the times | Tuesday May 17 2022 9arts
fuss of them.” His rule that no one star
was bigger than the Carry On name
itself meant that, off screen, everyone
was treated the same regardless of
their sex. All the former Carry On
actresses I spoke to for my book were
thrilled by their involvement in the
films and proud of their legacy.
Exploited? Never, they said.
Leon, a Bond girl who was in six
Carry On films, told me: “I was treated
very well. I saw no difference in my
experience.” It’s clear she remains
thrilled by her part in the franchise,
still giggling at the story of forgetting
her purse at a petrol station one day
on the way to the studios. “The next
day all the newspapers were full of it
— ‘Val’s big bust-up at the garage.’ I
enjoyed the whole thing enormously.
It changed my life.”
Sally Geeson, who appeared in two
of the later titles, Abroad and Girls,
described it for me as “an atmosphere
of total respect and equality”, while
Windsor, who died in December 2020,
famously gave as good as she got, both
on screen and off. On the set of
Camping she loudly accused the
producer of having “his arse in the
marmalade”, sitting in the comfort of
his Rolls-Royce while the cast toiled in
muddy, rain-swept conditions. She
later chuckled on receiving,
anonymously, a Fortnum & Mason
hamper full of the same condiment.
As for the films’ female characters
being objectified and taken advantage
of, Windsor was equally dismissive.
Years later in an interview, she said:
“The ladies in Carry On would always
push the men away. They never
actually got there! They [the films]
were very moral actually.”
Look again at that bra scene in
Carry On Camping. Although she was
youthful in appearance, Windsor was
31, well established and in on the joke.
On screen she was quickly covered up
by the ever-protective Jacques, while
her admirers Sid James and Bernard
Bresslaw were reduced to spectators,
confined in a zipped-up tent.
The only person in “real’’ peril was
Doctor Soaper, his terror articulated
in Williams’s distinctive shrieks.
Windsor recounted afterwards of the
producers’ battles with the film censor
over how much of the scene to
include. Even the censor ultimately
realised the harmlessness of the piece,
reflecting, “I don’t think Miss
Windsor’s right boob is going to
corrupt the nation.”The Carry On films weren’t sexist
Caroline Frost, the
author of a new
book, says we’ve
got it all wrong...
I
t is probably the most famous
scene in all the Carry On films.
“And fling and in, and fling and
in, and fli... ’’ Doiinng. Cue
mayhem as Barbara Windsor
lost her upstairs underwear in
the PE scene in 1969’s Carry On
Camping.
That moment where the actress’s
bra flies through the air and ends up
on the astonished face of Kenneth
Williams might be fondly remembered
by many British men of a certain age,
but is also go-to grist for all those
critics who would have you believe
the comedy franchise to be a series
of sexist, simplistic romps with its
female stars objectified and reduced
to totty, exploited on screen by their
male co-stars and off screen by their
male producers.
Sitting down to watch all 31 films
again in preparation for writing my
book on the series, I thoroughly
expected to find plenty of evidence for
this complaint. Certainly the simple
narratives of the series — its
pantomime humour and the era in
which it was made — demanded that
the female characters, like their male
counterparts, were shoehorned into
stereotypes. They were either stupid
and beautiful with their clothes liable
to fly off or sexually frustrated
harridans unable to get or keep a man.
Yet, from their earliest days in
the late 1950s, the Carry On films
were more sophisticated than they
are remembered for, giving their
female characters opportunities to
shine. Indeed, some of the scripts
were defiantly feminist when there
wasn’t a lot of that about.
Consider the leading ladies of
the series — Hattie Jacques,
Windsor and Joan Sims. They
were all fine actresses who took
pride in creating characters and
never considered themselves
exploited, and what a range of
characters it was: from young,
romance-hungry, chaste (and
chased) and unchaste girls to older
women full of sport and smiles. Sims’s
Lady Ruff-Diamond in Carry On Up
the Khyber was nobody’s victim and
instead was happy to betray the
empire for a turn with the khasi,
Jacques revelled in her regular turn as
the indomitable matron, protecting
her nurses with a beady eye, and
Windsor’s Nurse Sandra May caused a
storm in Carry On Doctor, admiring
that “lovely-looking pear”.
In only the third film of the series,
when it was still in black-and-white
and busy poking fun at familiar
national institutions such as the army,
the NHS, the education system and
the police, it was Jacques, in 1959’s
Carry On Teacher, who reminded us,
“Mischief is a form of self-expression.”
A year later, in Carry On Constable,
her capable Sergeant Laura Moon
mused almost to camera: “Strange,
don’t you think, that the only efficient
rookie is a woman?”In fact, whether it was a rain-soaked
British campsite or pre-Revolutionary
France, invariably it was the inept but
well-intentioned menfolk who caused
the chaos, while it was left to the
women to save the day.
Carry On Nurse, Doctor, Again
Doctor and Matron are all based on
the central, tacitly acknowledged
premise that it is the nurses — paid a
lot less and often patronised — who
are getting on with running the
wards while their snooty superior
male colleagues tie themselves up
in stethoscope knots and have to
be rescued.
Some critics might regard Windsor
in her nurse’s uniform, the constant
subject of the male gaze, as definitive
proof of the films’ exploitation of
women, but this doesn’t really stand
up to scrutiny. While Windsor’s calling
card was her conspiratorial giggle, she
never gave away her agency. Her
characters were always independent
young women who knew their mind,
and no male character ever succeeded
in controlling her. Even in Carry On
Girls, when her character learnt that
the beauty pageant could be fixed, she
refused to take part, opting instead to
get out of town, a petite, proud figure
on a motorbike.
When the series producer Peter
Rogers was asked about the films’
treatment of women, he answered
drily, “Offensive to women? We make aIn the 1960s, Carry
On Jack had the
actress Juliet Mills
disguise herself as a
midshipman to sail
away and find her
lost love, while Carry
On Cabby recognised
that women were no
longer prepared to
stay at home and
cook their husbands’
dinners. Instead the
writer Talbot Rothwell had Jacques’s
girls using their wiles as well as their
brains to steal rival taxi rank
customers away. Even then women
could be smart as well as alluring, and
the Carry On team recognised this.
In what I call the series’ “golden
age’’ of the mid-1960s the female stars
were often limited to playing objects of
male desire — because the films
spoofed pre-existing male-centric
genres, such as Carry On Spying
(James Bond) and Carry On Cowboy
(westerns). Even here, though, Carry
On found space to be a little
subversive, giving their female
characters more agency than the
original films did. In 1970’s Carry On
Up the Jungle Valerie Leon plays Leda,
the chief of the all-female Lubby-
Dubby tribe from the Lost World of
Aphrodisia, and her ersatz
Amazonians quite literally save the
skins of those men around them.Valerie Leon and Jim
Dale in Carry On
Again Doctor. Top:
Kenneth Williams in
Carry On Abroad. Top
right: Barbara Windsor
in Carry On CampingCarry On Regardless:
Getting to the Bottom
of Britain’s Favourite
Comedy Films by
Caroline Frost is
published by White
Owl at £20. The official
launch event is on
Thursday at Chiswick
Cinema, London W4,
eventbrite.co.ukALAMY