The Discreet Charm of the Carry Ons.

 As an Englishman I love the Carry On films. Sort of. I think you not only have to accept them for what they are but actually celebrate them for it. They are a postcard from the past: they have the ghastly pallor of a Victorian freakshow: a row of gargoyles giggling at fucking. They remain a post-bellum portrait of the narrowness of English life. Everything is cheap or borrowed, shoddy and jerrybuilt. The writing is end-of-the-pier, blue-book stuff, and the direction would be workmanlike but it looks like the gaffer has called everybody out. When they looked good - "Screaming" or "Cleo" - it's because they managed to get the sets, and often the costumes, of "proper" films. When they looked shit, most of the time, it was because the producer and director had no respect for either the actors or the audience. 

The Carry On films aren't very good but the English like things that aren't very good. Look at the current Cabinet, or the people we choose to make celebrities. We applaud shitness - it makes us comfortable. Its people being good we hate. There's nary a tall poppy on this island. And that's unfair on the Carry On film actors who are mostly brilliant, but just sort of ended up in these dreadful films because there was nowhere else to put them. Charles Hawtrey in "The Wild Geese"? The Carry On's are like a home for people who can't really go anywhere else, the last chance saloon for oddballs and eccentrics. Its the last stop before The Glue Factory. 

There's something else: ubiquity. The Carry Ons were always on the box when I was growing up. Even now they still appear on out-of-the-way channels (though "Khyber" and "Jungle" may have had their day). Hideous people in week old hair oil and cardigans, smoking pipes clamped in cracked brown teeth, were always there. They raised me. My funny uncles were funny uncles. It was a superannuated Bash Street Kids sprung magically to life. And it was strangely hopeful too: my parents worked hard, they had little leisure time and the moment they sat down a snot nosed child would appear crying and demanding attention. Their lives looked decidedly un-fun. The Carry On team's life was dedicated to fun. It was all arsing about. I may not have understood about betting and drinking Watney's red barrel and women in mini-skirts pretending to be much younger than they were, but it looked like a laugh. Sid James never stopped cackling. Barbara Windsor giggled with every line. None of them had kids because they were kids. This was some Blue Remembered Hills vision of paradise, albeit a rather tatty paradise: eternity measured out in crafty fags, thwarted bunk ups and boozy work dos. 

I'm ashamed to say that vision has impacted rather more on my life than I'm happy to admit. Still, if Sid James can get the girl...  

Sid James, a Jewish South African hairdresser and boxer, is our entry point into these films. He's us, the every-man, apparently normal. He was a diamond miner, I think. And as an English every-man Sid is lazy, conniving, dishonest and an inveterate womaniser who never gets past talking about it. He is usually unhappily married and tormented by the permissive availability of mini-skirted dolly birds. He never gets further than a clinch before discovery. He is always the boss - the wise guy in the set up and the architect of every scheme. He looks like an elephant's bollock in a cardigan and yet is the romantic lead. 

Hattie Jacques is probably the best actor to have been in a Carry On film, excelling in the earlier, less obviously grotesque ones. Her turn as the conflicted proprietor of Glam Cabs is genuinely moving. She is obviously best known for being approximately the same Matron in a series of the films, and skipping around in a netball skirt and a t-shirt bearing the legend "Chayste Place". The parts got thinner as the series went on...and I'm obviously not going to do the joke you're thinking of. You should be ashamed. 

Charles Hawtrey, a gurgling stick man, is like some terrible lost boy. He's Walter the Softy brought to life or Jacob Rees Mogg if he'd been brought up by a theatrical dresser instead of a stiff pinnied Nanny. Hawtrey is my favourite character in the Carry On films. He is always the same: ghostly, cheerful, always chuckling to himself, always in on some private joke, having the best time. Where Kenny Williams is seething and affronted, spitting vinegar, Hawtrey is a giggling skeleton, his black hair jumbo-markered onto his skull, black circles describing his empty eye sockets. He is a blithe spirit, a funny phantom. I think I love him. He'd been playing schoolboys for decades by the time the Carry Ons started and he never stopped playing them. They just got older and stranger. He's always a comforting, benign presence on screen. 

Bernard Bresslaw played either well meaning idiots or ethnic minorities. His turns have not aged well - I suspect fully half his career has been cancelled now. 

Joan Sims started as a love interest but as time went on she became shriller and shriller. All the female parts got more reductive in the Carry Ons. You could argue that was the case for all the characters but its very much more noticeable for the women, as their characters were sketchy to begin with. Joan once spent an entire film in bed eating full English breakfasts. That was her whole character: woman who eats too much. Not sure why she bothered with it - she was better than that. They all were. 

Kenneth Williams was a monster: those great equine nostrils steaming, that whiplash tongue. The obsession with his anus, the palpable dissatisfaction, the horror of being over-looked, passed over. All that flagellating self-disgust. His repression and sexlessness: his farting, his feuding, his thick yellow streak of unlikability. Kenneth Williams was the Carry Ons. If England was a car he would be the mascot perched on its bonnet: The Spirit of Accidie. One of the nation's greatest treasures, utterly despite himself. 

