There are eight million stories in The Naked City, as the old television series used to say, after having presented you with one of them. The Carry On series, still deeply engrained into British popular culture after 30 films re-shown endlessly, has nearly as many.
Space prevents me telling you the story of Barbara Windsor and a neurotic Jayne Mansfield playing Soho strippers, not to mention Babs’ special mix of earthy sexuality and natural comedic ability which brought a new dimension to the Carry Ons. Or how Joan Sims’ weight problems removed her youthful glamour (and lost Joan a leading role) but transformed her into a comedy powerhouse with a huge acting range who was still quite beautiful. Or how Hattie Jacques’ famously motherly warmth and acclaimed stage act at The Players Theatre* was seen by the legendary figures Tommy Handley and Eric Sykes who helped launch her as the beloved comedy star of screen we all remember fondly.
An article for another day, perhaps, but for now step inside for the highest of low comedy, and stay awhile to appreciate some rather more interesting concepts than you might expect between the knob gags as Ian Fryer, author of a new book about the Carry On films, presents the stories of two writers who deserve to be much better-known and three unique actors who became household names and defined this comedy institution that began 65 years ago. And it all started with a Sergeant.
The Carry On series is a peculiarly British institution that is second only to the James Bond franchise in its longevity (1958-1992, albeit with a 14-year gap between the penultimate and so far final entries). However, where the saucy ensembles surpass 007 is in the productivity: its sheer number of titles constitutes the largest number of films of any British film series to date.
The films have maintained their cultural prominence thanks to regular airings on TV, providing a rite of passage for British children discovering them for the first time. The pictures are a comedic education that all of us go through, learning to laugh at the slapstick as children, and coming to appreciate the cheeky innuendo when we get older. Repeated viewings at various stages of our lives reveal more humour we may have missed when watching the films originally. But for a series that boasted a dazzling roll-call of familiar faces – everyone from Leslie Phillips and Amanda Barrie to June Whitfield and Jon Pertwee did a turn – how you like your Carry Ons to a large extent depends on your taste in scriptwriters.
With all 31 instalments produced by Peter Rogers and directed by Gerald Thomas, the first in the series (though not intended as such), 1958’s Carry On Sergeant, was based loosely on a dog-eared treatment by R.F. Delderfield which had been knocking about for some time. Norman Hudis, prolific screenwriter of B movies throughout the 1950s, was ultimately responsible for turning Delderfield’s story about a ballet dancer called up for National Service into an ensemble comedy led by the entertainer Bob Monkhouse and a selection of former cast members of Granada Television’s sitcom The Army Game. Running from 1957 to 1961, the series was the fledgling ITV’s first big comedy hit, and upped the television profiles of several actors including future Dr Who William Hartnell and former Will Hay sideman Charles Hawtrey.
The result could be described as an unofficial Army Game movie, a huge box office success which performed notably better than the official Army Game spin-off film, I Only Arsked!, which appeared later from Hammer Films. Hudis became the regular screenwriter for the next five films before decamping (as it were) to Hollywood, where he continued a remarkable career writing for all manner of productions including The Man from UNCLE and Mission: Impossible.
In the Hudis era the Carry Ons were from the start about post-war British society, in which people from all backgrounds came together in the new institutions created by Clement Atlee’s Labour government (National Service, the NHS, comprehensive education), found ways to work together and make the organisations work. By 1958, the size of the British cinema audience had only started to be eaten into by the popularity of commercial television, so the potential viewership was enormous. No matter who was watching, clever casting meant that they would see aspects of themselves reflected back at them.
The Carry Ons can be seen as popularising bawdy low comedy which was far cleverer in conception than critics (and probably much of the audience) gave them credit for. This continued when the writing chores for the series were taken over by possibly the most underrated screenwriter in British cinema history, Talbot Rothwell.
Britain is a country which ever looks down upon the popular until it can safely be filed away as Historical Curiosity, and thus it was with Rothwell. He was seen by much of the critical establishment (The Times’ critic John Russell Taylor was an honourable exception) as a mere conduit for channeling as many, and as dirty, a series of gags as possible into a ninety minute running time.
Ultimately ‘Tolly’ Rothwell worked himself into the ground, to the point of mental breakdown, and the fact that the quality of the Carry On scripts almost immediately fell off a cliff should tell an interested observer that something rather more interesting and valuable was going on in his writing than met the eye.
Rothwell was a gag-machine compared to Hudis, but he had a huge regular cast to write for, each of whom had an established comedic persona. This meant he had each time to construct complex, multi-character plots and acres of dialogue – of the long-term regulars only Jim Dale could be described as a physical comedian. Rothwell was also quite clearly a movie-lover, his time writing the films coinciding with a long and successful series of Carry On parodies.
