SIMON MATTHEWS on Gerald Thomas’s Carry On Columbus, the most recent entry in the most English of film franchises…

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Some think it terrible, a few place it in the so-bad-its-good category. What do we make of Carry on Columbus now? More to point, whose idea was it?

After the debacle of Carry on Emmanuelle in 1978, production company Hemdale cancelled three planned follow ups, Carry on Again, Nurse (set in a hospital slated for closure), Carry on Dallas and the Australian based Carry on Down Under. In the years that followed, a mid-’70s series made by ITV was repeated but there were no new projects, and most of the cast and crew settled down to a well-earned retirement.

The resurrection of the franchise after a gap of fourteen years thus came as some surprise. It seems that the impetus came – about equally – from the Comic Strip ensemble of the early 1980’s and Chris Blackwell. The former enjoyed a big TV hit with The Comic Strip Presents, but neither of their film ventures, Supergrass (1985) and Eat the Rich (1987), did particularly well and they struggled to fund follow-ups. Blackwell had sold his Island record label to Polygram for £180m in 1989, but had stayed on – as Chief Executive of Island Entertainment – and was looking for viable film projects via a subsidiary, Island World Productions.

The news that two serious epics were being filmed to tie in with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage seems to have piqued his interest. Proud of his Jamaican connections (an island Columbus visited in 1494), Blackwell saw an opportunity to cash-in with an irreverent send-up of the traditional Euro-centric account of how Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas. Back in 1981 Blackwell had funded the Comic Strip’s eponymous TV movie, which Julien Temple directed. They now agreed to work together on a send-up of the Columbus story.

Badging it as a Carry On was both a homage to the franchise’s spoofing of grand cinematic events (particularly Carry on Cleo) and a commercial safety device to ensure some sort of box-office action, given that the series retained a following in the UK. Thus was born Carry on Columbus, the opening credits of which state ‘Island World presents in association with Peter Rogers Productions’.

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Getting the gang back together, though, was no mean feat. Director Gerald Thomas was 72, and died shortly after completing the film. Producer Rogers was 78, cameraman Alan Hume 68. The script was written by David Freeman, 70, a former Benny Hill writer (and, oddly, Special Branch detective), assisted by John Antrobus, a mere 59. (The Antrobus-Freeman connection went back to the 1956 Peter Sellers-Spike Milligan TV series, Son of Fred, predating even Carry on Sergeant).

Assembling the cast was problematic. Of the core members, Sid James had died in 1976, followed by both Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey in 1988. Joan Sims, Kenneth Connor, Barbara Windsor and Bernard Bresslaw all declined to participate. Frankie Howerd accepted, but died before filming could commence.

Thus, the Carry On banner is carried by Jim Dale (as Columbus), Bernard Cribbins, Leslie Phillips and Jack Douglas. Of these only Dale, with five previous Carry On appearances, might be considered a regular. Maureen Lipman, an accomplished comic actor, famous for playing Joyce Grenfell on stage, and with a great many TV credits, was brought in as a co-star, alongside Comic Strip founder Peter Richardson, appearing as ‘Bart Columbus’.

Richardson’s colleagues play various Arabs trying to frustrate Columbus’s expedition: Alexei Sayle as Ahmed, the shoemaker, Rik Mayall as the Sultan, and Nigel Planer as Wazir. Bulking out the cast are a great many faces familiar from 1980s and ’90s TV comedy, presumably to ensure that audiences felt they were getting their money’s worth. Among these are Julian Clary and Richard Wilson, with Clary, clearly playing the part that would have been taken by Kenneth Williams, rather good as jailer for the Spanish Inquisition. (A nod here, of course, to Monty Python).

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Watching it is a peculiar experience. The dialogue, music and sound effects all have a curiously analogue tone, rather as if Thomas, Rogers and Hume simply unpacked the gear they put away in 1979 and started using it again. (Maybe they did). Almost everything is shot on old-fashioned sets, with equally old-fashioned studio lighting, though Columbus’s voyage, in another retro effect, is done pirate film style, with some long-distance stock shots.

It starts in Turkey in 1492, and from the moment the characters appear the jokes are being fired off at machine gun speed, around 200 of them by the end of the film. Dale and Cribbins are fine throughout. An encounter with Arawak Indians is quite farcical and leads to a repeat of the Indiana Jones joke where a boulder rumbles down a passage way toward Columbus and his crew. At 91 minutes, the film is clearly too long for anyone who dislikes it (and probably a bit too long anyway), but doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Interestingly, the score was by John Duprez, formerly of 1980s pop outfit Modern Romance, who had also worked with the Python team on Life of Brian, and much else. The best music, though, comes during the end titles, which are accompanied by a brilliant piece of techno, ‘Carry on Columbus’. Credited to Fantastic Planet, this was written and produced by Malcolm McLaren and Leigh Gorman (once bass player in Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow). It should have been a big hit, but, with vinyl an anomaly by 1992, failed to get anywhere near the charts, despite being released by A&M in both 7’ and 12’ formats. It comes as no surprise to see McLaren involved, given his prior cinematic form with The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.

Reassessing it today, the obvious point is that, thankfully, it avoids the nudity and smut of Carry on Emmanuelle and its immediate predecessors. This is simple entertainment with no intellectual pretensions: we’re not talking Schindler’s List or Citizen Kane. If it resembles anything, it would be an ‘adult’ Christmas pantomime of the type that Julian Clary (and other members of the cast) appear in each year.

The critics, who seem to have expected a nicely retro recreation of one of the quaint, genteel early films in the genre, overlooked this and were merciless. Time Out snootily observed ‘None of the new crew of Sayle, Richardson, Mayall and Planer is remotely endearing in their awfulness’ and Radio Times found it ‘a cacophony of puerile jokes and general atrociousness’.

Released in October 1992 it ended up losing £0.8m, though with on-going sales of DVD and TV rights it might by now be close to breaking even. Which was a triumph compared to its two gigantic rivals, both of which had budgets around twenty times that available to Carry on Columbus. The Ridley Scott-Gerard Depardieu 1492: Conquest of Paradise lost $40m and the hopelessly anachronistic swashbuckler Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, with Marlon Brando (!) and much beset with law suits, similarly tanked with losses of $36m.

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Attempts continue to produce the next episode in this traditionally English form of entertainment. In 2003 Peter Rogers held a launch event for Carry on London at the House of Commons with Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith. About ‘a limousine company ferrying celebrities to an awards show’ this would have starred Burt Reynolds and Vinnie Jones and been directed by Peter Richardson. It never quite got going. Charlie Higson succeeded Richardson as director, the cast was rejigged with Paul O’Grady and the lugubrious Frank Skinner as Kenneth Williams and Sid James type characters respectively and sets were built at Pinewood, only for the project to collapse when Rogers died, at 94, in 2009.

A struggle for ownership of the rights seems to have followed. Nigel Gordon-Stewart, one of the directors of the holding company behind Carry on London, emerged in June this year announcing Carry on Beside the Sea. A farce set in a beauty pageant it promises to be ‘non-woke.’ Whether it appears or not is another matter, but 67 years after it started, the franchise, like Dracula, remains undead.

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