Barbara Windsor was, like all of the female actors in the Carry Ons, a proper actor slumming it. The male actors are turns, types, caricatures. They couldn't really do anything else, be anything else. Eventually Babs turned into a 35 year old naughty schoolgirl, flashing her knickers, but before and after these films, and her adverts for cream slices, Windsor proved she could really do it. She was the real deal. Its extraordinary to think the Carry On films branded everyone who appeared in them to the grave: Sid James made 148 films and only 19 were Carry On films but he will only every be remembered for a lecherous laugh and that horse-collar gurn. Its the same with Barbara Windsor. I suppose to other generations she was Peggy Mitchell, but to me she will forever be doing calisthenics in a green bikini attached to a bit of fishing wire. 

Jim Dale. He's a funny one. The white Kenny Lynch. Forever juddering down a staircase on a gurney or grappling with Anita Harris' underwear. I think he was quite big in the seventies before moving to America to do Pete's Dragon. He was never quite right for me. He'd been a minor pop star and was conventionally handsome. He had no business in the Carry Ons. Later replaced by Richard Callaghan as the aging juvenile. 

Patsy Rowlands, a dour, red haired woman who always seemed to be vacating a toilet cubicle with a troubled expression. 

In the films, I mean. 

Jack Douglas, with his Richard the Third hair and his "Duke of Earl" t-shirt was never a welcome sight. A one joke character - he would have a sort of spasm and spill his pint - that's it - his presence genuinely upset me. As irritating as woolen swimming trunks, and I know of what I speak. 

Peter Butterworth on the other hand is a masterclass. Never one of the bigger stars he specialised in quietly stealing the scene, mugging in the background, running through a flurry of tics and winces and always wringing his hat. Always there, doing stuff, his face like soup coming to the boil. 

I never cared for Kenneth Connor and his adenoidal weakling persona, including a "Phwooar" that sounded like an evacuation of the sinuses. He got much better as he got older, hanging up his string vest to become a succession of randy majors. 

Those are the major players. June Whitfield and Terry Scott turned up in a couple, as did Frankie Howerd. Harry H Corbett deputised beautifully for Sid James in Screaming, and Peter Gilmore was in a lot of them, either hanging around in the background or showing off his range. There was an actor called Terrence Longdon who was in all the early ones and then...just disappeared. There were Valeries Leon and Van Ost. And there was the always wonderful Margaret Nolan, who died recently, on hand with a lisp and a big blue-eyed stare, her breasts primed to fall out of her top on cue. Marianne Stone was in a lot of them but then she was in every English film ever made. What a Pantheon of Gods. 

There are constant threats to revive the Carry On films and there are constant threats to consign them to the dustbin of history. I dont think we should do either. Certainly any film made now would not be a Carry On film. The death of Barbara Windsor means that the last of the major players has gone. But equally there is no NEED for Carry On films. The films belong to a specific time period: the 1960s. These are films for people who missed out on the permissive society and the counter culture. They exist as rumours in these stories, it's all happening somewhere else. This is the real 60's as lived by ordinary people, older people who had been in the war and remembered rationing and bomb-sites and whose concession to the new consciousness was to grown their sideburns longer and paint their drainpipes orange. 

The further you get into the seventies the more these films lose their way. They're up against Robin Askwith's bared bottom and they become crasser and cruder: less picture postcard than mucky book. These aren't films about the modern age, they're films about a failure to engage with anything modern. They're inherently conservative: hippies should be chained by their own beads and sprayed with liquid shit and the Unions are all bolshie and idle and are just spoiling everyone's fun. There's nothing wrong with anyone in an NHS hospital, they're all malingerers. By the mid-seventies the real world is encroaching on the Gang: they're dying off for one thing. And there are power cuts and three day weeks and nobody is burying the bodies, and the producers are looking to parody the Emanuelle films (apparently without watching any) and Dallas. Imagine how toe-curlingly awful Carry on Dallas would have been? Luckily Lorimar wanted twenty times the film's production budget for the rights so it was shelved. But once again the Carry Ons ran afoul of the real world. 

The sort of people who want bring back Carry On films haven't any real understanding of what Carry On films are. They're not just sexual innuendo, blacking up and tits. Its not just ignoring "all this PC nonsense". The Carry On films were that cast, at that time, coming out of austerity and being witness to new freedoms without really understanding them. The Carry Ons came out of a defunct British Film Industry: they were naughty children of Ealing Comedies. They come from seaside sauciness and a profound English reserve. They come from criminalised homosexuality and the nation's continued fascination for a sanitised prime time homosexual. They come from class, and the loss of Empire and the good old days. And crucially they come from a time when there were only three channels and everybody watched the same things because that was all there was. That's how Sid James and Kenneth Williams became the nation's favourite funny uncles and how Barbara Windsor became as close to a modern identification of Britannica as we have. St George's Cross? He's absolutely livid. 

We dont have that relationship with television and cinema in our fragmented modern world, and we dont have the same sense of place, of status, of knowing who we are and not straying from that. We dont have the same horror of queers or foreigners - or at least most of us dont. We dont really have a film industry that could green-light these things, and there isn't really an audience for them. And really we dont make people like this any more. We rarely did even then. These films are fascinating windows into a world that no longer exists. And that's fine. To do modern, self-consciously edgy versions of them would be like drawing tits on the Mona Lisa. 

"Matron, take them away."