Features

When Ealing comedy, the cinematic brand that uniquely embodied 20 years of idiosyncratically "charming" English humour, ran out of steam (surely the best way to describe it) in the late 50s, the British film industry’s grasp on the kind of popular comedy that could work at an international level became alarmingly loose.

Ealing’s unlikely successor, the Carry On series, unashamedly focused its aims much lower, and embraced the kind of cheerfully parochial vulgarity that had for years tickled the British working classes, either as audiences in music halls or as consumers of risqué seaside postcards. But Carry On’s domestic success made no dent on the international scene, and the series was for its entire duration held in complete contempt by those who saw themselves as the guardians of cinematic taste and decency. By the ‘70s, Carry On itself had begun to tire, and British comedy cinema was again left with an identity crisis. Aside from Monty Python’s occasional forays into filmmaking, the only other comedies were being generated for the exploitation market, but these had nothing like the shelf-life of a Carry On film. Those (remaining) domestic producers of film comedy who did not want to tap into exploitation therefore had to wrack their brains for material that would keep people away from their TV sets. The answer, ironically (Alanis Morissette, take note), came from TV itself.

Depending on your point of view, it was either a healthy pragmatism or a monumental lack of imagination that drove British film producers, in this newly "permissive" era, to the country’s most conservative television culture — the half-hour sitcom — for material. The quality of resulting films suggests the latter, but their initial domestic success was unquestionable. As a result, in the 1970s a peculiar brand of lowbrow comedy — the sitcom spin-off film — was born. And it reigned in British fleapits for more than ten years. The 1970s are generally regarded in Britain as the golden age of the television sitcom. From the densely scripted Fawlty Towers (BBC 1975 + 1979), Steptoe and Son (BBC 1962-74) and Porridge (BBC 1974-77) to the mass appeal of On the Buses (ITV 1969-73) and Are You Being Served? (BBC 1972-85), the sitcom, inexpensive and traditional, also proved itself to be the consistent ratings pinnacle of light entertainment programming. Having been deterred from exploiting more dangerous material by the consistently overzealous British film censor, it was clear that the average, enterprising low-budget film producer was eyeing sitcom’s TV success with some envy.

At the time, Britain’s domestic film industry, more than ever, needed this huge, conservative TV audience to stay alive. Although the early seventies had seen films like The Devils (1971), Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) and Performance (1970) break new ground in the mainstream and give British cinema a fashionably dangerous edge, by 1974 most of the major U.S. studios had closed down their U.K. operations, and crippling taxation (98 percent for the super rich) was driving the big talent out of the country in droves. Consequently, the sitcom spin-offs that flooded the screen, from On the Buses (1971) to Rising Damp (1980), became bread and butter to homegrown companies such as Hammer and British Lion. And, although critically abhorred, the films were, initially at least, considerable crowd-pleasers — the sitcom spin-off was the only domestic cinematic trend to see the decade through.

Between 1968 and 1980, more than 30 British films were adapted from successful television shows. Not even the Carry On series had matched this concentrated prolificacy. From 1972, Carry On films had begun to peter out, from two a year to one a year, and in 1977 the Carry On backer, Rank, decided to focus on distributing Xerox machines instead of films. The series’ parting shot (before a one-off resurrection in 1992) was the lamentable Carry On Emmanuelle (1978). Similarly, the defiantly unerotic and peculiarly British exploitation comedies of the time, such as the Confessions series, were all but finished by 1977, after a very short burst of suburban success.

It is with the later Carry Ons, however, that the majority of the sitcom spin-offs of the seventies are most comparable. Childishly smutty, relentlessly single-minded and lavatorially crude, many of them have nonetheless gained an aura of nostalgic affection that cannot be easily explained intellectually. Like endearing but mischievous children, films like On the Buses (1971) and Bless This House (1972), like their TV sources, now seem refreshingly free from worthiness, irony, and political correctness, and do not attempt to work on more than one level. On the other hand, spin-offs such as The Lovers (1972) and Porridge (1979) stand up more convincingly to modern scrutiny.

British radio and TV comedy had dabbled with the big screen before the sixties. Vehicles for radio comedians such as Arthur Askey were fashioned in the thirties and forties, and, later, some radio and television shows led to more or less unconnected features. The Goons, for example, a radio troupe featuring Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, appeared in Down Among the Z Men (1951) and Penny Points to Paradise (1952). I Only Arsked (1958) was a truer spin-off in the sense of this article, in that it focused a particular character from the successful ITV series The Army Game (1957-61). But it wasn’t until the late sixties that the film industry in Britain really caught the spin-off bug.

The first spin-off of this era was Till Death Us Do Part (1968). The original BBC television show (1965-75) had yet to be transported to the US, where it met with equal, if not more, success as All in the Family (NBC 1971-77). Focusing on the weekly rantings of working-class bigot Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell), Till Death Us Do Part was rarely out of the controversy spotlight in Britain, bearing up to frequent attacks from the "Clean Up TV" campaign for its aggressiveness and bad language. The film version, distributed by British Lion, offered a broader and less censorious forum for the show’s writer, Johnny Speight, to indulge Garnett’s loudmouth politics and bigotry. Speight also used the film as an "opening out" of the confined sitcom, a noble intention given the slack padding of later spin-offs. The film followed Garnett’s life from the ’30s to the ’60s, giving him ample opportunities to rant about major political events as they unfolded. However, much of the astute rawness of the series was lost in the process, and lavatorial humour (literally) crept into the proceedings — Garnett spends a fair portion of the film sitting on the toilet, conversing loudly with his neighbour in the bathroom next door. Perhaps this was a warning of what was to come.

Till Death did not set the box office alight, nor did it set the trend. It took the release of On the Buses (1971) to really launch the British spin-off phenomenon. If Till Death Us Do Part had been filmed for vaguely "artistic" reasons, On the Buses was the opposite side of the coin. The TV series (Americanised, unsuccessfully, as Lotsa Luck [NBC 1973-74]), followed the exploits of a (laughably late middle-aged) bachelor bus driver, Stan (Reg Varney), and his unspeakably crass family. A tasteless and puerile antithesis to the abrasive realism of Till Death, it was, nevertheless, equally as popular in the ratings. This fact did not go unnoticed by Hammer films, which was now under the control of Michael Carreras and was keen to reverse its ailing horror fortunes. A deal was made, and On the Buses was brought to the screen by Hammer in a film that, instead of attempting to broaden and strengthen its TV source, merely inflated and further vulgarised it.

Coarse and anachronistic, the film version of On the Buses sees Stan and his repellent colleague Jack (Bob Grant) scheming to "put a stop" to a liberal company policy that allows the employment of female bus drivers. Although pretty excruciating to sit through today, the film’s cheerful zest was, at the time, quite infectious. It grossed over £1 million in domestic rentals in its first six months of release — an outrageous sum for a low-budget British production at the time. On the Buses soon became the most financially successful 1971 release at the British box office, outgrossing even Diamonds Are Forever. This may say a lot more about British society than it does about the merits of the picture, but the returns could not be argued with. By 1973, On the Buses had generated two theatrical sequels: Mutiny on the Buses (1972) and Holiday on the Buses (1973). Arguments about taste and decency were futile — the sitcom spin-off had arrived.