This is the "pur sang"of "Carry on",the benchmark against which all other examples of the genre must be compared and found wanting.Here is everything that the self - appointed comedy fascists who want to tell us what we can and can't laugh at detest. Nearly every taboo they have tried to impose is gleefully smashed in very short order.This movie is proof that freedom of expression in art has been brutally repressed,presumably in the name of progress.Since the demise of "'allo,'allo" on TV nothing as remotely as funny as the most average "Carry on" has been allowed on our screens at home,presumably on the grounds that we might laugh at it and cause the end of civilisation as the Highgate Mafia imagine it.The scene in the tent with Miss Brown and Meesrs Scott and Hawtrey is brilliantly done - Laurel and Hardy would have been proud to have made it. Wonderful comedy actors are given a brilliantly funny script.That's all there is to it.It will make you laugh immoderately - I guarantee it. "Carry on Camping" - even the title is a little bit whoops dearie -was not considered to be anything particularly special at the time it was released,yes it was funny,but in an era of funny films it sort of got lost in the mix;Carry on fans loved it of course,but it had a relatively short shelf life and it needed the invention of the VCR to resurrect it and eventually lift it to its proper place at the top of the pantheon of British movie comedy. Be happy that,up to now,the intellectuals have not "discovered" the "Carry on" canon and "explained" the hell out of it.to us peasants. Fearfully I can envisage the day when the "Post - Modern - Ironic" brigade decide that Sid James is the new Jacques Tati,i.e. not actually funny.Until then let's happily accept that Sid,Hattie,Babs,Hawtrey and the others were the finest movie comics in British cinema and man the barricades against the intellectualisation of the last bastion of working - class humour.
Review of Carry on Camping
