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Thursday 4 December 2008

What a carry on

James Walton suggests reading George Orwell in order to understand the appeal of Carry On films

In most countries, Kenneth Williams would surely be the campest actor imaginable. Here, he’s not even the campest actor visible — at least not when Charles Hawtrey’s around. Then there’s the fact that the romantic lead is often played by Sid James, a battered-looking Jewish bloke in his fifties whose past life — vigorously hushed up by James himself — included many years as the finest ladies’ hairdresser in Johannesburg. The acme of female desirability, meanwhile, is represented by Barbara Windsor.

Even so, these were the movies that packed out the cinemas during Britain’s years as the swingingest nation on earth. Of course, in trying to explain their success, it’s traditional to point out what a working-class country Britain was until Mrs Thatcher got her hands on it — and to stress their seaside-postcard origins. Of course, too, both things are true. In preparation for this piece, I read several academic articles on the Carry Ons — many of them containing the word ‘transgressive’. Nonetheless, the sharpest insight into the films’ appeal comes in an essay written 17 years before the first one was made. In The Art of Donald McGill, George Orwell famously paid tribute to the greatest seaside-postcard man of them all. Yet, if you substitute the words ‘Carry On films’ for ‘McGill postcards’, the essay still makes eerily perfect sense.

Here’s Orwell, for example, listing some of the conventions of the postcards’ jokes about sex: ‘Marriage only benefits the woman. Every man is plotting seduction and every woman is plotting marriage. No woman ever remains unmarried voluntarily.’ Elsewhere, he notes that ‘the Suffragette, one of the big jokes of the pre-1914 period, has reappeared, unchanged, as the Feminist lecturer’ — which can’t help but remind some of us of Augusta Prodworthy (June Whitfield) whose Operation Killjoy wrecks the beauty contest at Furcombe in Carry On Girls.

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