Carry on Camping (1969) - film review

One year, Sid and Bernie decide to take their girlfriends, Joan and Anthea, on a camping holiday.  They had intended to spend a week of wild abandonment in a nudist camp but instead find themselves at an ordinary campsite run by the aptly named Mr Fiddler.  The site offers no attractions and the two men are ready to give up and go back home when they see a party of well-endowed young females descending from a coach.  This is the latest intake at Chayste Place, an exclusive finishing school run by Dr Soaper and his assistant Miss Haggard.  A camping holiday is just what is needed to give the young ladies an appreciation of the joys of nature, thinks Dr Soaper.   Sid couldn’t agree more...

After the superlative Carry On Up the Khyber, the Carry On team ditched the period costumes and returned to more familiar territory with this, their seventeenth offering of madcap innuendo-laden fun.  If there is a plot to this film it is very carefully hidden; instead, what we have is a well-stocked compendium of gags bolted together in the episodic format of the earliest Carry On films.  Whilst clearly not the best film in the series, Carry On Camping remains one of the most watched and best loved.  It had the distinction of being the highest grossing film shown in British cinemas in 1969 (the second highest grossing was, incidentally, Up the Khyber). 

If there is one enduring image in Carry On Camping it is the sight of Barbara Windsor losing her bikini top whilst performing an exercise routine with Kenneth Williams.  This is just one of several brilliantly executed visual gags that the film has to offer.  Screenwriter Talbot Rothwell may have given up on the plot but he can still deliver the laughs.  His script is saturated with so many comedy nougats that it must have felt like a gift to the performers. 

With most of the regulars present and giving of their best, it is no wonder that Camping is considered one of the most enjoyable of the Carry Ons.   As Sid James salivates at the sight of Babs Windsor (along with at least half of the audience) and Charles Hawtrey becomes a target for comedy missiles of every kind, Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques pick up more or less from where they left off in Carry On Doctor (1967).  Once again, poor Ken manages to unwittingly release Hat’s pent-up feminine yearnings and ends up looking like a man superglued to the side of a volcano just before it erupts.  Meanwhile, the incomparable Betty Marsden (who had worked with Williams on the popular BBC radio series Round the Horne) makes life like Hell for miserable hubby Terry Scott (who, throughout the soggy November location shoot, was afflicted with hemorrhoids).  What else could we ask for?

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