Film people were constantly baffled by how the producers of the Carry On series managed to keep the team together on such miserable wages. But there is no doubt, it was those same old faces popping-up on the posters, year after year, that kept the tills ringing - Sid James, Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams and, to a lesser degree, latecomer Frankie Howerd.
There is nothing new about tragic clowns, so we're hardly taken-aback to be reminded of the unedifying private lives of this lot, three of them uncomfortably gay and the fourth uncomfortably hetero.
Sid James had started-off in South Africa as a hairdresser, not a boxer, as he claimed. Any fisticuffs happened only in bar-rooms or bedrooms, where he was a known wife-beater. A lifetime of over-indulgence ended on a theatre stage at 62, while he was hopelessly in love with the much-younger Barbara Windsor (whose memoirs make it embarrassingly clear why she found the relationship uneasy). Interestingly, he got over the poverty-trap by organising product placement on the filmset, especially his favourite Johnnie Walker Red Label - a surprising concession by such a tight-fisted management.
Charles Hawtrey had worked as a child actor, having changed his name from Hartree, in the hopes that people would think he was the son of a top theatrical producer of the same name. In the Carry Ons, he played the timid wimp and the butt of all jokes, who never gets the girl (or wants to). For some reason, the Americans found him funnier than the British did, and he was briefly kept on for this reason, but his creeping alcoholism made him impossible to work with, and he was dropped after a doomed attempt to demand star billing. He was abnormally close to his mother, and after her death, lived in a small seaport, where he would pick up sailors and take them home for one-night stands that involved strictly no commitment.
Also a mother's boy was Kenneth Williams, from a surprisingly rough background, but who became keenly self-educated and widely read. He proved to be God's gift to the radio comedy scriptwriters because he could pack more syllables into ten seconds than any actor alive. His transition to the screen was only partially successful - a clue as to why he agreed to settle for such low pay. He made few friends, either on the team or in social life, and his diaries reveal extreme self-absorption. He seems to think we're riveted by the question of whether he was still a virgin (behind all the codes, it seems there had been one attempt at penetrative sex that put him off any further experiments) but who cares anyway? A more significant puzzle is the unexplained death of his father, who swallowed poison kept in a bottle labelled as mouthwash. Williams was banned from America while the FBI examined his unsatisfactory testimony, but his suicide ended the investigation - though not our doubts about the emotionally unstable mother's boy whose possessiveness may have got the better of him. (This story is not touched-on at all in the film.)
Last and least, Frankie Howerd turns out to have been a relentless pesterer of young men, the only anecdote of interest being his supposed comment on the death of Benny Hill, communicated to the press by his manager, unaware that Howerd had already been dead for two days!
There is nothing new about tragic clowns, so we're hardly taken-aback to be reminded of the unedifying private lives of this lot, three of them uncomfortably gay and the fourth uncomfortably hetero.
Sid James had started-off in South Africa as a hairdresser, not a boxer, as he claimed. Any fisticuffs happened only in bar-rooms or bedrooms, where he was a known wife-beater. A lifetime of over-indulgence ended on a theatre stage at 62, while he was hopelessly in love with the much-younger Barbara Windsor (whose memoirs make it embarrassingly clear why she found the relationship uneasy). Interestingly, he got over the poverty-trap by organising product placement on the filmset, especially his favourite Johnnie Walker Red Label - a surprising concession by such a tight-fisted management.
Charles Hawtrey had worked as a child actor, having changed his name from Hartree, in the hopes that people would think he was the son of a top theatrical producer of the same name. In the Carry Ons, he played the timid wimp and the butt of all jokes, who never gets the girl (or wants to). For some reason, the Americans found him funnier than the British did, and he was briefly kept on for this reason, but his creeping alcoholism made him impossible to work with, and he was dropped after a doomed attempt to demand star billing. He was abnormally close to his mother, and after her death, lived in a small seaport, where he would pick up sailors and take them home for one-night stands that involved strictly no commitment.
Also a mother's boy was Kenneth Williams, from a surprisingly rough background, but who became keenly self-educated and widely read. He proved to be God's gift to the radio comedy scriptwriters because he could pack more syllables into ten seconds than any actor alive. His transition to the screen was only partially successful - a clue as to why he agreed to settle for such low pay. He made few friends, either on the team or in social life, and his diaries reveal extreme self-absorption. He seems to think we're riveted by the question of whether he was still a virgin (behind all the codes, it seems there had been one attempt at penetrative sex that put him off any further experiments) but who cares anyway? A more significant puzzle is the unexplained death of his father, who swallowed poison kept in a bottle labelled as mouthwash. Williams was banned from America while the FBI examined his unsatisfactory testimony, but his suicide ended the investigation - though not our doubts about the emotionally unstable mother's boy whose possessiveness may have got the better of him. (This story is not touched-on at all in the film.)
Last and least, Frankie Howerd turns out to have been a relentless pesterer of young men, the only anecdote of interest being his supposed comment on the death of Benny Hill, communicated to the press by his manager, unaware that Howerd had already been dead for two days!
