Carry On Camping

1 9 6 9 (UK)

Carry On Camping has no plot to speak of - it is simply a collection of familiar eccentrics going on a camping holiday. But when Sid Boggle and Bernie Lugg take their girlfriends to the Paradise Camp, the lecherous pair think they're off to a nudist colony. They couldn’t be more wrong. 

At the same time, snooty headmaster of a girls' school, Kenneth Williams, and school matron, Hattie Jacques are organising a trip back to nature for their over-sized and over-sexed girls.

The middle-class businessman brigade is represented by a pin-striped Terry Scott, who is quickly out of his suit and into country gear for yet another horrendous camping holiday with nagging wife, Betty Marsden. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Charles Hawtrey is having a bit of difficulty with Valerie Leon in a tent.

For the first half hour or so we follow these various misfits through their struggling and hilarious attempts to find the glorious 'Paradise Holiday Camp'.

Once the team are settled safely in the field, Sid and Bernard approach the sexy nymphets of Barbara Windsor and Sandra Caron, Hattie tries to lure Kenneth into her tent, Charles Hawtrey reunites with a less-than-keen Terry Scott and an all-night rave-up in the adjoining field threatens to disrupt several plans for sexual coupling.

At the end, everybody's happy, it's been a whiz-bang cascade through a clutch of loosely linked sketches and comic devices, but the Carry Ons came out on top with a timelessly funny example of the team's work and the biggest money-making film of the year.

"No Barbara . . . tent up first, bunk up later!". 

Elements of this article © Robert Ross: Carry On Companion.