comedy since the first film, Carry On Sergeant, marched into view in 1958. They spawned numerous spinoffs, including an original TV series and two compilation series, and a stage play; they have influenced British comedy; and they have led to countless merchandising opportunities ranging from CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays to Toby jugs, toy cars, pillow cases, mobile phone covers and even models of the cast spouting their most famous lines – and, in the case of one cast member, Sid James, his famous laugh.

As Carry On fan and chronicler Richard Webber argues, the films were not Oscar-winning material, but they have remained firmly lodged in the nation’s affections due, in no small part, to the fact that they appeal to the masses. ¹ From the late 1950s and well into the 1970s, cinemagoers flocked to see the latest Carry On film, no matter what it was about.

Attendance figures show that in the year of Carry On Sergeant’s cinema release, 755 million patrons visited British cinemas over the course of the year. ² This was considerably down from the heights of the 1,635 million tickets sold in 1946. Television was seen as cinema’s greatest threat, and one that exerted a hypnotic control over its audience, so much so that cinema declared war on TV. Films were presented in glorious Technicolor, Cinerama, Cinemascope, Super Technirama and even 3D to entice viewers back into the cinema. But films presented in these formats were mostly American productions, with their high-end production values and studios churning out product after product. Despite having a studio system, Britain could barely compete with Hollywood’s mega-production base or its advancements in technology.

So what did it do to survive? It turned to stalwarts such as the war film, melodramas, the woman’s film, costume dramas, Ealing’s whimsical comedies, Hammer Films’ grim and grisly horror outputs, and television for help. Television? The enemy? Yes. Cinema had borrowed talent from other media from its very beginnings: stage actors, music hall performers and radio stars regularly moved from one to another, and many productions were based on existing material. It was only a matter of time before TV actors and productions would make the swap too. Whilst one of the most famous and fondly remembered British films of the 1950s, The Blue Lamp (1950), became the long-running and incredibly influential police series Dixon of Dock Green (1955–76), many other TV productions made the reverse transition to cinema. Such TV programmes as The Grove Family (1954–57), The Larkins (1958–60) and The Quatermass Experiment (1953–1959) science fiction/horror hybrids all found a new lease of life in their cinematic versions.

The first major influence on the first Carry On film came from a TV sitcom, The Army Game (1957–61), in itself based on the incredibly successful American import The Phil Silvers Show (1955–59). This cosy black-and-white comedy saw a misfit group of conscription soldiers at Nether Hopping’s Surplus Ordnance Department (SOD) battle against the rigours of army life, boredom and authority. The series was a huge hit, spawning both a film, I Only Arsked (1958), and a spinoff show, Bootsie and Snudge (1960–63). The importance of The Army Game to the Carry On series cannot be underestimated: Sergeant used its ideas and themes, and shared much of the same cast, including William Hartnell, Norman Rossington and Charles Hawtrey as its TV progenitor.

Carry On Sergeant was a box office sensation up and down the country. From its humble beginnings, it began the longest, most successful and arguably best-loved comedy series that British cinema ever produced. Over the course of the next 20 years, the team both in front of and behind the cameras of these 31 energetic, gloriously uproarious films kept on making bawdy, smutty, innuendo-laden farces that became emblematic of the British face of comedy. Whilst some of the actors and technicians changed over the course of the series, the jokes certainly did not. They got progressively bluer in keeping with the times, but at their heart lay one thing: good, honest vulgarity. Despite the critical roasting that the films often received, the British public loved them.

The films never approached High Art, but rather revelled in the traditions of the past. They were not seen as approaching Shavian and Wildean plays of wit, drawing room comedies or even the Aldwych Farces. No. The movies wore their rollicking, barrel-scraping and pun-laden innuendo with pride firmly on their sleeves, in much the same way as Shakespeare had done with his comedies four centuries earlier. They had their origins in the music hall acts of Marie Lloyd, Max Miller, Gracie Fields and George Formby. They also became the living, breathing, joking and celebratory embodiment of Donald McGill’s saucy seaside postcards. In other words, they were the working-class populace, those who drank beer, smoked fags, ate fish ‘n’ chips and wore Kiss Me Quick hats at the seaside.

