suzepulcheria

Please may we start an Esma Cannon appreciation society? There is a lovely photograph of her in her Britmovie biog.

"I've come a long way you know!" "Equally long way to go back..."

Boom Man

I remember hearing the producers of "Are You Being Served" saying they had been certain the humor was much too specifically British, and American audiences would never understand it. It is true that there are some references I was not sure about (I remember a scene where Mrs. Slocombe in AYBS said she worked as a "nippy" during World War II. I still don't know what that is - and no one I know has any idea either. But it got a big laugh from the TV audience!) But that doesn't interfere with the enjoyment of the material.

If you are interested about 'Nippies'. Just go to Google, click on images the put in the box Lyons Corner House,Nippies. then hit search , All should be reveiled to you. I really should get out more!

Jason Leonard

Truly original British humour, really enjoyed being took the cinema with my brother at a very early age to watch these films. So many great scenes, and really great actors, namely Sid James (most wicked laugh!).

CaptainWaggett

Fighting talk from Tanya Gold (anyone know of her) in today's Guardian

Infamy? They've got it
The Carry On films were crass and populated by misfits. And, sadly, they mirrored people's lives

It's now 50 years since the first of the Carry On series was shot at Pinewood, and the films haunt the body of British culture like a rotting thong. Whenever I see Barbara Windsor's bra bouncing off in Carry On Camping, I wonder why this is the most successful series of films in British history.

The answer is rather sad. The Carry On films are not funny. They are parables about failure. The typical Carry On hero is an everyman who lives a life of misery, unrequited lust and boredom. They are either ugly and lecherous (Sid James), pretty and foolish (Jim Dale), or obviously repressed gay men (Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey). Either way, they are incompetent and impotent. In a note to the producer Peter Rodgers, one scriptwriter called the Carry On characters "a bunch of screen idiots". And the idiot is always in some form of prosaic peril - in Carry On Nurse, the most successful British film of 1959, the protagonist in is hospital for a bunion operation.

The women belong to three depressing types. They are either stupid and beautiful (Barbara Windsor), bossy and masculine (Hattie Jacques), or ugly and bitter (Joan Sims). Carry On everywoman, personified by Sims, is a loveless harpy, atrophied by loneliness and only able to rage. In comedy after comedy, she begs for love and gets indifference. (The once-beautiful Joan Sims stuffed her face in real life - soon her characters did too). The hero rarely gets the girl he wants and, if he does, she comes at a terrible price. She will either grow a beard after accidentally taking a sex-change drug, as Barbara Windsor does in Carry On Again Doctor. Or she will turn out to be a serial killer who throws his wife into a vat of plastic and turns her into a mannequin, as Fenella Fielding does in Carry On Screaming! Carry On is a world of misery and it knows it. At the end of Carry On Henry, Kenneth Williams actually begs to die, screaming, "Carry on, executioner!"

So why did people like them? Because it was happening to them. Carry On held up a cartoonish mirror to the depressed and repressed Britain of the 1950s and 1960s. The Carry On audience - people like my grandparents - did not have opportunities to travel or do creative jobs. My grandmother left school when she was 14 and worked in a dress shop all her life. She considered herself lucky if she got taken out to dinner twice a year and didn't go abroad until the 1970s. And she loved Carry On. When she heard Kenneth Williams shouting "Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me" in Carry On Cleo, it rang true.

For people like her and millions more, the Carry On films offered a chance to see People Like You, with all your woes, on the big screen. The early films were set in schools, hospitals, police stations and a toilet factory, because everyone has a toilet, especially you. They went further afield later - to the Wild West (Carry On Cowboy), Imperial India (Carry On Up the Khyber) and Africa (Follow That Camel). But it was always a daytrip to Eastbourne with people you know too well. They smell of home movies - the props for Carry On Nurse were borrowed from the Bermondsey Work Group Hospital Management Committee. In Carry On Cleo, a park in Gerrards Cross stands in for ancient Egypt, with the Beaconsfield fire department providing the rain.

And Rodgers chose his screen idiots carefully. Their misery melted out of the screen - they were too good at their jobs. Kenneth Williams died of a barbiturate overdose at 63 and left diaries that despaired of the films. "It is appalling," he wrote of one script, "it is a Carry On." Hattie Jacques died of a heart attack at 58; Sid James on stage at 63. Both Joan Sims and Charles Hawtrey died as alcoholics. The last thing Hawtrey ever did was to throw a vase at a nurse who asked for his autograph; now that's a Carry On ending.

batman

Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist. She often writes for the Daily Mail as well as The Guardian.

Search results for tanya gold | the Daily Mail=

Guardian Unlimited | Search | tanya gold

I wish I had claws.

smudge

I'm sorry but what a load of old tosh that is. With a creative talent like this I can only assume she served her apprenticeship writing the outlandish stories which used to populate The Sunday Sport...

Smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

batman

I totally agree Smudge ....

I wish I had claws.

Windthrop

'Denigration is the art of the inadequate' to paraphrase Oscar Wilde

or

'The critic is the impotent artist' to quote someone

Still time to enter 'There Is Nothing Like A Dame' Quiz

Sgt Dudfoot

That's an appalling article which at least gives me hope that I too can be a journalist if they accept that kind of tripe.

hoggers

Wise words Windthrop..

What a joyless cretin she is..
Needs to pull her head out of her .... if you ask me.

All VERY Guardian though..

dremble wedge

It reads like a clumsy piece from an indifferent sociology student. Never let the facts get in the way of a harangue:

The women belong to three depressing types

What about Liz Fraser? Juliet Mills? Fenella Fielding? Hmm, they don't fit my tract so I'll ignore them...

She writes like an oaf. There's nothing more to say on the matter.

billy bentley

I'm not a big Carry On fan, but a couple of years back I read a very slender and very interesting biography of Charlie Hawtrey. Can't remember the title.

Sgt Dudfoot

That would be ' The Man Who Was Private Widdle' by Roger Lewis. A decent read but filled with inaccuracies. More of a personal essay than a true bio.

billy bentley

Sarge, Does that mean the bickering, frocks and sherry (or was it VP wine ?) aren't true ?

Windthrop

Peter Rogers claims that he offered a percentage, with a reduced fee, to the cast after the first few films and that the agents blocked it. I can believe that because the concept of the repeat hadn't come about and films didn't usually have a life after the initial run. There were only two channels on UK TVs at time and not that many films were being shown. The agents probably thought they were doing their clients a favour insisting on a flat fee.

Still time to enter 'There Is Nothing Like A Dame' Quiz