Carry on at Your Convenience (1971) - film review

William C. Boggs is the appropriately named owner of a factory that manufactures lavatories.  The firm’s productivity is jeopardised by Vic Spanner, a Bolshie union representative, who routinely calls his fellow workers out on strike at the least provocation, especially on days when the football team he supports is playing at home.  The factory foreman Sid Plummer finds himself caught in the crossfire between the management and the workers, but this is preferable to staying at home with his budgie-loving battleaxe of a wife.  As a result of all the disruption caused by Vic and his little red book, the factory is losing business and faces being taken over by another company.   In a bid to secure the firm’s future, Boggs’s son, Lewis, tries to convince his father to diversify into making bidets, but Boggs is adamant that he would rather sell up than dirty his hands with such distasteful appliances...

Carry on at Your Convenience is the Carry On team’s only attempt at satire, the one film in the series that made light of contemporary political issues – specifically, the industrial relations problems that blighted Britain in the early 1970s.  It is no coincidence that this, the 22nd film in the series, was also the first of the Carry Ons to lose money on its first release.  (In fact, it took five years before the film recovered its modest production cost.)  The film’s blatant right-wing, pro-management bias is evident in the way that union representatives are portrayed as self-serving idiots who drive thriving businesses to ruin, something that would hardly endear the film to its core working class audience.

The film has other failings which may also have counted against it.  Most significantly, the innocent humour of the past, which relied on subtle innuendo and wordplay, had by this stage given way to something much cruder and far less suitable for family audiences.  No previous Carry On film employed anything like the number of expletives that this one contains and there are even one or two digressions in the direction of soft core porn.  This is the film that marked the beginning of the end for the Carry Ons.   The writing was on the (lavatory) wall.

Whilst it may lack the charm and innocence of previous entries in the series, Carry on at Your Convenience still offers plenty of good laughs and memorable comic situations.  Guest stars Kenneth Cope and Renee Houston slip effortlessly into the Carry On team (which includes most of the regulars, all as mad as ever) and divert us from the ramshackle plot and dubious political subtext (which has Conservative Party sponsorship written all over it).

In a rare excursion from the environs of Pinewood studios, the Carry On team invade the Brighton seafront and bring to life the saucy McGill postcards which the films are often likened to.  (The team would return to Brighton for Carry On Girls a couple of years later.)   Definitely not the best of the Carry Ons but, for all its failings, it is guaranteed to lift your spirits and put a broad smile on your face, unless you happen to be an über-militant trades union rep with absolutely no sense of humour, in which case you had probably best stick to the unabridged memoirs of Arthur Scargill.

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