When I was growing up in the 1980s, grey Sunday afternoons were invariably spent in front of a Carry On film, while the adults snoozed in armchairs. Despite the homophobic jibes, the fat gags and the relentless groping of female characters, the films were seen as the ultimate in family entertainment. They didn’t seem so bad at the time. At the very least, we can credit Carry On Cleo, which starred Kenneth Williams as a neurotic Caesar, with giving us one of the great comic lines: “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.”
Nowadays we might reasonably look upon the worst of the Carry On franchise as we do an elderly relative whose generous distribution of Werther’s Originals is accompanied by a stream of low-level bigotry. Certainly, primitive sight gags around bursting cleavages, and scripts that did somersaults in order to get Williams to utter the word “queer”, are more likely to make us cringe than cackle. As for the “browning up” of Bernard Bresslaw in Carry On Up the Khyber, let’s not even go there. And yet, Carry On nostalgia endures both in the national consciousness and in the intermittent efforts of film producers to reanimate the brand.
Continue reading...posted from The Guardian
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