Listen Again: Play it Cool

If you are looking for a diversion this weekend and can't find anything on the telly (apart from all the Carry Ons on ITV£3 that is) then why not check out this vintage comedy series on the always excellent BBC Radio 4 Extra?

There are currently several episodes available to listen again to online and as the series stars a certain Joan Sims, it must be worth checking out. First broadcast in July 1964 on the Light Programme, Play it Cool was produced by that master of radio comedy, John Simmonds. Starring alongside Joan are those two wonderful comedy actors Ian Carmichael and Hugh Paddick.

Ian shot to fame thanks to starring roles in films such as Private's Progress, I'm All Right Jack and Double Bunk, while Hugh is of course much loved for his appearances as part of the regular cast in radio's Beyond Our Ken, Round The Horne and Stop Messing About. Joan of course needs no introduction.

Play it Cool was Ian's first radio comedy series and promised fast moving sketches, a plethora of comedy characters and a variety of 'potty and pompous' situations. It's written by the brilliant Eric Merriman and as was often the case at the time, musical interludes are provided by the likes of Rosemary Squires, The Mike Sammes Singers and The Ken Thorne Orchestra.

If you want to have a listen you can find it here.

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My Five Favourite Liz Fraser Performances

We lost a great talent this week with Liz Fraser passing away. I know my Twitter feed has been pretty focussed on this the last couple of days but I think Liz's contribution to the best of British film and television warrants this coverage. A big thank you to everyone out there who commented positively on my tribute to Liz, posted after I heard the sad news. It wasn't easy to write but I'm glad it was well received.

I thought, after the sad news, I would take some time to write a blog on my favourite Liz performances. As she was on our screens for seven decades and worked with just about everyone this is no easy feat. So what I've come up with is a purely personal list of favourites. Some are from the cinema, some the small screen. Some are starring roles, some are small yet important cameos. 

I hope you like my choices.


Cynthia Kite in I'm All Right Jack (1959)

I couldn't do this without including Liz's breakthrough role in this Boulting Brothers classic. Despite being almost sixty years old, I caught this film again recently and it made me laugh and kept me fully engaged throughout. Not only that, it also made my husband laugh and he has a very un-British, very American sense of humour. The tale of trouble at the works boasts a stellar cast, headed by Ian Carmichael and Peter Sellers. Liz shines as Peter's sexy young daughter Cynthia who flutters her false eyelashes at Ian's Stanley Windrush and dons many a tight sweater. This role saw Liz nominated for a BAFTA and her career as a British comedy icon and glamorous sex symbol began. In an interview with The Art Desk in 2015 Liz was still immensely proud of this film and rightly so. Her seduction of Ian Carmichael in his bubble car is a highlight with that knock out line: "Is them your own teeth?" Brilliant.

Delia King in Carry On Regardless (1961)

Liz joined the Carry On team for three adventures in the early 1960s followed up by a supporting turn in Carry On Behind in 1975. She brought a breath of fresh air to the established cast and although labelled another 'Carry On Blonde' she was always much more than that. Yes, she was blonde, busty and beautiful but she was also a damn fine comic actress. She brought something different to the films from other 'Carry On Blondes' such as Shirley Eaton or Barbara Windsor. I think my favourite of Liz's Carry On roles is her very first, as an eager member of the newly established Helping Hands Agency. Although a late addition to the cast following the withdrawal of Hattie Jacques due to illness, Liz fitted like a glove. She was acting with her Hancock co-star Sid James and alongside lifelong friend Joan Sims and everything just clicked. In a cast bursting with talent, Liz holds her own.  And in my eyes, she never looked lovelier. 

Sandra in Double Bunk (1961)

By all accounts, Liz's own personal favourite from all the films she made, Double Bunk is just a delight from start to finish. In many ways it's Genevieve by boat and that's not a bad thing. It's charming, innocent black and white fun with a touch of sauce. Starring alongside Sid James, Ian Carmichael and Janette Scott, Liz joins a rather unexpected voyage on a rusty old houseboat. Liz is again working closely with Sid and the pair share tremendous chemistry. She also provides the silver screen with one of the sexiest and yet most innocent strip teases in order to pinch some petrol from fiendish cad Dennis Price. Double Bunk is light and frothy and fairly inconsequential but it wins through on bright, breezy charm and the cosy familiarity of a bunch of actors who get on well in real life having a hoot together in the studio.

