Carry On Girls (1973)

The team have feminists in their sights.

The seaside resort of Fircombe is struggling to attract the tourists, so Sid Fiddler (Sid James) proposes a beauty contest to draw some much needed punters into the town. Getting the inept Mayor (Kenneth Connor) to agree was easy enough, but opposition comes in the form of Augusta Prodworthy (June Whitfield) and her league of feminists.

Lurid, smutty and just about average in the pantheon of the Carry On series. No Kenneth Williams for this one, but a point of interest is that Robin Askwith appears for the only time. Askwith ironically would become the star of the "Confessions" series of film's which would take the sex comedy to a whole new plateau from 1974 onwards. Carry On Girls has its moments, Bernie Bresslaw in drag brings quite a few gags, while Peter Butterworth as a lecherous old man steals the film.

Also pleasing for the franchise faithful is that the Sid James and Barbara Windsor (Hope Springs) pairing gets a nice arc befitting the relationship the pair built up during the series. Beauty contests and feminist whiles are given the treatment in Talbot Rothwell's screenplay, and the dying seaside town in need of a boost has a certain warmth to it (filmed on location in Brighton on England's South Coast). But really it's mild Carry On fare outside of the flesh and double entendres that are laced in humorous stereotypical cheapness. 5/10

Despite the quite entertaining and bubbly contributions from Barbara Windsor, this franchise is now really scraping the bottom of the ideas barrel with this one. Sid James is "Fiddler", a local councillor who manages to convince the town council - under the mayorship of the hopeless "Mayor Bumble" (Kenneth Connor) to agree to let him host a beauty contest. Now this infuriates fellow councillor "Prodworthy" (June Whitfield) and so she attempts to galvanise a woman's lib movement to fight this blatant sexism and put the kibosh on the entire thing. What now ensues are a series of escapades that are, frankly, quite crass, contrived and unfunny. Windsor does bring some fresh air to the thing, but James and Bernard Bresslaw ("Potter") are well off-form, Kenneth Connor only really had one, slightly seedy, style of delivery and that is failing to entertain these days and generally this is a weakly devised and rather clumsy gambol through early 1970s stereotypes peppered with some jokes that can really only be described as naff. There is a donkey, though....