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No one could say that the Carry On movies stretched their female stars, or paid them generously. But, decades later, Amanda Barrie, Valerie Leon, Sheila Hancock and co have fond memories

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.

If you listen closely, every year around October 1st you’ll start to hear things go bump in the night… but don’t worry, instead of g-g-g-ghoooosts it’s mostly just the sound of props department interns who have been made to stay late and dig out boxes of bat bunting, dry ice machines and facepaint ready for another round of Halloween TV specials.

Halloween episodes are now a spooky season staple on both sides of the pond, but while the US has been producing Halloween hits like It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and The Flintstones’ ‘A Haunted House is Not A Home’ since the early 1960s, the American tradition didn’t properly catch on in the UK until the 1970s.

Dig through the archives, and – while a couple of spooky stories were read out on Jackanory in the late 1960s, including Doctor Who’s own Jon Pertwee’s memorable reading of Ghoulies,...

A sprig of roaring power emo with your grime, madam? Side of jazz soul? Dash of playlist indie? The modern Reading Festival is an eclectic beast. For the first 45 or so years since one of the oldest existing popular music festivals settled in Reading, through periods of prog, hard rock, metal and indie dominance, it acted as the place that anyone who wasn’t interested in pop music could make their summer second home. Since around 2018, though, it’s faced an identity crisis. What do you do when your core niche – rock music – no longer sells the tickets you have to shift?

Reading & Leeds’s answer has been an attempt to become all festivals to all people – well, all glitter-smothered students clothed largely in netting. The 2022 festival, as a result, resembles three different festivals for the price of one. Friday is akin to a condensed Wireless, headed by rap and grime but accepting all-comers.

A sprig of roaring power emo with your grime, madam? Side of jazz soul? Dash of playlist indie? The modern Reading Festival is an eclectic beast. For the first 45 or so years since the oldest existing popular music festival settled in Reading, through periods of prog, hard rock, metal and indie dominance, it acted as the place that anyone who wasn’t interested in pop music could make their summer second home. Since around 2018, though, it’s faced an identity crisis. What do you do when your core niche – rock music – no longer sells the tickets you have to shift?

Reading & Leeds’s answer has been to attempt to become all festivals to all people. The 2022 edition, as a result, resembles three different festivals for the price of one, and originally looked like R&l crystalising its regenerated identity after several confused years in the stylistic wilderness, when it pandered...

Much of Ealing Studios’ core appeal begins right here, with T.E.B. Clarke’s astute look at the character of pragmatic, energetic Londoners, who in this fantasy face an outrageous situation with spirit, pluck, and a determination not to be cheated. What happens when a few square blocks of London discover that they’re no longer even part of the British Empire? A classic of wartime ‘adjustments,’ the ensemble comedy even begins with a Tex Avery- like ode to rationing.

Passport to Pimlico

Blu-ray

Film Movement Classics

1949 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 84 min. / Street Date December 20, 2019 / 29.95

Starring: Stanley Holloway, Hermione Baddeley, Margaret Rutherford, Sydney Tafler, Betty Warren, Barbara Murray, Paul Dupuis, John Slater, Jane Hylton, Raymond Huntley, Philip Stainton, Roy Carr, Nancy Gabrielle, Malcolm Knight, Roy Gladdish, Frederick Piper, Charles Hawtrey, Stuart Lindsell, Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford, Gilbert Davis, Michael Hordern, Arthur Howard, Bill Shine, Harry Locke, Sam Kydd.

Cinematography: Lionel...

Stage and screen actor best known for her roles in the Carry On films and as Cynthia Kite in the 1959 classic I’m All Right Jack

The actor Liz Fraser, who has died aged 88, specialised in comedy in a career that stretched from cough and spit parts in 1950s Ealing Studios films to a guest star suspect in the latest series of Midsomer Murders (2018). She also worked with Tony Hancock and Sid James, and starred in the classic I’m All Right Jack (1959) with Peter Sellers, but her long and varied career was almost inevitably overshadowed by her membership of the Carry On team.

The slap and tickle British film institution of innuendo and pratfall, awash with music hall one-liners, Carry On celebrates its 60th anniversary this year and remains as popular as ever, a reassuring never-never land of off-colourjokes, whose occasional sexism, racism and homophobia is somehow muted by...

