Carry On Series

The question you should really be asking, Petrolina, is which of these smutty, crude, double entendre-laden, low budget, lowbrow British comedies is the worst film?.

For my sins, I have seen all of the Carry On flicks - mostly at two now long gone cinemas called THE GRAND and THE 20TH CENTURY (where, in a country where TV only arrived in 1976, they were shown over and over again) . As a kid in the sixties and seventies I sniggered and guffawed - alongwith my parents in most cases - as I watched them, but they are now so hideously dated they are almost impossible to watch.        

As a child my faviorites were CARRY ON UP THE KHYBER, CARRY ON CRUISING, CARRY ON DOCTOR and CARRY ON HENRY (which, as a kid, I just had to see because it had a ludicrous No Persons 4 - 21 age restriction in South Africa - thus my dad had to buy the tickets for my brother and I. For the record book, technically speaking, this meant only kids under 4 and adults over 21 were allowed to watch it). I also have a certain fondness for CARRY ON DICK, which was ** initially banned in South Africa and, when I was a young, film-mad cub reporter, earned me my first byline and my first * front page story a few years after it was released in the rest of the world. 

CARRY ON HENRY and CARRY ON UP THE KHYBER are arguably the best/funniest of these crappy films, and CARRY ON BEHIND, the aforementioned CARRY ON DICK ("this is Dick Turpin, the highwayman with a very large weapon") and the piss poor late entry CARRY ON EMMANNUELLE are arguably the smuttiest.

My favorite cast members were (the South African born) Sid James (the man with the dirtiest laugh in showbiz), the buxom Hattie Jaques, Charles Hawtrey, the pertly, roundly bosomed Barbara Windsor (who was as salacious as Sid James in her own way) and the often hysterical Kenneth Williams.

Stricken by a sudden, strange moment of madness and nostalgia I bought a restored DVD of CARRY ON COWBOY on a sale about a year ago. I watched 10-minutes of it, turned it off and realized i had bought a frisbee. Attempts to watch other CARRY ON films on TV, VHS or DVD over the years have also found me switching off within minutes.              
 
Nowadays, it's hard to believe we ever watched this sort of lowbrow rubbish, let alone found it funny.

Some truly terrible films deserve to be buried in the past forever, and never resurrected. The CARRY ON films fit in this category. I suppose they have a place in working class British cultural history (and they are, I guess, a small piece of my childhood), but I never ever want to watch a CARRY ON picture again. They belong in the rubbish bin of history. 

* CARRY ON DICK was scheduled to be shown on SABCTV (it had been bought sight unseen) and when I saw it in the TV Guide I immediately pened an article entitled "BANNED FILM TO BE SHOWN ON PRIME-TIME TV ON SATURDAY NIGHT".

The paper loved the story and ran it on page one. After much debate (and articles in every newspaper in the country) the film was pulled from the schedule and replaced with the bland, family-friendly Doris Day/Brian Keith -starring comedy WITH SIX YOU GET EGGROLL (Lol. I was not popular with many members of the public, who felt I should have written the article after the films was screened).

I remember it like it was yesterday. When SABC bureacrat Mr Henk Jordaan phoned me to tell me CARRY ON DICK had been pulled and replaced with WITH SIX YOU GET EGGROLL I said to him "excuse me Mr Jordaan, did you say the replacement film is called WITH SEX YOU GET EGGROLL?"

"No Mr Aubin it is definitely not", he replied, before adding "haven't you caused enough trouble already?"  

That unhinged, boorish British CFB regular and compulsive IMDB reviewer known as SPIKEOPATH loved these films, but the reality is that the CARRY ON films are  crappy movies. They were crappy then, they're crappy now.

Although these pistures were made during the so called 'classic era", they are, in no way, shape or form, classics. Do we really need to celebrate mediocrity Petrolina?

** CARRY ON DICK was later (after my article) passed by the National Party's notorious Publications Control Board" with a No Persons 4 - 12 age restriction (and two cuts).
This was the very same PUBLICATIONS CONTROL BOARD who famously once, briefly, banned Anna Sewell's BLACK BEAUTY (without ever having read it).  
 

carry On Up the Khyber is my favourite - the dinner party scene is just sublime. Abroad probably second, has the craziest finale of any Carry On film. I like most of them, always watch them when they’re on the telly and have all my favourites on dvd. I never get tired of them.

I think they expire after a while - this is quite an old post, I just happened to come across it when I was looking for anything comedy related.  Spying is a good one.