‘We didn’t worry about a few dirty laughs!’ The Carry On women on playing nags, bra-burners and ‘crumpet’

I’m watching a clip from the 1969 film Carry on Camping with Valerie Leon. As in, I’m with Leon, in her house in west London, with a plate of Hobnobs, and we’re watching on my phone. But also as in: she’s in the film and she’s watching herself play a sales assistant in a camping shop.

There’s a display tent in the shop, with all sorts of shenanigans going on inside – poking of canvas and cries of: “No, sir, you mustn’t!” before the tent collapses completely. Charles Hawtrey and Leon crawl out, looking guilty and dishevelled. Smoothing down her minidress, Leon explains to the manager: “I’m sorry, Mr Short, but the gentleman kept touching things.”

Hawtrey beams through his round glasses. “Splendid girl, and so helpful,” he tells the manager, after Leon has been sent back to the sales counter. “Do you know, she’s been showing me how to stick the pole up!”

It’s pretty much all there in the clip, Carry On encapsulated. Innuendo and saucy seaside postcard humour? Check. Beautiful, scantily clad young female? Phwoar. High camp (although Kenneth Williams will ramp this up higher as the film progresses)? Ooh, matron! Ogling, lecherous fellas? All present and correct when Bernard Bresslaw and Sid James come into the shop, the latter armed with the dirtiest laugh in the history of cinema.

Over 55 years on from filming the scene, Leon, 80, remembers the lines, hers and Hawtrey’s, and recites along. “She’s been showing me how to stick the pole up!”

This was her second Carry On of six. In her first, Carry on Up the Khyber (1968), she didn’t have any lines, just handed out fruit in a harem. She doesn’t remember much of an audition. “There was a whole bevy of girls; we had to go to Pinewood Studios and get into swimsuits. We were in a long line and they chose who they wanted. That was my audition. You probably couldn’t get away with that now.” We’ll come to that – the not getting away with it now.

Leon’s favourite and biggest Carry On part was in Carry on Up the Jungle (1970), a send-up of the Tarzan story. She played Leda from the Lost World of Aphrodisia, the scantily clad leader of the all-woman Lubby Dubby tribe. She was the boss. “They had to do what I said.”

I interviewed five women who were in Carry On films. Not for any particular reason, but simply because we realised they would now be in their 70s, 80s, 90s … “Or dead. Or dead, darling, or still dead,” says Amanda Barrie, who was in Carry on Cabby and Carry on Cleo (as Cleopatra herself). She’s 88 and still very much alive. But she’s right. Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims, Barbara Windsor? All gone. I saw Leon at home in Chiswick and Jacki Piper at her home a few miles up the Thames in Teddington, with a plate of chocolate-covered ginger biscuits. Barrie, Patricia Franklin and Sheila Hancock I spoke to on the phone.

Hancock in Carry On? Yes, she too was in Carry on Cleo, as Senna Pod, an English caveman’s nagging wife. “In those days, women were always nags or tits ’n’ arse – those were our roles.” she says. “The nagging wife is such a fucking cliche.” Hancock, 91, had a very young baby at the time, looked after in the dressing room by her mum. She had to rush out for feeds during breaks in the nagging.

All five have fond memories of their roles in the Carry On story. For Franklin – the farmer’s daughter in Carry on Camping, pregnant by … well, she never actually found out his name – it was because of the people she worked with, particularly the women. “All those women are so clever. Joan and Barbara, they know how to set up a joke. Their timing is wonderful.”

Franklin was just out of Rada, and in a play in the West End, when she got the part. Piper and Barrie juggled screen and stage, often dashing off after a long day filming in Pinewood to a theatre in central London in the evening – in Barrie’s case, scraping off her heavy Cleopatra makeup on the journey. Piper remembers asking the Carry On producer Peter Rogers if they provided a car. “He nearly fell off his chair. He said: ‘You either have a car and no salary or a salary and no car.’” She got £500 for her first Carry On film, Carry on Up the Jungle, in which she plays a prim maidservant, who during a dip in a jungle pool meets Ug, the Tarzan character, loses her primness and moves into his tree house for some basic English lessons and a lot of rumpy-pumpy.