Stars: Will Hay, Charles Hawtrey, Peter Croft, Barry Morse, Peter Ustinov, Anne Firth, Frank Pettingell, Leslie Harcourt, Julien Mitchell, Jeremy Hawk, Raymond Lovell | Written by Angus MacPhail, John Dighton | Directed by Basil Dearden, Will Hay

I always enjoy reviewing re-releases of old films, they remind us – and in some cases introduce us to – some classics. One such release is The Goose Steps Out which is getting a special 75th Anniversary release, and is a comedy great from the 1940s…

Will Hay plays William Pots, a bumbling teacher who turns out to be the double of a German general. Sent to Germany to impersonate the general and steal a new bomb the Nazis are working on, he finds himself having to teach a group of students how to spy on the British.

Watching The Goose Steps Out it is easy to see this was a piece of propaganda used to...

Author: Competitions

To mark the release of The Goose Steps Out 75th Anniversary Edition on 15th May, we’ve been given 3 copies to give away on Blu-ray.

Inept schoolmaster William Potts (Will Hay: Oh, Mr Porter!, The Black Sheep of Whitehall) is mistaken for a Nazi spy by British Intelligence. When the real spy is captured, Potts is sent to Germany in his place to intercept plans for a new Nazi secret weapon being thought up by inebriate Professor Hoffman (Frank Pettingell: The Remarkable Mr Kipps). Upon his arrival Potts takes charge of a group of trainee spies and, in his own unorthodox fashion, teaches them the manners and customs of the British. Among the young spies are three pro-British Austrians (Charles Hawtrey: Carry On Films, Peter Ustinov: Poirot: Death on the Nile & Barry Morse: The Fugitive TV series), who question Potts’s true motives yet...

ITV3 has announced that it will celebrate the Carry On films with a new documentary series.

The channel will air three-part documentary Carry On Forever across Easter Bank Holiday weekend, with some of the best-loved Carry On films also being aired back to back.

Martin Clunes will narrate the documentary, which features interviews with stars Kenneth Williams, Sid James, Charles Hawtrey, Joan Sims and Barbara Windsor.

Carry On Forever will also feature never-before-seen footage from behind the scenes of the movies. The cast will reunite as well in some of the film series's most iconic locations.

Amanda Barrie, Liz Fraser, Bernard Cribbins, Juliet Mills, Sally Geeson, June Whitfield, Shirley Eaton, Fenella Fielding and Jim Dale will also feature in the three-part series.

Mark Robinson, executive producer at Shiver, said: "Carry On is the most successful and best-loved brand in British movie comedy history, influencing generations of comedians.

"Stars like Sid James,...

ITV3 has announced that it will celebrate the Carry On films with a new documentary series.

The channel will air three-part documentary Carry On Forever across Easter Bank Holiday weekend, with some of the best-loved Carry On films also being aired back to back.

Martin Clunes will narrate the documentary, which features interviews with stars Kenneth Williams, Sid James, Charles Hawtrey, Joan Sims and Barbara Windsor.

Carry On Forever will also feature never-before-seen footage from behind the scenes of the movies. The cast will reunite as well in some of the film series's most iconic locations.

Amanda Barrie, Liz Fraser, Bernard Cribbins, Juliet Mills, Sally Geeson, June Whitfield, Shirley Eaton, Fenella Fielding and Jim Dale will also feature in the three-part series.

Mark Robinson, executive producer at Shiver, said: "Carry On is the most successful and best-loved brand in British movie comedy history, influencing generations of comedians.

"Stars like Sid James,...

Feature Alex Westthorp 28 Mar 2014 - 07:00

In a new series, Alex talks us through the film roles of the actors who've played the Doctor. First up, William Hartnell and Jon Pertwee...

We know them best as the twelve very different incarnations of the Doctor. But all the actors who've been the star of Doctor Who, being such good all-rounders in the first place, have also had film careers. Admittedly, some CVs are more impressive than others, but this retrospective attempts to pick out some of the many worthwhile films which have starred, featured or seen a fleeting cameo by the actors who would become (or had been) the Doctor.

William Hartnell was, above all else, a film star. He is by far the most prolific film actor of the main twelve to play the Time Lord. With over 70 films to his name, summarising Hartnell's film career is difficult at best.

