Carry On Christmas/ Carry On Stuffing!

Great Bad Christmas Specials Of The SEVENTIES: Carry on Stuffing!



Funkdooby

anyone remember the spinoff series from the Carry On movies that was made? Carry On Laughing was perhaps the least appropriately named show ever, being as it was almost entirely devoid of anything remotely funny. Seemed to be a horrible hotpotch of scenes and jokes deemed too lame for the movies, which is to say it was pretty damn awful (IMHO). Astonishingly, it ran to a second series.

TheLurkerInTheShadows

Have to agree with Funkydooby on the Carry On Laughing series. Dismally unfunny, overplayed, underwritten and nothing like the films, which definitely had their moments. The episode "Orgy and Bess" makes interesting viewing, though, since the writers, Dick Vosburgh and Barry Cryer, wrote it as a Marx Brothers homage, with Walter Raleigh written as Groucho and Queen Elizabeth written as Margaret Dumont. Unfortunately Sid James and Hattie Jaques seem unaware of this and most of the lines fall flat.

And speaking of Sid James has just reminded me of the Bless This House film... and I wish it hadn't!

I can't help with Carry On Laughing, but I've now seen three of the four Carry On Christmas specials that preceded it. Finally had opportunity to see what all the fuss was about when the laugh-a-millennium Daily *xpr*ss gave away a double DVD over one infamous weekend of terror and I found 'em in the charity shop a few days later.



Babs Windsor is the Bride to Terry Scott's Victor Frankenstein in this spine-chilling shot from Carry On Christmas (1969)

The 1969 effort is take on A Christmas Carol which sees "Sid James, Barbara Windsor et al in a reworking of a literary classic - obviously through their own inimitable twist! With added characters such as Dr. Frank N. Stein, Dracula, Robert Browning and Cinderella, this special also features a scene-stealing Frankie Howard".



Valerie Leon (left) and Kenneth Connor in Carry On Stuffing (1972). Included because vivacious Val was in Blood From The Mummy's Tomb so there's nothing gratuitous about it or anything.

Carry On Stuffing from 1972, "the cast acting out classic Christmas panto Aladdin, singing bawdy Elizabethan songs and what's going on in the Garden of Eden?"



St. Sid moans about "all this permissiveness" shortly before welcoming 'schoolgirl' Babs onto his lap in the '73 special.

Carry On Christmas (again) from 1973: "Led once again by Sid James, this time as a department store Santa, the Carry On team journey through the ages to see how Christmas was celebrated by cavemen, Robin Hood and our brave men in the trenches in WWI"