If we overlook the doomed exercise in resuscitation that was 1992’s Carry On Columbus, it is almost 30 years since the final Carry On film was made. Almost all the Carry On stars are now dead and few of them could stand any of the others when they were alive. The films themselves were seedy and juvenile; an alarming number featured Hattie Jacques in a bathing costume, a sight that pleased few people beyond Mr Jacques. So why won’t the Carry On films just go away? Clearly, because the British don’t want them to. The Carry On flicks are the strange old uncle we can’t stop inviting to the party, even though he gets drunk and pinches the vicar’s wife’s backside. For 47 years they have unspooled ceaselessly and ubiquitously, like a kind of snorting, guffawing white noise in the background. They can even now be purchased attached to a part-work magazine at your newsagent.
Alternatively, you can take your prescription in theatrical form, through a run of the Carry On-based play Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick this month at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, or as nature intended, through the screening of Carry On Camping as part of the Glasgow Comedy Festival.
But why would you want to? We all know the Carry Ons are unmitigated rubbish, sniggery, fatuous and unhealthily obsessed with the workings of the fundament. As Kenneth Williams says in the Citizens’ production, the films represent “a culture that’s cruder than the Tudors”. In his diaries, the actor went further. “I read the script of Carry On Henry and I think it’s abysmal,” he wrote in 1970. He liked Carry On Emmannuelle even less: “Monotonous and unfunny. I’ll have to turn it down.” In the end, though, Williams did turn up in the film, as a character named Emile Prevert. Not even the actors who appeared in them could resist the weird allure of the Carry On films. Their power to override sensible objections — to their cheapness, laziness and puerility — afflicted those who made the films as much as those who continue to watch them.
Terry Johnson’s Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick suggests this was because the players were locked into cruel and unusual relationships with one another, Dantean circles of hell from which they wouldn’t and couldn’t free themselves.
Sid James loved Barbara Windsor but couldn’t leave his wife for her. Williams and James loathed each other so intensely that they found measures of self-validation in their hatred. James found Williams’s ego to be monstrous and queeny. (“Kenneth doesn’t love men,” says Windsor, “He loves himself and other men are the next best thing.”) To Williams, James was simply boorish. Windsor, meanwhile, loved James but was married to a jealous gangland figure, Ronnie Knight. Only the relationship between Windsor and Williams appeared vaguely healthy, but only so long as Windsor was prepared to sit at Williams’s feet and soak up his self-pity.
Johnson’s play first appeared at the National Theatre in 1998. By writing plays such as Hitchcock Blonde and his recent television dramatisation of the life of Peter Cook, Johnson has created his own genre, in which popular entertainers are dissected dispassionately. The extent of his dispassion can be measured in the fact that in one scene, Williams utters the line: “Oh, what’s the bloody point?” while complaining about a script. Famously, this was the final entry in his diary.
Set entirely within one caravan located on four film sets, Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick is ingeniously staged, a triumph over its self-imposed claustrophobia. Andrew Clark gives a convincingly seedy portrait of the lecherous Sid James, a tragic old soak writing his long goodbye on every betting slip and cocktail napkin. Garry Collins captures the trilling indignation of Williams most effectively.
In its fascination with the misery of its principals, the play is quintessentially modern, but Johnson’s interest is essentially morbid. The films themselves are a vague backdrop against which colourful inadequates bemoan their lot. It is a Jacobean revenge tragedy where, rather than kill the king, the victims end up doing panto with Joan Sims. But the central question of the Carry Ons, how such tat achieved immortality, goes unanswered and unaddressed.
Although we talk of the Carry On films as though they were a homogenous entity, there were, in fact, three distinct phases. The first ran from 1958 to 1963, from Carry On Sergeant to Carry On Jack, when the films were still benign comedies of errors, usually made in black and white, set in English suburbia and no racier than a television soap opera.
By Carry On Spying (1964), the films had switched to colour, begun ramping up the innuendo and had embarked on a series of genre parodies (James Bond in this case), that would take in horror (Carry On Screaming), westerns (Carry On Cowboy), swords and sandals (Carry On Cleo) and hospital drama (Carry On Doctor). This was the golden age of Carry On, the naughty motherlode that occupies late-night television slots to this day.
The rot set in with Carry On Camping in 1969. The liberalisation of censorship laws weren’t seen only in the famous scene involving Windsor’s bra flying off during a set of vigorous exercises but in dialogue that became increasingly smutty, bordering on the single entendre. With each new film — Carry On At Your Convenience, Carry On Girls, Carry On Dick, Carry On Behind — standards slipped and desperation increased to keep pace with sex comedies such as Confessions of a Window Cleaner that were flooding cinemas emptied by the growing popularity of television.
But just as there several types of Carry On film, there are also several reasons to love them. For one, we don’t really have an option. They are ubiquitous in our culture in a way only James Bond and the Beatles can match. You’ve seen every Carry On film there is, even if you weren’t aware of it. They’re background radiation, almost one of the elements: earth, wind, fire and Williams. They are gaudy, garish postcards from a world much nicer than the one we inhabit, where taboos still existed.
In his famous essay about the seaside postcards of Donald McGill, George Orwell wrote that “on the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time”. Some explanation, at least, for the persistence of this collective, ever-so guilty pleasure.
Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick is at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, until February 26. Carry On Camping is at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Tuesday, March 15