Prolific comedy actor who worked with Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan and Hattie Jacques

The stony-faced, beaky comedy actor Graham Stark, who has died aged 91, is best remembered for his appearances alongside Peter Sellers, notably in the Pink Panther movies. His familiar face and voice, on television and radio, were part of the essential furniture in the sitting room of our popular culture for more than half a century. A stalwart in the national postwar comedy boom led by Sellers, Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, Dick Emery, Eric Sykes and Benny Hill, he worked with them all in a sort of unofficial supporting repertory company that also included Hattie Jacques, Deryck Guyler, Patricia Hayes and Arthur Mullard. He was also a man of surprising and various parts: child actor, trained dancer, film-maker, occasional writer, and dedicated and critically acclaimed photographer.

Like Gypsy Rose Lee, he had a resourceful and determined...

Like five million viewers every Tuesday night, Digital Spy has become addicted to the Great British Bake Off. Soggy bottoms. Mary Berry's buns. Paul Hollywood's eight inches of sausage. Pies, meringues, tarts, latices, doughnuts, pastries, bagels... We can't get enough of it. But who has been your favourite baker so far and who do you think is going to win the crown of Britain's best amateur baker? Seven contestants remain in with a shout of claiming the trophy. [Great British Bake Off - Meet the contestants]

Current Star Baker and leader of the pack is cheeky 63-year-old Brendan. The Irish man with a dash of '70s flair, he knows his way around a torte and brings a mixture of Charles Hawtrey camp and Demon Headmaster steeliness to the kitchen. Jazzy jumper specialist James Morton and floppy-haired finger-chopping John Whaite (more)...

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Although Ealing Studios did not exclusively make comedies – actually, less than ten percent of their output was comic – it is the run of comedies from the late ’40s into the ’50s that the studio is best remembered for, and it’s not difficult to see why. Under the leadership of Michael Balcon, the legendary British producer who also founded Gainsborough Pictures, they produced incredibly sharp, witty and likeable comedies ranging from the whimsy of a film like Passport to Pimlico to the razor-sharp black comedy of Kind Hearts and Coronets, also released in 1949.

The movies were quintessentially British, and often got funnier as they got darker precisely because the characters had to uphold good British virtues while getting away with political upheaval (Passport to Pimlico), theft (The Lavender Hill Mob, one of their best) or murder (Kind Hearts and Coronets). This paradox is prevalent in Passport to Pimlico,...

Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, the Carry On films entertained cinema audiences with their naff jokes, bawdy humour and naughty innuendos for 34 years, with a long shelf-life beyond that. Thirty-one films were made between Carry On Sergeant (1958) and the awful Carry On Columbus (1992), during which time a gang of popular comic actors and comedians formed a now-legendary team that made the series so popular. Now it's time to see which of those great Carry On stars made the most films...

The bespectacled, spindly-framed Charles Hawtrey came next, with 23 films. Another debut from Carry On Sergeant, he was often the eager innocent in the early C-Os. In the period films he was Charles Hawtrey, the eccentric high-camp Englishman, whether he was the Duc de Pommfrit in Carry On Don’t Lose Your Head or Private Widdle in Carry On Up the Khyber. As Chief Big Heap in Cowboy, only Hawtrey could...

John Landis's first film in 12 years is a sad disappointment. It stars Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as the Irish murderers William Burke and William Hare, who became notorious for providing corpses for Dr Knox (Tom Wilkinson) to dissect in 1828 Edinburgh. Made at Ealing studios with a formidable British cast, its model is clearly Kind Hearts and Coronets. The result however is closer to knockabout pantomime than black comedy, with the two Billies as cheeky Broker's Men, accompanied by one of the two Ronnies, the diminutive Corbett, as the pompous captain of the local militia.

Landis and his screenwriters, Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft, have little to say about Burke and Hare and their desperate times, and the only "ism" the makers seem committed to is anachronism. The picture is full of schoolboy jokes, about for instance Charles Darwin who was in Edinburgh at the time, and Joseph Lister who wasn't,...

The sixth series of The Apprentice gets under way, while Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman are lost for words in a piece of pure poetry

The Apprentice | iPlayer

The Song of Lunch | iPlayer

The Genius of British Art | 4Od

PhoneShop | 4Od

Modern Family | Sky1

Wedding House | C4

The sixth series of The Apprentice at last kicked off after months waiting for Alan Sugar to stop pootling around in his baronial robes trying to help fish Britain out of the toilet and return to the important job of looking cross on television. Flanked by wry uncle Nick and new scrutineer Karren Brady, here he was, glaring at the latest intake of pathologically immodest ninnies – the girls with their hyperalert rictuses and ironed hair, the boys affecting a steely tousledness borrowed from the suit pages of the Next catalogue. His lordship unveiled an unwieldy joke he had prepared earlier. "On paper you all look very good…...

