The Huggetts Abroad

A charming, sentimental, simple tale of a charming, sentimental, simple British suburban family who would like to escape from the post WW2 austerity programme in operation. And Dad had lost his job too. To execute this escape they decide to drive over Africa to South Africa in a 2nd hand truck with a paying Canadian guest who has a rather dark secret in his oil powered refrigerator.

Jack Warner as Dad and Kathleen Harrison as Mum were perfectly cast Cockney stereotypes, the kids and Jimmy Hanley were excellent role models too. Everyone and everything, the story, production and acting is old fashioned and mind-numbingly ordinary - I've always loved this film! 83 minutes to switch off thinking and let it flow. If you do it's amazing just how believable the plot and people really are, even when Pet Clark bursts into song. Her second song was pleasant, yet it was rudely interrupted by a nasty piece of work complaining about the row.

This was the 4th and final Huggett film, but the family were revived by BBC radio from 1953 to 1962, at its peak getting more than 10 million weekly listeners. As the other films are never shown on UK TV nowadays I presume they've been banned by the Department of Political Correctness. I'm not surprised it didn't win any prizes at the time, but it's a nice little film.

If you remember the Huggets then probably this film is for you. It follows the family attempting to escape from austerity England to South Africa, and getting caught up in some diamond smuggling along the way.

The plot is paper thin (so much so that it almost disappears at one point), and the direction moves in fits and starts, but if you're feeling nostalgic for the days when we believed in the stereotypes for foreigners because we had no experience to teach us better, then you'll like this. Interestingly enough, the only out and out baddie in the film is another Englishman - even the Canadian diamond smuggler is a lovable rogue.

The film is made palatable for me, however, by Jack Warner, who despite playing more or less the same character as his subsequent Dixon of Dock Green (and The Blue Lamp) police sergeant, exudes an irresistible avuncular warmth, and Pet Clark, whose bubbly performance helps raise the rest of the family out of the mire that an uninspired screenplay tries to put them. She also gets to sing, though you'd never believe this little girl is the same as she who sang Downtown.

The third film concerning the Huggett family has them in all kinds of problems. Jack Warner has lost his job and his son-in-law can't get passage for his wife Dinah Sheridan and himself to South Africa where a job awaits. So the whole Huggett clan, Warner, Kathleen Harrison, Hanley and Sheridan and the two other daughters Susan Shaw and Petula Clark decide to move bag and baggage to South Africa.

Here's what I don't get. For some reason they decide that it might be cheaper and faster to go overland from Algiers to Johannesburg and that's over 4000 miles through some nasty country, not all of it a colony of the United Kingdom. It seems so preposterous it's the reason I can't give The Huggetts Abroad a higher rating.

They also get some assistance from Hugh McDermott who has his own reasons for wanting to get out of Great Britain quickly and quietly.

With these British city folk in the Sahara desert The Huggetts Abroad is far more serious than the two previous Huggett films. If it weren't for the black and white I'd swear I was watching scenes from Legend Of The Lost.

Best part of the film is Petula Clark's singing. Before she became an international pop star in the 60s with Downtown she was a Deanna Durbin/Judy Garland like child star in the UK. Voice like Garland's a little Miss Fixit personality like Durbin's. But very pleasing to listen to.

Huggett Family fans of which there are many should like this one despite the impracticality of the premise.

Easily the most far-fetched outing for our stoical post-war British family, this one sees them embark on a trans-African trip after "Father" (Jack Warner) loses his job and "Jimmy" (Jimmy Hanley) manages to get himself one - in Johannesburg. Needless to say, they haven't two farthings to rub together, and when poor old daughter "Jane" (Dinah Sheridan) can't get a visa to accompany her husband the whole family (with varying degrees of willingness) decide to decamp - by truck - and drive the 4,000-odd miles. Luckily (or not) they have the slightly iffy character of "Bob" (Hugh McDermott) to help (?) them so off they go. It's preposterous, from start to finish - even if back then, Britain still controlled great chunks of Africa. The comedy is absurd and the normally reliable leadership of Warner and on-screen wife Kathleen Harrison is subsumed into an almost episodic lesson in rather poorly written and executed slapstick. The charm and cheeriness of these films was always their selling point. This has neither, really, and at 90 minutes is far too long, too.

The title of the last gasp of the Huggett series - Gainsborough Pictures itself soon followed later the same year - lead me to expect comic frolics abroad like 'Carry On Abroad', but it turns out to be a fairly rugged adventure film, albeit constructed around the Huggett family, with actual desert footage directed by editor Alan Osbiston surprisingly effectively integrated with studio-shot scenes of the Huggetts themselves. (Did emigrants to South Africa really get there in the late forties by trekking across the Sahara?)

Esma Cannon, who was murdered in the original 'Holiday Camp', surprisingly pops up briefly in a completely different role in this film as Petula Clark's scoutmistress.