The films arrived at the tail end of the 1950s, when Great Britain had virtually shaken off the austerity of the post-war years, with 1951’s celebratory Festival of Britain demonstrating that the country was well on the road to recovery after being bruised, battered and dazed in the Second World War. There were huge celebrations across the nation as Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation was beamed into people’s living rooms in 1953. Food rationing had finally come to an end in 1954. Whilst the danger of nuclear annihilation remained a constant menace from the communist bloc, Carry On Sergeant blithely took pot shots at ideas about gender, sexuality, the nation, the dreaded threat of conscription into the armed forces and even Armageddon in its stride. As it swept into cinemas on a wave of outlandish publicity, its elements of farce, gentle innuendo and tales of love conquering all proved a winning box office combination. It was not long before a sequel, Carry On Nurse (1959), was announced and the series began in earnest.

If the 1950s came to represent a sense of austerity – and the first few films in the Carry On series do have a sense that change is slowly coming – the shift towards Swinging Sixties affluence proved that Britain was the place to be. The 1960s were seen as halcyon days, when The Beatles ruled the airwaves, the Mini was both fashionable cars and short skirts, England won the World Cup and Carnaby Street clothes were the talk of the fashionistas. During this period of social change, with Britain slowly but surely coming out of its post-war malaise, films like the James Bond series and the Hammer Films horror canon reflected notions of Britishness. Bond was, to all intents and purposes, virtually single-handedly keeping the British Empire afloat, whilst Hammer’s Van Helsing, despite his mittel-European name, ensured that a British stiff upper lip helped ward off foreign denizens like Dracula and his vampiric brides. Other popular films, notably the ‘kitchen sink’ movies, tackled themes of sex, rebellion and the fracturing of Britain’s class structure head on. Films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and This Sporting Life (1963) were filmed in stark black and white on gritty council estates and rugby playing fields. Characters were motivated by the harsh realities of their world around them, a world of toiling in factories, where the only respite from tedium and hardship was either through venting anger or becoming lost in drink. On the one hand, there were the populist genre fare—Bond and Hammer—whilst on the other, there were the socio-realist films, but both demonstrated that there was a vibrant and often challenging film culture in Britain that reflected, through direct or indirect means, the 1960s.

When Norman Hudis left to pursue a career in America, Carry On scripting duties were taken over by Talbot Rothwell. His scripts usurped the cosiness of the first six outings and he broadened the basic fundamentals of the series. With less institutional targets to aim at, he attempted a two-pronged approach: his screenplays would parody and pastiche genre outings, whilst those films set in the ‘real’ world would critique British society directly. Therefore, the 1960s films were a mix of genre and realist outings: Carry On Spying (1964), which ridiculed James Bond; Carry On Cleo (1964) mocked the Burton-Taylor farrago of Cleopatra (1963); Carry On Screaming! (1966) out-hammered Hammer’s horrors; and Carry On Don’t Lose Your Head (1967) was a parody of Gainsborough’s 1940s melodramas, which sat alongside Carry On Doctor (1967) and Carry On Camping (1969) and their attempts to be both ‘hip’ and ‘swinging’.

The films were always popular at the box office. Carry On Up the Khyber and Carry On Camping held the top two positions at the British box office in 1969. It showed that the films were, despite their low budgets and often ramshackle appearances, incredibly popular on the domestic front. They competed alongside British prestige products such as Battle of Britain (1969) and Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), literary adaptations with Women in Love (UK 1969: Ken Russell) and Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), and co-productions like Monte Carlo or Bust (1969). They clearly demonstrated that the British public wanted to watch these bawdy comedies, no matter whether they were in period costume (Khyber) or set in the modern day (Camping). It also proved that despite the stock situations, characters and lines, the films not only tapped into the peculiarly British traditions for innuendo, bawdiness and double entendres, but that they provided laughter for the masses. That laughter may have come from blue jokes and outlandish situations, but it also took delight in forming critiques against those in positions of authority, where the utopian collective of the masses almost always conquered the stiff, sexually inept and socially awkward ruling classes.

