Carry on Laughing: A Celebration

by Adrian Rigelsford

This work chronicles the history of the Carry On phenomenon, which includes 30 feature films, a TV series and stage shows. The book examines the making of the films and TV shows, and looks at censorship problems, reviews, press-campaigns, box office figures and the realms of publicly acceptable taste. It also contains never-before-published interviews with Sid James, Kenneth Williams and Peter Butterworth, alongside photographs taken on the film sets.

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Adrian Rigelsford was born in Cambridgeshire. He is a writer and long-time fan of Doctor Who and has conducted interviews for periodicals including Radio Times, Film Review, Fantasy Zone and Movies and Doctor Who Magazine. He wrote the script for The Dark Dimension, an unproduced story intended to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Doctor Who. It would have starred all the surviving Doctors.

Reviews

[Baba · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty frank and honest look at how the Carry On franchise started up, ran and finished with a foreword by Barbara Windsor. Jam-packed with quotes, anecdotes and informative bits about the likes of Jacques, James, Hawtrey, Williams, Windsor and the production team. 7 out of 12, Three Stars, ooh matron!

2012 read

[Andy Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s certainly not the most politically correct film series there has ever been, but you can’t deny that the Carry On films were massively popular and certainly of their time in the 1960s and 1970s. Mind you, overt sexism and not so casual racism was of its time in that period too so whatever enjoyment one derived from what have become comedy classics has to be tempered by that sobering fact. This book details the history of Carry On and its inexorable rise and then fall - after a film lampooning trade unions at a strike-hit toilet factory bombed at the box office because ordinary working people didn’t take kindly to be depicted as strike happy idle laggards. The casts of these films read like a Who’s Who of British light entertainment, with Bob Monkhouse, Sheila Hancock, John Pertwee, Geoffrey Hughes (Eddie Yates from Corrie), Bill Maynard, Kenny Lynch and Roy Castle joining the more established names of Sid James, Hattie Jacques, Kenneth Williams et al over the years. My personal Carry On fave is Carry On Up the Khyber. If only the strap line had been “an excoriating critique of the British Raj’s racist policies on the sub-continent”, it could have been an art house classic. Nearly.

[Michael P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book about a film series that is not very good. The book is quite informative but not the sort of book you want to read cover to cover. Keep it around and if you can force yourself to watch one of the Carry On films, read the corresponding portions of this book and you will have a greater appreciation for the movie by knowing something about what went on behind the scenes.