One of his earliest scripts for the series was Carry On Jack. Had this been a Hudis script our hapless heroes would have settled their differences and helped the jolly old British navy beat the dastardly Spanish Armada. This being the rather more freewheeling Rothwell our heroes do nothing other than get in the way of the real professional sailors and only triumph by complete chance.
Carry On Jack looks a million dollars (well, perhaps a few hundred grand) thanks to its borrowing ship sets from the 1962 Napoleonic War drama HMS Defiant, still standing at Pinewood Studios two years after Dirk Bogarde showed audiences his on-screen sadistic streak. While the second film in the series, 1959’s Carry On Nurse, had (temporarily, at least) broken the US market, Rothwell really hit the comedic jackpot with Carry On Cleo, an aesthetic triumph thanks to the sets that remained at Pinewood from a failed attempt to film the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton epic Cleopatra in the nearby Home Counties. Taylor got sick and the increasingly elephantine production moved to Rome’s Cinecittà, leaving the Carry On gang to mount a full-on lampoon of what had by now become the world’s most talked about film.
And what a gang it was! It’s fascinating to watch Kenneth Williams develop as a screen actor over the course of the first eight or so films. In the early films he plays the haughty intellectual humanised by his relationships with the other cast members – believe it or not, in Carry On Nurse, Kenneth Williams is the romantic leading man, being wooed by Jill Ireland, future wife of Charles Bronson! His performances broaden film by film until by the time of Carry On Jack, released during the peak of Beatlemania in 1964, Williams gave exactly the sort of full-throated, magnificently over-the-top performance that listeners of his BBC radio comedy Round the Horne loved so much.
Kenneth Williams was a fascinating, contrary character who had steered himself away from working class poverty in London via elocution lessons and a commitment to autodidactism. Although ‘Kenny’ was always conscious of his lack of formal education, he was left with the remarkable ability to switch accents and social classes at the drop of a hat. This brought Williams his earliest major successes, in revue theatre (a now dead form of stage production which moved to television in the form of sketch comedies) and radio shows such as Hancock’s Half Hour.
Williams was the perfect all-purpose comic actor for the Hancock shows, but one character created for the show not only provided him with his lifelong catchphrase ‘Stop messing about!’, but also resulted in his departure from the series. One of Williams’ arsenal of voices for the series was a peculiar, nasal and wheedling voice known as ‘Snide’.
The show’s writers Galton and Simpson built a character around the voice, which resulted in Williams getting a huge audience response whenever Snide appeared. This eventually earned Snide the enmity of Tony Hancock, who was aiming at a more realistic style of comedy, shorn of the traditional BBC Radio fall-backs of catchphrases repeated each week. Reduced to minor supporting characters – what he called his “Felix Aylmer” voice was especially useful for playing high court judges – he left Hancock to find greater fame in the decades that followed.
A brilliant wit and a raconteur par excellence, when The Kenneth Williams Diaries were published after his death (albeit in heavily edited form – the publication of new, more frank editions would be nothing less than a public service), even those who knew him well were shocked at the levels of self-doubt and self-loathing they contained. Many speculated that the fatal mixture of prescription drugs Williams took on 15 April 1988 was a deliberate response to years of depression and ill-health, but others, notably his authorised biographer Christopher Stevens and Kenny’s friend former Tory MP Giles Brandreth, who read a eulogy at his funeral, have made convincing arguments for it being a tragic accident.
The Hancock shows brought Kenneth Williams into contact with Sidney James, whom his diary entries reveal he had a low opinion of professionally. Like Williams, James was also eventually ejected by Tony Hancock in his noble, but ultimately doomed quest for comedic purity. Sid was a much better dramatic actor than his reputation might suggest; the child of a British music hall couple who took to the Johannesburg stage after careers as a boxer and a hairdresser.
Sid arrived in the UK in 1946 and immediately transformed himself from a South African to a cockney Jew. He was perfectly happy as a working character actor, moving from film to film in a then-busy British movie scene. Sid was good, too – Hammer Films, providing b-pictures for the American market in the company’s pre-horror days, showcased him in a series of strong dramatic roles in films like The Man In Black (1949) and The House Across The Lake (1954).
Hancock’s Half Hour, on both BBC TV and radio, launched Sid as a comedy star. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson created the persona of Sidney Balmoral James which turned the actor from a staple of the British movie scene to the nation’s slightly disreputable big brother.
Sid James was recruited to the Carry On cast for Carry On Constable, the fourth in the series, in order to give the team an on-screen leader, a move which was eventually to work so well that the Carry Ons needed Sid more than he needed them. This was proven when he stopped making them, not because he quit but because he was simply too busy. While Sid was touring Britain and Australia in stage farces and appearing in his hugely popular ’70s sitcom Bless This House – a workload which would before long kill him – the Carry Ons withered on the vine.
