'Carry On...' Is Back, But Where Does it Sit in the Age of PornHub and Periscope?

"Your rank?" asks a moustachioed Eric Barker as Captain Potts in Carry On Sergeant. "Well, that's a matter of opinion," replies Kenneth Williams' James Bailey. Carry On Sergeant was released in 1958, and was the first of 31 Carry On films between then and 1992, when the much-derided last episode, Carry On Columbus, was released. They featured themes, jokes, references and acting talent that would boggle the millennial mind. Hattie Jacques, Sid James, Charles Hawtrey. There were TV specials, stage shows and careers launched. A very specific aspect of the British character was captured almost annually for over 30 years. It had bawdiness, cheekiness, double entendre, eye-rolling sex gags made by perverse men, matronly women and busty young girls. They were silly, harmless fun, albeit not very good. If they were a person they would be wide-eyed, with a slacked jaw and a mouth in an O-shape, an expression which aforementioned series stalwart Kenneth Williams regularly found himself in.

But Kenneth Williams, Sid James, Eric Barker, Hattie Jacques, basically all of the directors, writers and producers are dead. And with them – you'd have thought – the very antiquated, safe style of comedy. But apparently not. Carry On… is the latest relic to be resurrected with satanic smelling salts, with a new film out next year.

The re-hash is reportedly to be written by two writers of the also antiquated and much maligned BBC3 series Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, of which apparently only Sheridan Smith came out on top, much like Barbara Windsor in the Carry On series. In some ways, Two Pints… was a kind of spiritual successor to Carry On, replete with tawdry sexual slapstick, dullards, unconventional characters in conventional settings.

Carry On was just too safe for the audiences that were growing up with rave pills Cannibal Ferox. Now more than ever, young people are desensitised with terroristic beheadings and finding their yucks in 'baiting out skets' on YouTube. How can this flimsy, sweet style of comedy appeal to the LiveLeak generation?

Well, for one, when not Periscoping themselves bullying small children, young people conversely find themselves in a mire of hypersensitivity. They enjoy the modern tropes of PC having gone mad, and skinny dip in its shrieking waters. Could the family friendly problematics of Carry On be the perfect antidote to their hate fuelled polemics against the golden generation and all its foibles? Would they maybe be heartened by its silliness, even though it does feature a large amount of dirty old men honking at busty women?

You would think Carry On, made in the '70s, would be teeming with racism, but aside from Carry On Up the Jungle with Bernard Bresslaw caught in an unfortunate bit of blackface as a man called "Upsidasi", and stinky tropes of tribes and witchdoctors (not to mention that old chestnut of Africa being regarded as just one big country (or in this case one big jungle)), the rest of the time the themes were all very light hearted. They were also mocking of the establishment, reducing things like the army, the police force and those in them to a slew of prattling sex-obsessed idiots.

The Carry On films were many things, but I'm not sure you could call them mean spirited. They were something completely of their time, and were signposts of a culture in which all sex was was an embarrassing aside, something chaste that you did behind closed doors. Nowadays sex is the battleground on which all our identities are based, and with that comes openness. How much sex are you having, what kind of sex is it, who is it with and does it matter? What place does a Carry On film have in an era of Channel 4's Sex Box and "cumpilations"?

And do we really need another revival? Dad's Army, Absolutely Fabulous – what's next, fucking new episodes of 3-2-1? A female Steptoe and Son reimagined as Zoella and Amanda Holden? We are surely only moments from an ill-fated Last of the Summer Wine reboot. It smacks of an industry desperate to not understand its audience, a noxious fear of the unknown, of losing money, of not taking chances. Sometimes this is justified, as taking a chance often leads to some real dog-shit films and TV – especially comedy. But reaching too far back is surely a recipe for disaster. The only way to modernise such a thing is to make it cruder, which will tarnish the cheeky family fun of the originals and make them slightly toned-down versions of Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

This is why the internet is winning. It may be colossally unfunny a lot of the time but shit, at least YouTubers and People Just Do Nothing types are trying new things, catching new waves, acknowledging new trends. Rehashing old intellectual property in the hope it sticks is no way to progress entertainment. Until every sap in every production company with dreams of bringing back El Dorado wakes up and smells the coffee, it will always be stagnant.

@joe_bish

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