But by the 1970s, all this began to change and the Carry On movies hardened in their examination of sexuality, gender and class. After the release of Carry On Up the Khyber, Rothwell’s scripts begin to alter. The cosy and conservative playful rebellion of Camping does have a ‘tail end’ feel to the 1960s. As Charles Hawtrey’s NHS-bespectacled character Charlie Muggins gets wheeled off with a bevy of young schoolgirls, the randy, older men (Sid James and Bernard Bresslaw) find themselves contained within the shackles of marriage. There is a genuine feeling that the proverbial wind of change is in the air.

This change became ever more apparent with the move into the 1970s. Any fun from the previous era became curtailed, with the films’ realist approaches critiquing British society with more relentlessness than ever before. Films like Carry On Loving (1970) attacked the supposed sanctity of marriage, whilst Carry On Abroad (1972) relentlessly mocked and ridiculed the notion of the Brit abroad. Arguably the most unremitting of the 1970s outings was Carry On Girls (1973), which tackled the ideals of family, marriage, the seaside hotel, dragging up, small-town officialdom, Miss World and the Women’s Liberation Movement.

The world of the Carry On films had always been one of nudging and winking, but it now turned towards more nudity and harder stereotyping. The British sex, or glamour, film had started out as 8mm films made for the burgeoning home market and private clubs up and down the country. Filmmakers like Harrison Marks, Stanley Long and Pete Walker made countless five to eight-minute ‘loop’ films that displayed a female undressing in particularly unsexy surroundings: a kitchen, living room or the garden. Despite these humble beginnings, such films as Naked as Nature Intended (1961) Nudist Memories (1961), Take Off Your Clothes and Live! (1962) and London in the Raw (1964) began to push back the boundaries of censorship. They may not have been shown nationwide, but many were passed for exhibition by local authorities. There was an increasing demand for these films, and by the 1970s The Wife Swappers (1970), Cool it Carol! (1970), Eskimo Nell (1974) and many others were proving to be big box office successes (albeit made on miniscule budgets) that challenged the Carry On films and their perceived notions of sex.

By attempting to keep up with the bona fide British sex film and moving away from music hall gags and Donald McGill postcards towards the markets of Stanley Long’s Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1975), Derek Ford’s What’s Up Nurse! (1977) and Harrison Marks’ Come Play With Me (1977), the release of Carry On Emmannuelle (1978) signalled that the team were caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it was a film that parodied the French erotic (and rather dull) art house film Emmanuelle (1974), whilst on the other, it was a film that fell between two stools: it was neither sexy nor funny. Audiences stayed away. The film series came to an inglorious end. Badly constructed and sloppily made, with awful back projection and a general air of desperation, the film tanked at the box office. The end of the Carry On films, at least for some 14 years, had come.

But it was not only the move towards a more adult-orientated audience that helped bring about the demise of the series. The 1970s is seen as a decade in which the stagnation and decline of fortune within the British film industry saw audience attendance fall dramatically away from its renaissance in the 1960s. Whereas cinemas were once huge leisure palaces, the increasing need for profit meant that cinema chains began to change their auditoriums into proto-multiplexes where screens were often rudimentarily split into two with a dividing wall separating theatres, to the detriment of viewing experiences, but turnouts of higher revenue. The withdrawal of American funding from UK film production was widely felt, and with the Hollywood Majors posting substantial losses (in 1969, MGM lost $35.4 million, whilst Warner Bros lost $42 million) and moving production back to the States, it was obvious that British filmmakers could not afford to directly compete wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Everything Has a Beginning
• 3. The Carry On Saga
• 4. ‘Carry On, Sergeant!’
• 5. Heroes, Rogues and Fools: The Carry On Men
• 6. Hottentots and Harridans: The Carry On Women
• 7. Room at the Bottom
• 8. Spies and Screamers!
• 9. Cowboys and Khasis
• 10. Conclusion: Carry On Concluding
• Backmatter