There was a family feeling about the cast. “They were all so kind to me and so helpful,” says Barrie.

Hancock says: “We were all comedy people – it was a bit of a laugh. Everybody was outdoing one another with funny stories.”

As well as telling stories, Kenneth Williams would play pranks. “Charles Hawtrey used to come to the studio with a plastic bag,” Leon says. “In it would be a sandwich, his Woodbines and his newspaper. And most days Kenny Williams would hide this bag, so when Charlie was ready to sit down, have his lunch and read his paper, he couldn’t find it. It caused huge upsets.”

Hancock says Hawtrey was “a marvellous, eccentric original. There are not many genuine eccentrics in the world – people pretend to be eccentric – but he was.” James used to get Piper to put bets on for him at the bookies. Barrie, too. Windsor went to bed with him. Everyone loved James.

Barrie couldn’t drive, which was a problem in Carry on Cabby, when she was supposed to drive a taxi. “The crew had to get a tow rope and pull me out of shot.” In Carry on Cleo, someone left the heater on in the bath of donkey milk and her foot was burned when she dipped it in. The set for Cleo was a lot more lavish than others, because the epic movie Cleopatra, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, had just been filmed at Pinewood, so they used a lot of the set and costumes from that film, as well as sending it up. Barrie heard that Burton had watched and enjoyed Carry on Cleo.

Not everyone was a fan, though. Barrie was offered further Carry Ons after Cleo. “But my agent said: ‘You’re not doing that – you’re going to Bristol Old Vic.’” Franklin agrees there was a snobbery towards them and that they were looked down on. “At a family thing, someone might say: ‘Patricia is in a Carry On,’ and a lot of people would say: ‘Oh, I’m not interested in Carry Ons.’ But then others were absolutely mad about it. I was in a play at the National with Anthony Hopkins and he said he loved the Carry Ons and had always wanted to be in one.”

I watched Carry On films as a kid in the 70s and loved them – chuckled along happily. Rewatching them now is interesting. There are still chuckles. Williams’ famous Caesar line in Cleo – “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me” – is a pun, but it’s a very good pun. In the same film, Senna Pod’s husband, Hengist, inventing the square wheel (which then gets repurposed as a cave window-frame) is still funny. In Camping, I enjoyed it when the farmer says to his pregnant daughter (Franklin): “All that money I spent on a posh education, trying to make a lady out of you, and you haven’t even got the manners to ask: ‘With who am I having the pleasure?’” They are all very skilful comedy players.

But, in with the chuckles, there’s quite a lot of groaning, too: the innuendo bombardment is now a little tiresome. Piper remembers something Sims, whom she became very friendly with, used to do when she got a new script. “She would always check where ‘Oh, what a big one’ would appear, because it always used to appear somewhere. ‘Maybe page 20, page … oh, I found it: page 21!’ ‘Oh, what a big one.’ I said it to Sid when he had a gun in Carry on Up the Jungle.”

Other bits will have today’s viewers wincing rather than groaning. Up the Khyber, set in colonial India, has some dodgy racial stereotypes, while in Up the Jungle (set somewhere in Africa) Bresslaw wears blackface to play a man called Upsidasi. As Piper says, the Black and White Minstrel show was on primetime TV at the time and would continue to be so for another eight years. “It seemed normal.”

Then there’s the biggest “ism” of all, the dirty seam that runs through the Carry On franchise. The female roles were mainly just objects of male sexual desire (apart from the nagging wives, obviously). “Tits ’n’ arse”, as Hancock says, or “crumpet”, to use a word James’s characters often did. It was an affliction that infected the industry, says Piper. When she was starting out in the business, she would have meetings with film people – directors and producers – “and they’d want me to have operations to make my boobs bigger, or change my nose, or the circles under my eyes. I always said: ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want to do any of these things.’”

