A Write Carry On: The Untold Story Of A Man In The Shadows - Author: Mike Cobley - Publisher: Wholepoint Publications (wholepoint.co.uk) - 18th June 2012 - The story of Talbot 'Tolly' Rothwell, one of the great unsung heroes of British comedy writing (Carry On films, Up Pompeii! and The Crazy Gang).
I remember him well. Those whisky tones and with a smile to illuminate even the darkest room.
Rolling summer green. Shades of the boy and a glimpse into the soul of a loving man.
Where I can escape to. Slip into his stream and journey beyond everyday demands.
Where I can hear his laughter. Of his presence so engaging so omnipresent and serene.
There he is still out walking. Over the hills and on through valleys. A spirit born to guide. A feature carved into chalk and a memory to survive.
Rolling summer green. Colours of the joy and a soul enlightened by a man in the shadows who left an indelible mark.
A place I can escape too. Slip into his stream and journey beyond everyday demands. Where I can hear his laughter. Of his presence so engaging so omnipresent and serene.
Supertramp may not be the name that trips off of the tongue
when discussing the Carry Ons, but back in 1975 I was forced to flee a somewhat
numbers depleted cast and crew get together to celebrate my fourteenth birthday
at Brighton Dome in the company of that very band.
As a present from my brother Martyn, I had been invited to
join his very own 'crew’, and head in to the centre of Brighton
to catch the band Supertramp, who had just released their fourth album,
'Crisis? What Crisis?'
Among my fellow group of gig-goers there was much talk of
poppers (alkyl nitrites), of which I happily concluded would mean end of
evening balloons. I was to be both confused and disappointed by naivety!
Rewind back to lunchtime and I was sat in the kitchen of
ex-Carry On scriptwriter Talbot 'Tolly' Rothwell's house, quietly observing the
coming, goings and conversations of the few Carry Oners who had accepted the
invitation to Tolly's farewell shindig in honour of his uprooting from his
beloved secluded bolt hole in the picturesque village of Fulking, to the rather
more urban soundtrack of the bustling coastal town of Worthing.
The move had been necessitated after Tolly's breakdown
following scripting twenty-two of the highly successful and lucrative Carry On
films.
Sadly, it was glaringly obvious from the turn out of cast
and crew that the famous Carry On brotherhood counted for little once talent
had flown the nest.
But Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor, Jim Dale and producer
Peter Rogers were the 'a-listers' who mingled at Tolly’s along with a
sprinkling of those who worked behind the Carry On scenes.
Conversation was unusually muted, and the expected ribbing
and backbiting was absent. All-in-all, and not surprisingly due to the
circumstances, it was a party that had the air of a wake.
Meanwhile, I was clock watching. I still had to get out of
Fulking and back to Brighton by 7pm to meet my
brother and his cast of merry misfits.
My attendance at my first ever gig was imminent, and I was
almost breathless with anticipation. Supertramp meant nothing to me. I hadn't
heard their music and didn't even know they were American and at the peak of
their prog/pop powers.
Upon entering the Dome I tried to act in a nonplussed and
laid-back manner. Most of the longhairs milling around the venue were sporting
the band's current album title, 'Crisis? What Crisis?' on their t-shirts.
The memory of the gig itself is a
bit of a blur. I remember being highly impressed by both the personality and
musicianship of John Helliwell (woodwinds, keyboards, backing vocals), as well
as the swearing heavily featured on the band's closing number, 'Bloody Well
Right'.
Once back outside and engulfed by the town's ice cold air, I
discovered poppers had nothing to do with balloons! But I went home happy and a
few years wiser to the world.
The next morning my brother presented me with a second
present, a copy of Supertramp's break through third album 'Crime of the
Century'.
For me, much like for those involved in the ongoing Carry On
franchise, the times they were a changin'.
It was a scene blessed. The rolling South Downs covered
in crisp late autumnal early morning dew, while - from my vantage point in the
front room of the then Carry On scriptwriter, Talbot ‘Tolly’ Rothwell’s house -
I was being willingly given a poetic crash course in all things Mother Nature.
Tolly’s two Golden Retrievers were getting restless. All the
talk of the great outdoors was sending them over the edge.
The four of us were
soon stepping out and crossing the few feet from Tolly’s gravel driveway and on
to the damp green blades of the Downs.
Talk on that half-term Wednesday morning soon turned to the
somewhat surreal happenings of the previous Sunday. An afternoon dominated by
grand arrivals and off-centre lessons in the complexities of adult gatherings.
The occasion had been one of the sporadic social get
togethers of Carry On cast and crew. A time when the post midday hours were
orchestrated by Kenneth Williams, and played out to a soundtrack of laughter
and one-upmanship.
Tolly had been intrigued to what I had made of the event.
He’d noted that Hattie Jacques had spent a good hour with me .. the two of us
engaged in deep conversation.
I explained that she had raised the somewhat
thorny topic of weight gain .. a ‘condition’ that had hung heavy on both our
lives.
Hattie was sweet and understanding. I was barely in my teens
and she geared the conversation towards my adolescent body image concerns.
Initially I was embarrassed that the topic had been raised. But Hattie’s almost
sisterly approach instilled in me a new found confidence.
Then there was Sid, the old rascal. Sid James, bless him. A
man very much of his time. Flirty-yet-a-gentleman. Trustworthy, though would
bet your granny if he thought the old nag would come home first.
At the party I’d also been accosted by Kenneth Williams.
