Carry On Teacher (1959)
Carry
on Teacher was a coy, cosy look at the world of mortar-boards
and chalk dust.
 Naturally enough it is the main team members who inject touches
of manic humour and delightful prat-falling to the scenario, but
with the exception of moments of babyish bickering between Hawtrey
and Williams, these characters are not the clumsy eccentrics of
the initial films.
Even the ultimate dithering science master, Kenneth Connor, is
a brilliant and clever teacher who battles with love sickness and
tongue-tied spoonerisms to create a likeable figure of bumbling
nervousness.
Both Hattie Jacques and Joan Sims crusade through the blinkered
men's world of education with comments about beating the men at
their own game and sorting out the school's problem for the
feminist course. Jacques' wildly uncontrolled math’s mistress is
the chief harridan of cane mad authority.
The film's chief asset is an inspired tooth-and-nail battle of
one-upmanship between Hawtrey's music master and the flamboyant
English master played by Kenneth Williams.
Their tense relationship is strained even further through
disagreements over the school play, Romeo and Juliet. The
disastrous staging of the Bard forms the, by now standard,
explosive Carry On, Ted Ray's amazed and totally
dumbfounded headmaster sinks deeper and deeper into his front row
seat and literally eats his handkerchief in embarrassment.
The tear-jerking finale has the children's bad behaviour
explained away as a plan to distress the visiting school inspector
and thus destroy Ted Ray's dreams of leaving Maudlin Street
School.
Teacher is a delightfully naive vision of the education
system and was another top money earner for the Carry On
stable. The team had developed a style of outrageous retelling of
the same story through similar characters in various locations and
occupations.
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