Year: 2022

If we had to pick one film of the Carry On series to watch, it would be this film from 1963.

It stars Sid James, Hattie Jacques, Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey and Jim Dale.

The story is a simple one. Charlie and Peggy (Sid and Hattie) are a married couple. The marriage is an unhappy one – Charlie owns a struggling taxi company and has to work hard to make a living. Peggy resents this and wants a life of parties and entertainment. To punish Charlie, she sets up her own company with the idea to beat Charlie’s company out of business.

So, why is this film one of our favourtes? Sure, it looks very dated. It’s not even massively funny.

And that’s exactly it. It’s a glimpse of early 60s England. The Beatles were just around the corner.

The cars, the fashions, the style are indeed dated. When the new cab company is set up, GlamCabs, the female drivers dress in skimpy outfits and drive much more modern vehicles, Ford cars I believe. It probably seemed quite shocking at the time.

There’s loads of driving round the streets of Windsor. It’s a real time capsule of the early 1960s and not to be missed.

There are some brilliant websites and YouTube videos where you can see the locations around Windsor and Maidenhead where many of them were filmed.

As the Carry On series, er, carried on, standards, such as they were slipped. The humour became more lavatorial, production standards (and presumably budgets) decreased. The set for several films was just a muddy field.

Some of the later films are quite unwatchable. “Carry On England”, from 1976, is dreadful and reaches an all-time low. It stars Kenneth Connor, Peter Butterworth and even Judy Geeson and goes back to the army.

The very last, “Carry On Columbus” is rarely shown.

But many of the films have at least some great bits. “Carry On Regardless” concerns the employees of an agency called Helping Hands who set out to help people with their problems. It’s episodic, of course, but does have the great Stanley Unwin.

Some entries in the series are highly regarded, especially “Carry On Up The Khyber” and “Carry On Girls”, including the wonderful Margaret Nolan.

It’s very hard, though not imposssible, to talk about films from a UK perspective and not mention the Carry On… series. Depending on how you count them, there are about thirty films, the first black and white then moving to colour, finishing in 1992.

The first was 1958, with “Carry On Sergeant”. This starred Kenneth Connor, Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques, Charles Hawtrey and Bob Monkhouse, with William Hartnell playing the sergeant in question.

This film was barely thirteen years after the war, and National Service was still a thing. The plot concerns a group of new recruits who are incompetent and fail at everything, until they learn that their sergeant is retiring and so come together at the end, for their sarge, because they love him so much.

Next was “Carry On Nurse” (hospitals and doctors were always popular), then “Carry On Teacher” (1959).

This starred Kenneth Connor, Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques, Charles Hawtrey and Joan Sims, and is about a school where the teachers struggle to control their naughty children. It turns out that the children know their headmaster (Ted Ray) is to leave so they behave badly so he cannot leave, because they love him so much.

By now, a core of Carry On actors was being established. Joining later would be Jim Dale, Sid James, Barbara Windsor, Bernard Bresslaw, Peter Butterworth and others. Stars came and went.

There was a big gap, fourteen years, between the penultimate “Carry On Emmannuelle” and “Carry On Columbus”. By this time, few of the big names were alive or willing to work any more for such low pay.