April 28, 2012 |
Long ago, I watched Carry on Camping in a hotel room with a photographer’s assistant in New York who was cute. He didn’t get it. And then he wasn’t cute. I watched Carry on Columbus and I didn’t get it. That’s the one from the early 1990s: not right. These films have to contain blouses with frills and plenty of ugly-beautiful shoes with blocky heels to be right.
I like colour more than I do black and white, which tends to turn slower. It’s colour but it’s a blousy colour and in, say, Carry on at Your Convenience, it’s painterly, especially at the seaside on the company charabanc.
Between 1958 and 1979 there were 29 Carry on films made at Pinewood Studios on the outskirts of London, produced and directed by Gerald Thomas and produced by Peter Rogers. They’re bawdy and are delectable and you watch with crisps on rainy Sundays or bank holidays, or if you’re ill, or pretending to be ill.
I like the homes in Carry on films. I like spider plants in smart pots on windowsills and tablecloths, teapots, antimacassars laid on the back of brown sofas and budgies in cages on stands in corners and tea out on time and fried eggs and breakfast bars and serving hatches. I like embossed wallpaper and flowery carpets, and I’m all for nets and women in hairnets.
The women in Carry on films are net twitchers. The men go to work and are klutzes and bunglers and skirt-chasers or sometimes art fags. And women can be secretaries (Carry on at Your Convenience) or nurses (Carry on Nurse, Carry on Doctor, Carry on Again Doctor, Carry on Matron) and they can be successful and usher in a new kind of woman, like an Augusta Prodworthy character, played by June Whitfield in Carry on Girls – she’s Fircombe’s formidable women’s libber. A bossy 1973 Margaret Thatcher-alike in navy wool crepe trouser suits and block heeled brown patent shoes with a power set that looked like the kind of crispy hair common after lacquer and a sit-down helmet dryer.
Carry on Girls has a really special fem called Cecil Gaybody, played by Jimmy Logan (“fem” is fag chat for pansy). He wears a delicious canary-yellow shirt and neckerchief with a neckerchief ring, and a purple peaked hat; he’s big business fem and in no way “toppy”.
The power of many of the fems in the films is all in the head. No power comes from the body. The mouth has power, as is traditional in the portrayal of fems: snippy lines, lisping, fey, a sexual predator. I think fems on film are untapped inspirations, and their indigo (a deeper pink) and gesticulating sexuality is totally gorgeous. The nearest we have to this gesticulation these days are new-way voguers who draw interconnected circles in the air with their arms, sometimes in drag.
Crisp, Mr Humphries, Carry on’s Charles Hawtrey, Dick Emery’s Clarence – the British traditional fems have something. I don’t think they’re anti-gay. We’ll come to see that sexuality has many colourful expressions and fems (exaggerated portraits on TV or real) are part of that. “Many of my friends are fem.”
In Carry on Girls, a group of women have come to a seaside town to take part in a beauty pageant; a catfight breaks out between two of them. I like their beauty-pageant swimsuits. One girl, Dawn Brakes, played by Margaret Nolan, is sitting on a donkey in a hotel foyer and wears a silver bikini; she has massive “jugs”, her buxom anatomy half-ballooned over her tiny top – her tiny top can barely contain its pendulous carriage. Another black girl is in orange hot pants that form part of her two-piece; it’s a monstrous colour. It looks engineered, the orange on curtains found in village halls where young kids in judo suits pay 50p to mess about a lot on fizzy pop and biscuits. I’m fascinated by these unnatural colours of the late 1960s and early 1970s that came in with the new poly fabrications.
The fight ensues: Barbara Windsor, who plays Hope Springs, starts it. The silver two-piece belongs to Windsor, not the girl who’s wearing it. The girl has nicked it from Windsor; it’s the kind of creaking denouement I enjoy in the films. The fight rumbles on: over a sofa Windsor and the girl fall, on all fours now, flashing the gusset, tons of gusset. There are tits, too, and white fleshy arses everywhere. The women are beautiful; it’s a carnival of bikini tops and tits and knickers but they’re not fat, they’re trim. Sarah Shotton, the brains at Agent Provocateur, calls this scene “spanky bottom”.
A hairpiece is pulled and launched somewhere. Windsor, she must have been mid-thirties when this was made in 1973, has a detached cropped hairdo with height on the top that has been heavily lacquered. The women are glamorous. Some prudes make funny faces nearby and a tin whistle goes “Whoop!”
“Trump!” That’s the noise when somebody puts two fingers up to a figure of authority in, say, a factory or to perhaps to a foreigner (probably German). I suspect these sound effects originated from a tradition that started in the theatre. “Twang!” and “Doing!” are also popular.
The Feminist League in Carry on Girls, a bunch on housewives in knitted waistcoats and checked flares and long gold, but absolutely not real gold, necklaces, plus an intransigently butch dyke in a to-die-for trouser suit with pageboy haircut and mannish lace-ups, try to forcibly stop the ill-fated beauty pageant taking place. All are a tongue-in-cheek lampoon of the feminists of the day. Again, they remind me of early theatre, of characters who are easy to understand and are terribly English. They represent facets of English society from the past 50 years, and I suspect before that, too. They don’t need lines. This is very music hall.
The Carry on of all Carry on films is Carry on at Your Convenience, a tale of union revolt in a WC manufacturers: “Everybody out” shouts the “Red Ken” shop steward after the slightest wrangle between shop floor and middle management, a reflection of the skewed power of the unions then.
I like how, on a works day away, in Convenience, they go to the seaside on a coach and they all stop off at pubs and then on a country lane for a communal wee. The men go to one side of a wood and the women the other. I adore Kenneth Williams, who I think was something approaching genius, and those intoxicating “Oh”s and the laugh!
We all must perch cardigans on our shoulders and wear lavender shirts, like Joan Sims in the seaside scene. This is absolutely essential. Sims wears a gold belt around the waist of her shirt. I think you should keep tissues up your sleeve – all colours – or in your boxy patent handbags.
Women are the primary power in all the films, despite the men, generally, playing positions of authority – sergeant, king, doctor, etc. It’s the women who hold everything together. The matriarch figure of matron Hattie Jacques with her humungous bosom, a huge figure of a woman, embodies absolute order, that is until she falls in love with the fey Kenneth Williams doctor character time and again in the four most commercially successful of the Carry ons, the hospital romps.
Carry on Screaming! from 1966 stars Fenella Fielding – “You’ll roar with laughter” insists the cinema trailer. She is an emo antiheroine in a raspberry velvet (it’s a bit Romeo Gigli) gown with long sleeves and backcombed, slightly thinning goth hair: pre-cursor Elvira. She has lipstick the colour of a bloody nose, kohl crayon eyes and nylon lashes. She’s white and powdered and her heels are black and high. It’s a dom look, and a little underground, more fetish than fairground.
There are more beautiful jugs and wobbly arses and men in brown trunks in Carry on Camping, when a trip to a countryside campsite turns into yet another bawdy farce. Babs wears tiny sporty shorts, boyishly cut and chic, and a crew-neck short-sleeved knitted tee. Modesty comes from a revere-collared, pastel-tangerine-y Baracuta jacket – zip-front, très sportive with a white strip above the pocket on her left breast – that looks Rodriguez or Lang and modern. Tiny heels on shoes and a light brown patent box bag in leather, the strap hanging from her wrist, are spectacular gestures. Her walk on grass gives her a whimsical carriage; she looks vulnerable and chic but powerful.
In my world we all can all be fems and bawdy and have gorgeous tits. And wish for this.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/carry_on_(film_series)
by Richard Gray
Richard Gray is online editor of The Sunday Times Style