Cinematographer known for his work on the Carry On films

Despite, or because of, the ancient, dirty jokes, schoolboy humour, double entendres, and a string of hammy actors tele- graphing each jest with pursed lips, rolling eyes or a snigger, the Carry On films have an army of devotees. Among the most regular actors were Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Sid James, Joan Sims and Kenneth Connor, and behind the camera, on almost all of the 30 Carry On movies, was the cinematographer Alan Hume, who has died aged 85.

Hume started as camera operator on the very first, Carry On Sergeant (1958), soon becoming director of photography (Dp) on Carry On Regardless (1961), and continuing as Dp until Carry On Columbus (1992) ended the franchise. Though few would make any artistic claims for the films, they were competently shot, rapidly, on a shoestring. Because of the rapport Hume built up over a long period with...

Bono's done his back in, so Gorillaz have been charged with saving Glastonbury. Rich Pelley goes head to head with Murdoc

Hi, Murdoc. Do you think Bono really slipped a disc "in rehearsals" or did The Edge land a particularly good punch during a piggyback fight?

A cover-up dreamt up for damage-limitation purposes by a well-oiled press machine? Maybe. Maybe he's been detained in a Mongolian jail for playing a strenuous public game of Twister with a couple of greased-up goats. Either way, I wish him a speedy recovery.

Bono wears sunglasses all the time. When he goes on holiday, does he have to wear two pairs?

Er, right. Are these the kind of questions you normally ask people (1)? Yes, he wears two pairs of glasses. The Edge wears two cowboy hats for sun protection. And Larry takes two drumkits into the shower.

Glastonbury is ideal for lining up special guests.

The great iconoclastic film-maker Werner Herzog is used to shooting films – but being shot at? In this extract from his cinematic memoir Mark Kermode tells the remarkable story of how, in the middle of interviewing the German director on a hilltop in Los Angeles, he gets shot. And refuses to go to hospital. And there's the day he meets Angelina... and other stories from a life obsessed with films…

We were somewhere near Lookout Mountain, on the outskirts of La, when Werner Herzog's trousers exploded. It was a small explosion, admittedly, as if a firecracker had gone off in his pocket. But it was an explosion none the less and in an area where unexpected bangs are to be treated with suspicion, if not outright alarm. Herzog had been shot – that much was clear – and was even now bleeding quietly into his boxer shorts as a tiny plume of...

Bac, London

This is a bit of a carry on, in more ways than one. There are over 50 characters but only one performer, Amanda Lawrence, in this affectionate whirlwind tribute to the comedy actor, Charles Hawtrey, who stole his name from the Edwardian actor and manager, lost his career to alcoholism and his life to gangrene. The former child actor, who began his career playing a Lost Boy in Peter Pan and appeared in the Will Hay films, eventually achieved fame late in life as a regular in the Carry On series.

But before he even opened his mouth to declare lines that included, "I don't mind the jiggery, but I do take exception to pokery" he looked funny: his thin face with its wire-framed specs in a permanent pucker of camp surprise and disapproval, as if he was sucking on a lemon while being tickled with a feather duster.

Peter Rogers, the producer and creator of the much-loved Carry On… series of films, has died. He was 95.Rogers, who died at his home in Buckinghamshire on Tuesday, following a short illness, was the brains behind all 31 instalments of the hugely popular British comedy franchise, from Carry On Sergeant in 1958, right through to the final Carry On, 1992’s Carry On Columbus, which he executive produced.Rogers, who was born on February 20, 1914, started his career as a journalist, before becoming a screenwriter for J. Arthur Rank. From there, he quickly moved into producing, turning a serious script called The Bull Boys into a jolly comedy called Carry On Sergeant, which starred a young Bob Monkhouse and Carry On regulars Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Connor and Charles Hawtrey.Critically derided, the film was nonetheless a success, and so Rogers started work on Carry On Nurse almost immediately. From there, an increasingly risqué and ribald formula was created,...