That's Carry On!

Hunting through the archives in their local cinema, Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor dig out all the old classics and settled down to watch them while eating out of a hamper. The structure (as if to suggest there is one) involves them playing a few clips from each movie as they make regular quips in between. As always with the series, originality and production values were not always top of the agenda and so this idea was ripped off from the success of MGM's That's Entertainment so the Carry On producers were trying to get more money out of very little.

Of course some of the clips are funny but if you are a fan you'll have seen them all before and will actually enjoy the films themselves rather than just watching the clips (and this isn't aimed at fans then who is it aimed at?). Not all the movies were much good though and it reflects in the fact that many of the clips are not that funny either. The interruptions (as the credits say) by Williams and Windsor all feel very cheap and lacking in imagination – there is a fine line between witty innuendo and out & out crudity and they are way, way over that line here with a shed load of unimaginative and crude jokes around body parts, sex and going to the toilet. Of course this will not be too much of a shock to those who have seen any of the films but it is the way it is done here that put me off.

Of course being a clips show we can't pick which ones we one to watch and therefore are lumbered with a lot of poor material just to get to the better stuff (much like the series over all) so I'd say just cherry pick the films themselves; that way you can select the better films, ignore the lesser ones and you won't have to put up with some real sub-par crudity from Williams and Windsor in cheap, dated clothing, not ever really putting the effort into it at all.

Well, hardly the best of.

If I were wanting to introduce someone to Carry On, I wouldn't recommend this. It wasn't full or complete.

For some reason it showed more of Carry On Camping and the Khyber one. I thought I was watching the actual movie of one of them, so much scene was being shown.

But there were great moments from other movies that weren't shown, which was a shame.

Williams and Windsor did dish out their dialogue in the connecting bits very well.

I especially liked Williams talking about how he would only listen to or work with someone who was clearly more intelligent than he, he worded it much better than that, and the clip from "Carry On Regardless" when he was walking the monkey was shown.

Altho I now stand at having only seen half the series, the first half, that is, I do think there was more to the Carry On movies than what this hilight reel states.

But I was disappointed that the theme music from the first five Carry Ons was dismissed with Cruising. What a pity.

No idea how that music would have sounded with "Carry On Cowboy" or "Carry on Screaming" but I think someone who was half creative could have figured something out.

Carry on.

This is rather a lackluster "Best Of" compilation overall; it takes a more-or-less chronological look at the series but then omits entirely the most recent effort up to that time i.e. CARRY ON ENGLAND (1976)! Linking material features stalwarts Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor mugging and witlessly chatting; however, no real discussion is made on how the series evolved to begin with…or, for that matter, any background given on individual performers.

Some of the series highlights are seen, to be sure – and Williams does single out his role in CARRY ON...UP THE KHYBER (1968; scenes from which open and close this film) as being his personal favorite – but, watched out of context, they just don't have the desired effect (even if several of them came from entries I viewed only recently)!

Carrying On Inappropriately with That's Carry On! (1977).

A series of films carried on, with perpetual double entendre, loved to finger an organ, unleash melons to gorge on, baps, flaps, jugs, bazookas went ding dong.

Though it's not quite so funny today, Fanny plays with her balls in new ways, Dick's choppers been cut, Kitty's curtains are shut, the clams gone from splayed to being spayed.

What an awful sequence of films these were, revisited today, they demonstrate just how out of touch and offensive the so called humour of yesteryear was, and how a generation of inappropriate behaviour was considered acceptable.

Carrying On Inappropriately with That's Carry On! (1977).

That's Carry On! Barely qualifies as a film, more a glorified clip show that gets occasionally interrupted by witty observations or general larking around from Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor hanging about the projection room of Pinewood Studios. It may have been a well-deserved anniversary, but this one also highlights how the series has steadily declined as the ensemble cast grew older and the gags began to wear thin. There's a definite mercenary feel to the production, the impossible-to-ignore realisation that this was purely made to wring a few more coins out of a by-then jaded movie-going public. The Carry On stable had long since been on the wane and the wraparound filler material is incredibly feeble compared to the good old days. The times had changed and That's Carry On! Feels more like a death knell than a cause for celebration. If anything it gave me time to reflect on why I enjoy watching these performers in increasingly absurdist circumstances during everyday or period settings come rain or shine. I wish ITV would bother to do a full Blu-ray release of the series given the DVD boxset I've been watching has been enormously hit-and-miss in terms of presentation.