Margery Harper in The Professionals: Backtrack (1979)

With the British film industry in severe decline by the late 1970s, actors like Liz were appearing more often on television. The Professionals, an action adventure crime fighting series featuring heightened violence and focussing on the negative aspects of Britain in the 1970s, may not immediately feel like the right home for an actress like Liz but her appearance is an utter joy. The Professionals, starring Gordon Jackson, Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins as leading members of CI5, although a hard-hitting drama, also featured many moments of surreal humour. As blowsy antiques dealer cum fence Margery Harper, Liz shines in an over the top performance of high camp, tight flared trousers and buckets of green chartreuse. Helping out agents Bodie and Doyle, Liz's Marge takes more than a shine to Shaw's Ray Doyle while making several hilariously snide asides to the brutish Bodie (Collins). It's camp, knowing and Fraser is obviously having a whale of a time. Where else can you find Liz Fraser screeching around Kensington in the middle of the night, dressed in furs in the back of a big American car? Wonderful stuff.

Mrs Brent in Miss Marple: Nemesis (1987)

Joan Hickson was the definitive Miss Marple. Her BBC adaptations from the 1980s and early 1990s are just the best. For me, they'll never be surpassed. They always boasted a superb cast of supporting actors and Nemesis is one of the best. Liz appears in just one scene in this feature length drama, playing a grief-stricken mother fond of a tipple. As Mrs Brent, Liz shares one small but powerful scene with actor John Horsley's Professor Wanstead. Mrs Brent's daughter Nora has disappeared and is presumed dead. Although initially bright and cheerful in her respectable 1950s semi, as Wanstead starts to ask questions, Mrs Brent's face slowly cracks and the emotion is palpable. Liz achieves this excellent emotion by completely underplaying it and the tears she sheds are very real. As her character sips her orange squash laced liberally with gin, the facade slips. This role remained a favourite of Liz's and you could tell she was very proud of it, even though it was the subject of two frequent quips. The first, that she loved it as it provided regular royalty cheques from the BBC and the second that the day after it was first broadcast a woman stopped her in the street to commend her saying, "I didn't know you could act!" 

That was Liz though. There was a spiky bluster to her but you could tell she had a heart of gold. She was proud of some of the roles she played, less so of others. She was a realist and took jobs because she both enjoyed the work and needed to work. I hope she would approve of my choices here and I hope you'll agree she was right to be proud of each and every one of them.

You can read my tribute to Liz Fraser here



You can follow me on Twitter @CarryOnJoan and on Instagram

Carry On Faces in Different Places: Heavens Above!

Here we go with another in my series of blogs looking at some of the cream of British comedy film making from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Although this blog is all about the Carry Ons, believe it or not, there were some other joyous comedy films made away from Peter Rogers Productions. However, given the quality of the actors Peter employed to make his series, it's no wonder that most of them popped up elsewhere.

So far I've looked at the wonderful 1959 crime caper Too Many Crooks , the 1954 domestic comedy starring Dirk Bogarde, For Better For Worse , the big screen spin off Please Sir! and the wonderful Up Pompeii and the brilliant John Gregson and Diana Dors vehicle, Value for Money.
  
More recently I blogged about the Sid James and Kenneth Connor comedy horror What A Carve Up! and the the Gordon Jackson drama, Floodtide. 

And last week I looked at the Carry On links with the wonderful film I'm All Right Jack and the Diana Dors' prison drama, Yield to the Night

Today I'm going to blog about the 1963 comedy film, Heavens Above!

 

What's it about?

A naive but caring prison chaplain, Smallwood, is accidentally assigned as vicar to the small and prosperous country town of Orbiston Parva, in place of an upper-class cleric (Carmichael) with the same name. His belief in charity and forgiveness sets him at odds with the locals, whose assertions that they are good, Christian people are belied in Smallwood's eyes by their behaviour and ideas. He creates social ructions by appointing a black dustman as his churchwarden, taking in a gypsy family, and persuading local landowner Lady Despard to provide free food for the church to distribute free to the people of the town. However, all his good works lead to trouble.

Who's in it?

Heavens Above! is produced by the Boulting Brothers, so as with several other films of the period, their stars include Peter Sellers and Ian Carmichael (who also starred in the brilliant I'm All Right Jack). Also in the cast is Bernard Miles, Eric Sykes, Miriam Karlin, Isabel Jeans and the wonderful character actor, Roy Kinnear. 

 

Carry On Faces?

Lots of them! Carry On original actor William Hartnell plays the town councillor, Major Fowler. Regular Boulting Brothers' favourite Irene Handl, who also had cameos in Carry On Nurse and Constable, plays Rene Smith. Carry On Jack guest star, the great Cecil Parker, stars here as Archdeacon Aspinall while Eric Barker, seen in authority roles in Carry On Sergeant, Constable, Spying and Emmannuelle, plays a bank manager in this film.