Don’t think he liked the fact I’d been happily sitting quietly with his fellow
Carry On team.
Kenneth very much saw himself as the numero uno. So I was
subjected to his full repertoire of peacock-like strutting. Much laughter was
had!
Barbara Windsor had arrived well after the party had peaked. Kenneth made sure he was next to her, or there abouts, for the remainder of the afternoon.
I noted that while he was talking to Barbara his eyes were actually locked into an intense gaze with Sid's. It would be a few years before I knew what that was all about!
Tolly loved to hear these tales. He found the inner workings of the Carry On cast a great inspiration for his writing.
As lunchtime approached we dropped down from the hills and took lunch at his local, The Shepherd and Dog. Tolly's attention was soon lost to the throng. I think they loved him just about as much as I did!
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
fellowA 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!
One of the chapters in A Write Carry On details the severe writer’s block suffered by Carry On
scriptwriter, Talbot ‘Tolly’ Rothwell.The blight of many-a-writer, the
condition is primarily the inability to produce new work. Though, in Tolly’s
case, it became the inability to recognise the keyboard layout on his
typewriter.
When asked about the most
frightening thing he had ever encountered, novelist Ernest Hemingwaysaid,
"A blank sheet of paper."
And none other than the
Master of Terror himself, Stephen King, said that the "scariest moment is
always just before you start writing. After that, things can only get
better."
An oft practised ‘cure’ to
‘the block’ is to try and take oneself out of the normal working routine.
In the case of Bats For
Lashes singer, Natasha Khan, she ‘hit the wall’ when it came time to write what
would become her forthcoming release, The Haunted Man.
"Stress! Stress! Oh God,
oh God, oh God!" she said, "I was getting very stuck and having
writer's block and getting panicked and really upset.
“I was honestly ready not to
do music any more because I thought, 'That's it, I'm just going to go off and
have a baby. I don't want to do this any more.' I'd lost my way."
Khan recently reported that as
her block worsened, she decided to step away from music.
It was suggested by a friend
that she could do unpaid work at Charleston (Vanessa Bell's artist studio, the
idyllic country bolthole for the Bloomsbury Group in East Sussex.), helping out
the gardener, Mark, and his infirm whippet.
"I was quite sad at the
time and quite lonely," she recalls. "I was stuck in my flat in Brighton and I was desperate for a garden.
“It felt like going back to
my mum's for a cup of tea. My parents don't live in the UK any more, so
it felt a bit like a little family."
When Khan went back to her
notebook, The Haunted Man started to take shape. It would be an album about England, a love letter to Hertfordshire where
she grew up and Sussex
where she now lived.
JK Rowling reported at the
time of writing Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets that “I really did have writer's block. Briefly, I think. It
wasn't a very serious case, it was only about five weeks. And compared to some
people, what's five weeks?
“Goblet of Fire, I was very
unhappy towards the end of writing Goblet, and at the point where I realised I
was fantasising that I would break an arm and therefore not be able to... I
really mean this.
“I mean I was just a little
way away from actually thinking "How can I break my arm so I can tell my
publishers that I can't physically do it?" and then that would give me
more time.
“Because I committed to a
totally unrealistic deadline. And I made the deadline. But I really did make it
by working round the clock really. I was so unhappy.” Supposed cures vary, but author
Julia Cameron advocates the practice of morning pages as a remedy to writer's
block. Morning pages are three handwritten pages of free writing where the
purpose is to write without the intention of using the writing for anything. It
is a practice that can bring your thoughts to the surface and allow you to
enter a more creative zone. All the above was written during my current bout of writer's block. At least I'm in good company!
A Write Carry On (Wholepoint Publications) is not the
whole story, it just marks the halfway point in my collection of reminisces
about growing up with the Carry Ons.
The final part of the tale, Intimate Insights, is currently
at the first draft stage and will be available for download (via Amazon/Kob/iTunes)
before the year's end.
Intimate Insights will focus on my meetings with many
of the regular Carry On cast. The majority of those off screen stumble-upons
took place in Fulking (Sussex),
at the home of 'Tolly' Rothwell.
A few of them, like my chance meeting with Julian Clary (Carry On Columbus), are worthy of their inclusion in Intimate Insights.
Julian was fine company; a thoughtful, engaging and open interviewee – despite
being caught somewhat off guard.
As for the featured Carry On regulars (Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Barbara Windsor, Jim Dale, Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims and Jim Dale), separately they were great
company. Together, in certain combinations, they could be a nightmare. I had
the (mis)-fortune to witness both! Intimate Insights will also
feature the illustrations of Mandy Hills. Mandy drew the cover for A Write
Carry On, and has teamed-up with me in the past where she has supplied illustrations for
poetry anthologies and magazines .. as well as drawing a mean Virginia Woolf!
The forthcoming
free mini-ebook 'Intimate Insights' will bring to a close the final chapter on
my unique tale of growing up with the Carry Ons. In A Write Carry On
(Wholepoint Publications) I offered a glimpse into the life and times of the longtime
series scriptwriter, Talbot 'Tolly' Rothwell.
'Intimate
Insights' delves a little deeper into the household names who were so universally
loved and respected; those icons of British comedy who included Sid James,
Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Hattie Jacques, Barbara Windsor, Frankie
Howerd and Jim Dale.
Some of
the mini-ebook’s insights have featured on this blog, others will be unique and
previously unpublished.
‘Intimate
Insights’ will be free to download from Scribd and this blog from 20th
October. Check back regularly for updates.