The three films in the series made without him, Carry On Behind (an attempt to recreate the success of Carry On Camping on a caravan site), Carry On England, and the notorious Carry On Emmanuelle, were not only increasingly poor, but were roundly rejected by audiences, who by now were of the opinion that without the presence of Sid they weren’t real Carry On films.
While the latter, in its attempt to court the dirty raincoat crowd while offering little by way of actual nudity (a blessed relief given the age of the cast) was literally all mouth and no trousers, Carry On England is the real crime against comedic sensibilities. The only positive one can grant the film is that it was shot largely outdoors in a balmy summer of 1976, so it at least looks nice.
While Sid became a bigger name than was Carry On, the same cannot be said of Charles Hawtrey, a unique performer whose story of perseverance and success against the odds eventually became deeply sad. A boy soprano and performer in silent films as a youngster, he was actually born Charles Hartree but was encouraged by his acting teacher, the famous tutor of young performers Italia Conti, to take on the name of the recently deceased actor-manager Sir Charles Hawtrey. In an early sign of his delusional personality, the budding young actor made no attempt to correct anyone who assumed he was Sir Charles’ son, even being billed on occasion as Charles Hawtrey Jr. He maintained the fiction of a theatrical upbringing to anyone who would listen until late in life, long after it would have given him any professional advantage.
Real success came to Hawtrey late in his career, after decades of struggle. He got some attention as a sideman on film, stage and radio to the enormously successful comic actor Will Hay, playing the cheeky overage schoolboy to Hay’s seedily incompetent teacher. Eventually Hawtrey overplayed his hand, asking Hay for more money and better billing. There was only one star in a Will Hay production, and Charlie was out in the cold, but a pattern was set where he would make impossible demands and lose roles. It was over just such a dispute that would see him walk away from the Carry Ons, and any significant acting career, in 1972.
Back in 1957 it would be the dawn of commercial television in Britain that would be the salvation of Charles Hawtrey’s career. He was cast as Private “Professor” Hatchett in ITV’s first hit sitcom The Army Game, giving a fascinating, highly detailed and idiosyncratic performance. Despite the success of the series, Hawtrey was dispensed with in a cast shake-up at the end of the first series. A solitary figure at the best of times, Hawtrey was the only cast member who had the indignity of having his character recast, with Keith Smith taking over the role of Hatchett.
The Carry On producers welcomed him with open arms, and it’s notable in Carry On Sergeant that Hawtrey’s opening scene is structured to give him a huge entrance, crashing through the barrack-room doors. By now the tiny, bird-like actor had developed an acting technique which nobody else on Earth would have been allowed to get away with, but which absolutely forced the audience to look at him. He would literally stare straight into the camera lens while speaking his lines, a method which really only worked in a comedic context. In dramatic parts, Hawtey could barely pass for a convincing human being – check out cinematic barrel-scrapings such as The Terrornauts and Zeta One for evidence. Yet in the Carry Ons he was a minor comic genius.
Hawtrey could have had a much more satisfying career on achieving stardom through the Carry Ons. Unfortunately a lifetime of perceived injustices and an increasing reliance on alcohol had chipped away at both his professionalism and his demeanour. In 1963 he starred alongside Hylda Baker in a sitcom called Best Of Friends. Given a prime spot in ITV’s weekend schedule, the series attracted good audience figures but the relationship off-screen between Hawtrey and Baker was so rancorous that no-one at ITV was in a hurry to commission a second series.
Baker was eventually forgiven, becoming a sitcom star again in 1968 in Nearest And Dearest. Hawtrey was not, his career henceforth being limited to the Carry Ons until he retreated to an 18th-century smuggler’s cottage close to the seafront at Deal in Kent. There he was notorious for frequenting (and banned from) the local pubs in search of rough trade – often at a price – from the nearby naval base and the oblivion of alcohol. By the end, Charles Hawtrey was a bitter drunk who had exhausted his friends with his shenanigans and had become reclusive and tormented. It’s a tragic story. When he died in October 1988, just six months after Kenneth Williams, his funeral was attended by just nine mourners.
What a carry on.
Ian Fryer
Carrying On: The Carry Ons and Films of Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas is published by Fonthill Media on 20th July 2023
* Slap bang in the very centre of London, the Players’ Theatre presented Edwardian Music Hall from before WW2 to the early 2000s, and was also the surprise venue chosen for a 1987 mini-concert to announce David Bowie’s Glass Spider Tour to the world.
Talking of which, as Steve Pafford was born on the Strand across the road from the theatre’s subterranean dug out beneath Charing Cross station, if you’ve ever wondered which Carry On film was in pole position at the UK box office the day said author of BowieStyle (a book which came into being in the very same Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury – the capital’s traditional writers’ quarter – where Kenneth Williams grew up) came into the world look away now
