Carry On Films - References in Other Media

References in Other Media

The success of the Carry On series occasionally led to affectionate parodies of the series by other contemporary comedians:

• In the Series 3 episode of The Navy Lark entitled The Explosive Biscuits, Sub Lieutenant Phillips (Leslie Phillips) and Lieutenant Murray (Stephen Murray) see a film in Portsmouth entitled Carry On Undertaker, which is used for a self-referential joke - Sub-Lt. Phillips comments on how amused he was by: "the silly hearse driver in the small moustache", a reference to Leslie Phillips. The Carry On films would be referenced again in the Series 4 episode The Northampton Hunt Ball, in which Ramona Povey (Heather Chasen) pretends to go and see the fictional Carry On Deckchair Man in order to secretly play Bingo.
• In The Spitting Image Book, released in 1985, there is a reference to a fictitious made-for-TV film entitled Carry On Up the Rectum, satirising the transparency of the puns used for Carry On Up the Khyber and possibly Carry On Up the Jungle.
• Harry Enfield's mockumentary Norbert Smith – a Life (1989) includes a clip from an imagined Carry On film, Carry On Banging (a parody of the more risque approach of the later Carry On films, such as Carry On Dick and Carry On Emmannuelle). The setting is the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp of the 1980s. Three genuine Carry On actors appear in the spoof: Barbara Windsor, Jack Douglas and Kenneth Connor.
• In the Goodies 1977 spin-off book, The Making of The Goodies Disaster Movie, there is a parody poster and script extract from the obviously parodic Carry On Christ, which casts many of the regulars as Biblical characters (as well as providing a cameo for Orson Welles as God, who memorably gets to intone the line "Oops, know what I mean.")
• Electronic artist Pogo uses multiple excerpts from Carry On Cruising in his song Go Out and Love Someone.
• Although not expressly a Carry On parody, a sketch in That Mitchell and Webb Look is set in a "bawdy 1970s hospital" which closely replicates the look, soundtrack, style of dialogue etc. of the medical-themed films in the series. In the sketch, a new recruit is unable to understand the difference between the dirty double entendres used by the rest of the hospital's staff and mere openly obscene statements, and consistently uses the latter and only the latter to try to fit in.