Leon remembers writing to Rogers to say she had broadened her experience and hoped to have the pleasure of working for him again. “And he wrote back saying: ‘Dear Valerie, as long as experience is the only thing you’ve broadened, there’s every chance you’ll be working with us again.’”

The male characters, meanwhile, ogled and whistled and sometimes slapped. Not just on screen in Carry On, and in the industry, but in the world outside. “Everyone did then,” says Piper. “You couldn’t walk past a building site without getting whistled. It’s amazing what was normal at the time. It’s only when you look back you get perspective and think: ‘Gosh, that was terrible.’”

Hancock admits that the Carry On films are “totally unacceptable” by modern standards. But, again, it seemed normal at the time. “That’s what we did – until Dawn and Jennifer and Victoria [French, Saunders and Wood] came along and wrote their own material. We were doing material written by boys. To be honest, I didn’t question it in those days. Until I read Germaine Greer, I didn’t understand those things, really. I just did it. It was a job.”

Leon is thrilled to have been part of the Carry On story. “I think they’re escapism and take you back to a gentler, more fun life. We don’t live in a fun world any more.” Barrie says: “I get a bit worried about the wokey-wokey. You couldn’t do it now – but there are so many things you can’t do now. I don’t think they were harmful.” They were of their time in another way, too, with most of the cast and audiences having lived through darker moments. “We’d only just come out of world war two, so a few dirty laughs we weren’t all that worried about.”

And some positive things came from Carry On. Barrie says that the public started to accept homosexuality by way of the gay comics around at the time, not least Williams and Frankie Howerd (who appeared in Carry on Doctor and Carry on Up the Jungle). Franklin agrees: “It was just on the cusp of everything changing, acceptance of homosexuality in public life, and it was wonderful.”

In Carry on Girls, Franklin plays one of a group of bra-burning women’s libbers who set out to sabotage the beauty contest James has arranged at the end of Fircombe (!) pier. She says she didn’t play the part as overtly gay, “more as indecisive about her sexuality, but I certainly played her that she had a bit of a crush on June”. That’s Whitfield, who played the outraged feminist councillor and leader of the antis.

Barrie went a stage further, in real life, when she married a woman, the crime writer Hilary Bonner, although that was a while after Carry On, in 2014. “And I had married a man before,” she laughs. “I thought I’d just move it around a bit.”

She has no regrets about sitting in the bath in Carry on Cleo, with James’s Mark Antony “leching” down at her. “In retrospect, I’m glad, because that little person sitting there, up to her bits in milk, has served me well over the years. So many people have been so nice about it. A bit of objectification, if that’s the word, hasn’t done me any harm at all.”

The women’s liberation protest with Franklin in Carry on Girls might be some kind of acknowledgment of disapproval. And they do succeed in sabotaging the event, sprinkling itching powder in the contestants’ swimsuits and pouring washing-up liquid on the catwalk. But I have an idea whose side the film-makers – and almost certainly most of the audience of the time – were on; the scene is less a feminist statement, more an excuse to show a gaggle of women (including Leon) in swimsuits, wriggling, slipping and falling over.

I watched these films on the streaming platform ITVX, where they come with warnings. Carry on Up the Jungle flags language and attitudes of the time, including the use of blackface. Others warn of sexual references, innuendo, adult humour, brief nudity (when Windsor’s bra pings off in a morning exercise session in Carry on Camping). There’s no warning of overt sexism.

But the most critical of the five women I spoke to, Hancock, doesn’t condemn Carry On films for not being on-message and certainly doesn’t want to see them cancelled. “I think they would be good things for youngsters to study, and talk about why they’re unacceptable and silly now, and see how they think differently about it.”

So I tried watching Carry on Girls with my 10-year-old. He did find it silly, but also funny – especially, I’m afraid, the end-of-the-pier beauty pageant with the itching and sliding. I think we probably need to have a little chat.

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