There are also a whole host of regular Carry On actors in small parts throughout the film. Joan Hickson plays a housewife, Harry Locke a shop steward and Carry On Up The Khyber actor Cardew Robinson appears as a tramp. Also, look out for Marianne Stone in the role of Miss Palmer, Ian Wilson as a Salvation Army Major and George Woodbridge as a Bishop.

 

Did you know?

The film features small uncredited roles for future well known actors John Junkin and Rodney Bewes.

The film was the 12th most popular film in the UK in 1963.


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Carry On Faces in Different Places: I'm All Right Jack

Here we go with another in my series of blogs looking at some of the cream of British comedy film making from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Although this blog is all about the Carry Ons, believe it or not, there were some other joyous comedy films made away from Peter Rogers Productions. However, given the quality of the actors Peter employed to make his series, it's no wonder that most of them popped up elsewhere.

So far I've looked at the wonderful 1959 crime caper Too Many Crooks , the 1954 domestic comedy starring Dirk Bogarde, For Better For Worse , the big screen spin off Please Sir! and the wonderful Up Pompeii and the brilliant John Gregson and Diana Dors vehicle, Value for Money.
  
More recently I blogged about the Sid James and Kenneth Connor comedy horror What A Carve Up! and just last week I blogged about the Gordon Jackson drama, Floodtide

Today I'm going to blog about the 1959 comedy film, I'm All Right Jack.
 

Who's in it?

I'm All Right Jack boasts one of the strongest casts of any British film comedy of the era. Ian Carmichael stars as the innocent of the piece, Stanley Windrush. Peter Sellers takes on one of his best loved film roles as Union boss Fred Kite and Terry-Thomas stars as Major Hitchcock, boss of the factory.

The film also features several high profile guest stars in Margaret Rutherford as Stanley's Aunt Dolly, Richard Attenborough as Sydney DeVere Cox and Dennis Price as Tracepurcel. 

Carry On Faces?

Loads! Liz Fraser grabs her first big starring role in the film playing Fred Kite's daughter Cynthia. Playing her mother in the film is reliable character actress Irene Handl. Familiar Carry On supporting actor Victor Maddern has a sizable role as factory worker Knowles while some of the other workers are played by the likes of Fred Griffiths, David Lodge, Cardew Robinson and Terry Scott.

Harry Locke, a regular in three of the medical Carry Ons, plays a trade union official while the diminutive Ian Wilson pops up as an Evangalist. One of my favourites, Esma Cannon, also has a small role as Spencer, Margaret Rutherford's maid. 

Carry On Nurse actor John Van Eyssen appears in a small role as a reporter alongside the brilliant Michael Ward. Another stalwart, Brian Oulton, turns up early on in the film as the Appointments Board Manager while Carry On Cruising actor Ronnie Stevens plays Hooper at the Num Yum's factory, alongside Martin Boddey, as an Executive. There are also blink and you'll miss them appearances from Robin Ray, son of Ted and brother of Andrew, and Marianne Stone as a T.V assistant (After all, which British film of the era could proceed without Marianne Stone?)

And one final Carry On connection. I'm All Right Jack's narrator is E.V.H Emmett - a regular newsreader and voiceover actor who provided narration for the 1964 classic, Carry On Cleo.

What's it about?

After leaving the army and returning to university, newly graduated upper class Stanley Windrush is looking for a job but fails miserably at interviews for various entry level management positions. Stanley's uncle, Bertram Tracepurcel  and his old army comrade, Sidney DeVere Cox, persuade him to take an unskilled blue-collar job at Uncle Bertram's missile factory, despite Aunt Dolly's misgivings.

At first suspicious of the overeager newcomer, communist shop steward Fred Kite takes Stanley under his wing and even offers to take him in as a lodger. When Kite's curvaceous daughter Cynthia drops by, Stanley readily accepts.

Meanwhile, personnel manager Major Hitchcock is assigned a time and motion study expert, Waters, to measure how efficient the employees are. The workers refuse to cooperate but Waters tricks Windrush into showing him how much more quickly he can do his job with his forklift truck, than other more experienced employees. When Kite is informed of the results, he calls a strike to protect the rates his union workers are being paid.

This is what Cox and Tracepurcel want; Cox owns a company that can take over a large new contract with a Middle Eatern country at an inflated cost. He, Tracepurcel and a Mr Mohammed, the country's representative, would each pocket a third of the £100,000 difference.

Things don't quite work out for either side. Cox arrives at his factory to find that his workers are walking out in sympathy for Kite and his strikers. The press reports that Kite is punishing Windrush for working hard. When Windrush decides to cross the picket line and go back to work (and reveals his connection with the company's owner), Kite asks him to leave his house. This provokes the adoring Cynthia and her mother to go on strike. More strikes spring up, bringing the country to a standstill.

Did you know?

