Book review: Carry On Regardless, by Caroline Frost

“Isn’t it funny that a series called the Carry On films has stopped?” jokes the comedian, Tim Vine.
They in fact stopped a very long time ago now – in 1978 – but the public fascination with them has never ceased. From the gentle but jolly black-and-white National Service comedy, Carry On Sergeant in 1958 to the abysmal Carry On Emmannuelle twenty years later, a total of thirty Carry Ons films were produced. The early films such as the most second and most commercially successful release, Carry On Nurse (1958) were written by Norman Hudis and tended to poke gentle fun at national institutions, for example, the Army, hospitals, police force and schools. A big change came when Talbot Rothwell took over as screenwriter for the the 007 spoof, Carry On Spying (1964), a development which coincided with the arrival of Barbara Windsor on the cast and the move into colour. Carry On Spying in which Windsor played Daphne Honeybutt was the last one to appear in black-and-white.

From that point onwards, the films became less innocent and more smutty. Characters started having names like Dr. Tinkle and Gladstone Screwer and the films were crammed with all the sexual innuendoes (“Ooh! What a lovely pair!” “Once a week is enough for any man|!”) which they’ve become notorious for. On the plus side, they also became notably more ambitious, parodying everything from historical epics (Carry On Cleo, the most highly regarded of the series or Carry On Up The Khyber) to the Hammer Horror series (Carry On Screaming) with mostly enjoyable results, while always remaining cheap to produce.

As the 1970s began, however, things took a turn for the worse as the changing social mores of the ever more permissive society pushed the films into the gutter. Carry On Henry (1971) was good fun and the contemporary Carry On Camping (1969) – famous for the scene in which Barbara Windsor’s top bursts off during an exercise session – was one of the most successful of the whole lot. But by the mid-70s, the quality had declined to such an extent that most of the regular cast (Sid James, Hattie Jacques, Barbara Windsor, Bernard Bresslaw) had abandoned the whole enterprise. Those familiar faces were, of course, a key reason why the films had done so well. By 1992, with many of the originals either dead (Kenneth Williams, Sid James, Peter Butterworth, Charles Hawtrey) or unwilling to be in it (Windsor, Joan Sims, Kenneth Connor, Bernard Bresslaw and others), the disastrous attempt to revive the franchise with Carry On Columbus with a new cast of rising stars such as Julian Cary, Tony Slattery and Martin Clunes was doomed from the start.
Although it doesn’t gloss over the dark side of the series (the actors’ terrible pay, the miserable off-screen personal lives endured by Williams and Hawtrey), Caroline Frost’s book remains an affectionate portrait of a mostly fondly remembered national institution.

Book review: Carry On Regardless, by Caroline Frost. Published by: Pen and Sword. Available : now

Book review: Modernity Britain Book Two A Shake of the Dice 1959-62, David Kynaston

Book review: Modernity Britain Book Two A Shake of the Dice 1959-62, David Kynaston. Published by Bloomsbury.

They sometimes say that if you can remember the nineteen sixties, you weren’t there. Well, I genuinely wasn’t there, I know this for a fact. But after reading this, the second part of the third volume of David Kynaston’s masterful collection of books spanning the period from the Attlee victory in 1945 to its bitter denouement in May 1979, I sort of feel like I lived through it.
Or at least the first part of the Sixties. For this book takes us to the half way point in Kynaston’s saga. It is a nation in transition. The colossal changes of the Sixties have not quite began at the end of the book. The Beatles are no longer The Quarrymen. They have been to Hamburg but they have not fully taken off yet. Dudley Moore and Peter Cook’s names are getting mentioned but the satire boom has not yet really got going either. John Profumo is still just another minister in the government. Harold Macmillan is still in office although his hold on power looks less secure by 1962 than it did when the book starts after his General Election triumph of October 1959. Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell meanwhile survives a party crisis, a challenge from Harold Wilson and a brief Liberal Party revival after their sensational 1962 Orpington by-election win. But neither Mac or Hugh will turn out to be leading their parties by the time of the 1964 election.
This is a nation poised between the “Never had it so good” years and the “white heat” of another Harold’s technological revolution. Big important issues such a immigration, slum clearance, tower block building and the issue of British decline are being faced and in some cases botched. But it is Kynaston’s mixture of the lives of the stars, the stars of the future (new Tory MP Margaret Thatcher of Finchley begins to make her presence felt), the perfectly ordinary which makes these books such a delight.
In 1961, for example, rising Carry On star Kenneth Williams (then in his mid-thirties) complains of the heat. On the same day, the future Princess Diana is being born. In 1960, Labour politician Michael Foot asserts boldly (and probably wrongly) that “Like it or not, the most spectacular events of our age is the comparative success of the Communist economic systems…the achievement by any reckoning is stupendous”. Barbara Windsor, the 23 year old star of Joan Littlewood’s “Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be” scoffs at the idea that she might return to the Theatre Royal shreiking: “Are you kidding? I’m finished with all that ten quid a week lark. I’m not in this business for art’s sake, you know – I’m in it for the money. Besides, I’ve got too many expenses to keep up. I’ve just bought a telly.”
Beloved Dixon of Dock Green actor Jack Warden has an easy solution to the “problem” of a group of teenagers he sees loafing on the street. “Bring back the birch,” he says.
This is a marvelous book. Roll on the undoubtedly still more eventful next volume.