Carry on Christmas

The final Carry on Christmas special made for Thames television. By now instead of being a pantomime, it was mainly a sketch show with a theme of Christmas.

Sid James plays a department store Santa Clause who introduces the sketches after making the lusty department store boss irate with his shiftless antics.

The overlong sketches are the Carry On team as cavemen, where Sid James beings in his latest catch to the cave, Barbara Windsor.

An Elizabethan era dinner party. The trenches at world war one during Christmas Eve. A short ballet dance sequence and then a Robin Hood romp.

It is very much a bawdy affair, dare I say I wonder if it was suitable for family viewing. Barbara Windsor gets Sid's lusty attention and shows a lot of cleavage.

The best acting is from Bernard Bresslaw, he really thinks he is doing Shakespeare!

The last of the four Christmas TV specials from the CARRY ON team. They get a lot of the old faces back here, most notably Sid James who is having a bawdy ball dressed up as Santa Claus. There's a monologue style format and various sketches from historical periods, the most head-scratching a caveman Christmas (???). This special seems more sex-obsessed than ever, with a barely-dressed Barbara Windsor figuring predominately. Indeed one sketch with her playing a 13-year-old on Sid's knee was censored from the TV broadcast I saw as being too outrageous. A great Scouse accent from Kenneth Connor at one point, and assured turns from the old hands.

I have to disagree with 2 other reviewers who claimed that this was better without Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtry.

This one is rather bawdie than its predecessors but has the misfortune to feature the vastly unfunny Jack Douglas.

Carry On Christmas (4) (1973) -

I thought that this was definitely the best of the Christmas efforts from the 'Carry On' team. They seemed to have found their way better by going for a sketch show style, instead of trying to fit sketches in to an existing story. And they managed to deliver a much better performance than the previous three Christmas specials, because the scenes each seemed to have been more thought out and were tied together by Sid's story as a department store Father Christmas.

They also tried to put a moral or two in which was nice for the time of year, but not standard for the team.

It still wasn't their absolute best though, certainly no way near as good as 'Screaming' (1966) and 'Cleo' (1964), but I have to give them all credit for the Nutcracker ballet scene, which was very funny.

However, Jack Douglas should be edited out of every 'Carry On' film he ever appeared in. I don't understand how anyone could have ever thought his weird 'tic' thing was funny?

Other than Jack and the fact that Babs should really have kept those things on her chest locked away, it was harmless fun and I could see how it might have been brilliant in it's time.

461.09/1000.

David, you have truly hit the nail on the head - this is brilliant! My family enjoy watching the video whenever we need something to help banish the blues. I really enjoy the banter between Santa and the store manager at the beginning, while my mother and sister grin like the Cheshire Cat during the Ballet sequence! The characters are very well written and performed (especially Jack Douglas's clumsy, hard of hearing butler, Crapper), and as for the names (Senna Pod, Crapper, Mr Belcher etc) - well, what can you say? This is a wonderful record of the Carry On team at their hilarious best. (Personally, I think the team are much funnier without Kenneth Williams)