The film is a sequel to the Boulting Brothers' earlier hit film, Private's Progress, with Ian Carmichael, Dennis Price, Richard Attenborough and Terry-Thomas reprising their roles from that 1956 film.

Peter Sellers won a BAFTA award for best actor for his role as Fred Kite.

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Liz Fraser's Double Bunk

Liz Fraser has always been one of my favourite Carry On actors. I loved her appearances in Regardless, Cruising, Cabby and Behind.

She also of course starred in a host of other British comedy films of the era including a St Trinians film, Doctor in Love, I'm Allright Jack, Too Many Crooks and the delightful Double Bunk.

Double Bunk, which co-starred Sid James and Ian Carmichael, is apparently Liz's favourite film of all the comedies she made at this stage of her career. It's a lovely black and white comedy if you can track it down. 

Sid and Liz also sang the theme tune for the film and when Liz appeared on Jools Holland's radio show last year he played the track for her. I thought it was very sweet and although that show is no longer available to share online, here is the track, "Double Bunk". Enjoy!

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The Fantastic Ms Fraser

I have written about how much I love the glorious actress Liz Fraser before, but perhaps not in a great deal of depth. A contemporary of the likes of Joan Sims, Patsy Rowlands and Dilys Laye, Liz appeared in many classic films and television series during what many consider to be the golden age of British entertainment.

She made her name as the sexy teenager opposite Ian Carmichael in the classic British comedy I'm All Right Jack in 1959. As a new young actress, she held her own opposite the likes of Peter Sellers, Irene Handl, Terry-Thomas and Margaret Rutherford. Quite a line up! This film was just the beginning for Liz, who quickly cornered the market in glamorous blondes who were nobody's fool! 

Liz went on to star in many wonderful films, including four classic Carry Ons - Regardless, Cruising, Cabby and Behind. She appeared in Two Way Stretch in 1960 opposite Peter Sellers; Doctor in Love the same year with Joan Sims as a pair of strippers; The Bull Dog Breed with Norman Wisdom; The Pure Hell of St Trinian's; Raising The Wind (1961); A Pair of Briefs (1962) and my favourite, Double Bunk in which she co-starred with Sid James, Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael.

In the 1950s and 60s Liz Fraser also regularly appeared with Tony Hancock and Sid James in the iconic Hancock's Half Hour on television. This association led her to be cast as Sid's girlfriend in the spin-off series Citizen James. 

In the 1960s, Liz began to appear in more dramatic parts, an attempt to get away from the dizzy blonde roles of earlier years. This led to parts in films such as The Americanisation of Emily (1964); The Family Way (1966) and Up The Junction (1968). In the 1970s Liz made several forays into the world of the sex comedy, always maintaining her dignity while those around her were losing theirs. I almost wish Liz had stayed clear of these awful films, however she obviously enjoyed the experience from what I've read and at the time, parts in British film must have been few and far between. In the late 1970s, Liz appeared in two Confessions films, Adventures of a Taxi Driver, Under The Doctor, Adventures of a Private Eye and Rosie Dixon: Night Nurse. Moving on...

Two of my favourite Liz Fraser performances cropped up on the small screen. The first came in an episode of The Professionals in 1978. Liz plays a "fence" called Margery Harper and she makes a gloriously dubious, blowsy woman who takes a shine to Martin Shaw's Ray Doyle. It's all deliciously tongue in cheek. I also loved Liz's cameo appearance in the classic BBC adaptation of the Miss Marple story, Nemesis. Liz plays a drunken Mrs Brent and it's a wonderfully tragic performance.

I wish Liz had been given more opportunities to play dramatic parts. In 1988 she played a woman dying of cancer alongside Jean Boht in a BBC play called Eskimos Do It. Sadly I've never seen this film and I doubt the Beeb will repeat it any time soon. As with many actors in the public eye, Liz probably became pigeon-holed as a certain type of character actress, which is a shame as this gutsy woman obviously had a lot more to give.

Liz appears regularly reminiscing about the glory days of British film and it's always a joy to hear from her. She is a realist, always speaks her mind and clearly doesn't give a damn what people think, qualities I admire! She always speaks so fondly of her fellow actors, particularly Sid James and Joan Sims. Liz defends Sid so eloquently when so many others just want to muck rake and I love her loyalty. She was also very close to Joan and was obviously a very dear, loyal friend to Sims throughout her life, providing both practical and emotional support. 

Robert Ross once described Liz Fraser as the British answer to Marilyn Monroe and I must agree with him. She is stunning in so many of her films, combining glamour with a natural acting talent and flair for comedy. She is a highlight of many classic British comedies and a firm fan favourite. Liz is now in her 80s but is still a force to be reckoned with and long may that continue!

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