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Friday 5 December 2008

What a carry on

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

Orwell’s central argument, though, is that McGill’s postcards essentially undermine all attempts at human grandeur. What might seem merely an obsession with bodily functions actually represents ‘the voice of the belly protesting against the soul’. They also blow ‘a chorus of raspberries’ on behalf of ‘the millions of common men to whom the high sentiments’ aimed at them by politicians and social reformers ‘make no appeal’.

In the case of the Carry Ons, the targets for such grandeur-undermining raspberries are especially wide-ranging. The first few films systematically took on all the institutions designed to control Britain’s citizens, from National Service (Carry On Sergeant) to the police (Carry On Constable). After that, as the series headed into its Sixties Golden Age, more or less everything was fair game — including the British Empire (Carry On Up the Khyber), the British Navy (Carry On Jack) and the heroes of antiquity (Carry On Cleo, where Mark Antony, Julius Caesar and Cleopatra become ‘Tony’, ‘Julie’ and ‘that bird who rules Egypt’). As for the grandeur of religion, Carry On Up the Khyber has a celebrated raspberry for that, too — The Khasi: ‘May the radiance of the god Shivoo light up your life.’ Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond: ‘And up yours.’

Even the way the films were made could be said to have blown a raspberry at the supposed grandeur of cinema itself, with the strict six-week shoots enabling the same producer/director team of Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas to knock out 30 titles in 20 years — before the ill-advised coda of Carry On Columbus in 1992. Nor, needless to say, is the sex ever of a solemn Lawrentian kind. After all, no male character in Lawrence ever makes love in the approved Carry On way — by saying ‘Phwoar!’ and taking a running jump, fully-clothed, to join his partner on a bed which then collapses. Furthermore, as Orwell also spotted, ‘The McGill postcard is not intended as pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography.’

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