How I Carried On

In an extract from his new memoir, scriptwriter and Guild member Norman Hudis tells how he came to write the first Carry On films.

I’d had a stage play, Here Is The News, produced in repertory to not bad reviews. Executive Producer Earl St John took me out of publicity and gave me a modest screenwriting contract.

Two years of enthusiastic but unfilmed scripting and off I went into freelancing, scripting about twenty or so B-features. The Americans paid the stars and got the rights of the films in the western hemisphere; a British company made the film, usually a hearty thriller, in three weeks tops; and television wiped out the B-feature industry in not much more time than that.

One such script of mine did not fit the pattern, and did without American involvement. This was the unexpected million-pound box-office success The Tommy Steele Story for Peter Rogers at Beaconsfield Studios. We went on to another Steele musical, my first film with director Gerald Thomas, by which time I was under contract to Peter Rogers Productions Limited.

For the next six years Peter and Gerry loomed largest in my writing life and became, in my mind, the indissoluble pairing I will refer to as P-G, not failing to point out that this stood also for ‘Please God’.

Then, the Carry Ons …and the story of how they came about has been told many times over the past 50 years, in wild variation and unexpected places. Can I ever forget the American club theatre owner, deep in the heart of California’s San Fernando Valley, who told me to my face that he had “directed all the Carry Ons”?. I will not sully these memories with obscenity and blasphemy but, at the time, I had no hesitation in employing both to his jawdropping face.

I will quote, here, in this connection, the cautionary old saw: “Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan.” Further, let it simply be said that, for Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas, I scripted the first six and wallowed in the instant riotous success, and all it brought me, all around the world. Still something of an American record, I believe, for a very Brit comedy, Nurse ran for a year at the Crest Theatre in Westwood, Los Angeles.

Enough of that. Let’s settle for the accolade of Karen Pedersen, Library Director of the Writers’ Guild of America (West). She has declared that the Carry Ons have “gone beyond mere Cult into the realm of full blown Phenomenon”.

Norman Hudis

A simple concept

My major contribution to what, rather pompously, might be called ‘The Concept of Sergeant’ (and, to a great degree, the others of mine) was very simple: Sergeant Grimshawe (the ageless William Hartnell) is about to retire. He has never trained a No. 1 Squad. He’s passionately devoted to mould one aided by Corporal Copping (the rock-solid Bill Owen) out of his last intake. Alas, these National Service conscripts prove to be the Original Awkward Squad - unwilling, uninterested and unlikely to grant him his dream. But, when they hear that Old Leatherlungs has bet his fellow NCOs £50 that he can turn this bunch of dedicated civilians into a unit that even the legendary Guards Regiments would respect, the new soldiers consider: “Grimshawe shouts. Well, that’s what sergeants do. But when has he ever done any of us actual harm? Never.” And so they decide, without fuss, to help him show his fellows he can do it, as well as demonstrate to him that they’re not such a gang of incorrigible misfits after all.

This set the style, to a great extent, of the ones I wrote: the incompetent, the uninterested or the plain unlucky, seen at their worst for most of the story, but triumphing in the end, against all expectation, and to rousing effect, in hospital, school, police force, cruise ship and Helping Hands Agency. So, with Sergeant (No. 3 in Britain’s box-office returns for 1958, chirpily trailing Dunkirk and The Bridge on the River Kwai - a well-deserved banner year, cinematically, for the British Army), there we were: with a story thoroughly British in rough-and-ready humour, briefly topped by underplayed sentiment.

Immediately after Sergeant, two businesslike consequences were to be expected, both absolutely routine in The Biz, and not calculated to leave hard feelings. One: Peter would offer me a substantially improved contract. Two: I would nicely refuse, in order to take up offers from companies now flashing really big money.

One happened – par for the course. Two? My agent was Peter Eade, as practical and knowledgeable a manager as any in that field, and so gentlemanly that his Cork Street office HQ was once described as possessing the atmosphere of a country solicitor’s chambers. In spite of Peter’s advice, to move on, and my wife Rita’s similar plea (she, with no real experience of The Biz, instinctively knew the score), I metaphorically struck a loyal pose and stayed with Peter Rogers.

Career progressions, in any business, are of obvious, though sometimes overstated importance. An example of the latter, probably apocryphal, but I hope not, is what one Biz pundit said when Elvis Presley died: “Bad career move.” Okay.

So, staying where I was - how was that move rated? Gerald Thomas said it all, when Peter, unable to believe that I had not responded in the expected manner by rejecting his proposal and heading for other, welcoming doors, asked: “What’s the matter with him, Gerry? Is he mad?” “No. Just an NJB.” “What’s that?” “Nice Jewish Boy who doesn’t want to be thought mercenary.”

Nurses carrying on

Let me here nail the surprise often expressed, because even an average script, let alone an outstanding one, is written very fast. No one I know of has ever matched the young Noel Coward penning Hay Fever in three days, but this and my drafting of Carry On Nurse in ten days should not evoke wonderment any more than did James Joyce spending 17 years on Finnegans Wake at the rate of one-and-a-half lines per day.

A work takes as long to write as it takes. So, to recall that Carry On Nurse hit the foolscap, virtually unchanged, in a week and a half, is merely to report a statistic, not to make claim for inclusion in any book of records.

Rita. So many of the film’s gags were from her own nursing years, first at Princess Beatrice Hospital, Earls Court, as a student, and then at Hackney General for midwifery (though already an SRN, she was considered a student - at £2 a week), and The Royal Marsden in the operating theatre.

And she linked, unforgettably, gratefully, with present members of her profession at the morning Trade Press show. A public relations master from Anglo-Amalgamated Distributors packed the balcony of Studio One Cinema, in Oxford Street, with a couple of hundred young nurses, just off night duty and half-crazed with fatigue. But not so wiped out that they didn’t see every authentic joke coming, begin to laugh and continue laughing through its screening, and for seconds after it was over.

What I can only call the ‘Ritauthenticity’ of so many key scenes received validation from her fellows in gales of innocent merriment that still echo in these old ears. Not to say that the regular audience didn’t respond heartily too. But this first public, deafening reception of Carry On Nurse was invaluably endorsed by those exhausted girls. Their presence was an inspired way of validating the film for the rest of the audience.

Those young voices, raised to the golden heights of laughter, resonate for me, to this minute. Acclaim like that happens once in a lifetime or, at any rate, if ever repeated, never recaptures the elemental force of its first eruption. It is at such rare moments that the most battered movie writer knows that there is a God and that He has a sense of humour.

Paul Dehn, highly civilized critic of the London News Chronicle, deemed the notorious daffodil gag to be one of “unsurpassed vulgarity”. We met later, at 20th- Century Fox in Beverly Hills, where he was scripting Planet of the Apes, and giggled about that remonstrative notice. Time magazine advised that the picture was ideal entertainment for all who had completed toilet training. So, a good time was had by all.

Extracted from No Laughing Matter, by Norman Hudis (Apex Publishing Ltd)

This article first appeared in the Guild's magazine, UK Writer (Summer 2008)