A Write Carry On: The Readers Offer Up Their Intimate Insights!

Feedback during the four months since the publication of A Write Carry On has been both enlightening and informative.

 

Sally Majors, from 'up Gloucestershire way', emailed to say as a teenager in the early 1970s whilst visiting her grandparents in East Sussex, they had all been excited to come across a 'somewhat jovial Sid James and Barbara Windsor' sat in the quiet alcove of an Alfriston pub.

Sally and her grandfather approached the couple when they were at the bar ordering more ‘liveners’. Both were friendly, and Sally remembers Barbara taking a keen interest in her somewhat ‘off-the-wall teenage attire’.

Considering, at the time, that the Carry On couple were having an unpublicised affair, Sally is, in hindsight, amazed at how open and forthcoming the duo were.

 

 

Another interesting insight, from a fellow A Write Carry On reader, arrived via a private message on my Facebook page.

Dan Carter, a self-styled ‘British comedy film buff’ clearly remembers tracking down Carry On scriptwriter, Talbot‘Tolly’ Rothwell, to the Shepherd and Dog, his local pub in Fulking.

A few whiskeys later and talk turned to the ins and outs of writing to deadline and the process that saw the scriptwriting project brought to completion.

Tolly told Dan that Carry On producer Peter Rogers, once a scriptwriter himself, was both meticulous and demanding when it came to perusing the various script drafts.

They would return to Tolly with red crossings and markings as well as being heavily annotated.

 

There would be a number of these exchanges, and Tolly felt it was his willingness to take on board criticism (justified or not) and his quick turn around in ideas and drafts that kept him onboard the Carry On team for twenty-two of the series thirty-one films.

 

 

Lastly, in this blog entry, the last hurrah goes to Annie Crocket, now based in Northern France, but during the early 1960s and late 1970s she was a resident of Eastbourne, in East Sussex.

Annie worked as an extra on many projects shot at Pinewood Studios. She had muted background scenes in a number of Carry On films, and got to know a few of the personalities behind their on screen characters.

Having read A Write Carry On Annie dropped me a long email. Firstly she congratulated me on bringing out the true essence of the likes of Kenneth Williams, Sid James, Jim Dale, Hattie Jacques and Charles Hawtrey.

It was the latter she chatted to the most. Annie said she found Hawtrey a loner who, when sober, was friendly and always welcoming of a quiet chat. She said he kept himself pretty much to himself, and that initially once he began drinking heavily he found it easier to be a part of such a close nit group of actors.

 

She also bonded with Kenneth Williams. Always 'on' and never predictable. A true Carry On trait if ever there was one! 

Available now at Amazon - iBookstore - Kobo

A Write Carry On - The Untold Story Of A Man In The Shadows

by Mike Cobley

Wholepoint Publications