Carry on Columbus

Christopher Columbus, with the help of the Spanish queen, gets on board to discover India. He does America instead, that is full of tricky aborigines.

A foolhardy and predictably doomed attempt to get recovered a formula that worn out its date twenty years ago. The once-individual humour of double entendres, sex-overdose and sheer crudity, which has always depended very much on taste, no longer raises even chuckles. Tired antics of a loosely assembled new cast helps no more than the insignificant minority of once-regulars (Jim Dale, June Whitfield, Bernard Cribbins, Jon Pertwee, Leslie Phillips, Jack Douglas, Peter Gilmore).

Carry On England. Carry On Emmannuelle. Two titles to strike fear into the hearts of many a film fan. The Carry Ons were never highbrow, but were always good fun, until the later years, when they became an embarrassment.

14 years later, Carry On Columbus took the UK by surprise. It's not nearly as good as the Carry On Classics (Cleo, Camping, Cabby, Khyber, Convenience, etc), but is far better than its two predecessors.

Jim Dale gives a valiant performance as Columbus, with a host of Carry On regulars in cameo roles (Jon Pertwee, June Whitfield, Leslie Phillips, etc) and even a couple in larger, supporting roles (Bernard Cribbins and, in his least-annoying Carry On performance, Jack Douglas). The main problem with the film, I feel, is that there are far too many characters. Dozens of speaking parts, blurring the film's focus and ensuring that the major characters get less screentime than they ought to. Some characters are completely wasted, others get lost in the crowd.

Much is made of the "alternative" comedians appearing in the film: the likes of Rik Mayall, Julian Clary, Peter Richardson, Alexei Sayle, Keith Allen, etc. I always feel Mayall is way over-the-top, in a film where most performances are more sedate and down to earth. The star is Julian Clary, who is a natural at delivering the smutty lines, and gets a Hawtreyesque "oh hello!" on his first appearance. Sara Crowe is a perfect Carry On dollybird: blonde and bosomy, but far more intelligent than the Carry On girls of yesteryear.

A few of the best jokes of any Carry On (the "sharks" scene with Jack Douglas and Rebecca Lacey is a beauty), and some nice ideas all round. It just needs a bit of rewriting and re-editing, and its' cast list halved!

Carry On Columbus is a perfectly good film. For a first draft.

Absolutely terrible and embarrassing. Cheap looking and shameful. How did this atrocity ever see the light of day? What a disgrace to the Carry On name.

The 'Carry Ons' had been wound up - to very little fanfare - nearly fifteen years before Carry On Columbus was released back in 1992. I was in high school then and I remember it vaguely; along with most contemporary audiences at the time, I certainly made no effort to actually watch a Carry On film in the cinema. Followng a dismal run Carry On Columbus soon faded at the box office , and it's only thanks to ITV 4 that I've gotten the chance to occasionally watch it over recent years.

The storyline - a take on Christopher Columbus and The New World, in case you missed the hint - is stale and lifeless. Too many of the performances are forced, and the timing and delivery - always essentially in a Carry On film - just isn't there; if the 'magic' that existed between James, Jacques, Butterworth, Connor, Williams, Windsor, et al (despite whatever else was going on behind the scenes) was spent by 'Emmannuelle' then it was unlikely it was going to be rekindled in the early Nineties - particularly with a group of actors and comedians from a very different background.

This was at the heart of Columbus's failure - the Alternative Comedian of the 1980s was extremely critical (often with good justification) of their 'traditional', 'music hall' or 'old fashioned' predecessors; and when they got their own chance on the silver screen their big shot was yet another Carry On film...it was no wonder they struggled to adapt to the 'seaside postcard' style they'd spent nearly a decade disparaging. By trying to reinvent a sanitised version, and underestimating or misunderstanding the job in hand, the Alternatives surgically removed the essence of what made the series such a success in the first place - even if realities were a bit more hit and miss than the myth suggests. Peter Rogers takes his share of blame as well - if the same formula was well passed its sell by date in 1978 (or 1976 if count 'Dick' as the last decent entry) did he really expect a different result in 1992?

With one or two exemptions (notably Jim Dale and Sara Crowe) most of the cast look all at sea here - and not in the way Colombus would have liked. It says much about low expectations that people can say this is better than the last two or three entries is a plus point - I'd say it was a necessity! Not the worst but it's near the bottom of the league, and one for the completionists only.

The original Carry On series has a certain kitsch charm. They were smutty, low budget attempts to appeal to the masses, which broadly succeeded in putting a smile on the nation's face. Great casts of talented comic actors such as Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey and Barbara Windsor gave their all to leave a superb record of the humour of the time. Fourteen years after the original series drew to a close, largely because it was no longer relevant to the country, someone got the bright idea to revive the tradition. I can almost hear the smug conversations as the likes of Julian Clary and Rik Mayall decided to undertake what they thought would be a simple project. How miserably they failed. It is an execrable, ill conceived and poorly executed film, the only purpose of which is to illustrate the quality of the originals.

We often bemoan the demise of the British film industry, yet we seem to be almost incapable of turning out any decent films with the resources we have.