The Carry On Girls (eBook)

JULIE STEVENS

Julie Stevens is best known as the original The Avengers girl – the blonde-bobbed Venus Smith, alongside Patrick Macnee as John Steed, and alternating with Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale. Venus was a nightclub singer, featured in six episodes, each of which would include an interlude for Julie to sing a song. She later went on to be one of the best-loved presenters on Play School: ‘I actually gave my mouse chatting with a giraffe business from that programme for my Carry On audition!’

When Julie joined the Carry On team she was utterly thrilled; for one thing, the money was terrific. ‘I went from £15 a day on television work to £50 a day for Carry On Cleo. That was a lot of money, it was very good stuff.’ Moreover, Julie was delighted to be working with what she calls the ‘crème de la crème’ of British comedy. At the time, although she had just given birth and she was still carrying her post-baby weight, Julie was self-conscious that her breasts were not big enough. Indeed, the costume department had to pad her out. Looking back she doesn’t understand what she was worried about: ‘My figure looks gorgeous.’

When she went up for the role, she attended the audition not really knowing what it was about. She simply delivered her line and giggled. Thinking how lovely Pinewood Studios was, she left. When she was offered the role, she couldn’t believe her luck. In fact, she told her agent, ‘You’re kidding, I’m a midget with stumpy legs.’ To aid her with her concerns, they put her in high heels and a big blonde wig so she could be taller. ‘It’s hilarious,’ Julie remembers, ‘whenever I went up for a part and had dyed my hair blonde, I never got it. I kept my dark hair for the Carry On, and got the part!’

Julie had the most fun on set, particularly with Amanda Barrie (‘We would giggle all the time, and just enjoy the silliness of it all’), and Sid James:

Rome Antics for Ancient Britons in Egypt: Horsa (Jim Dale) and Gloria (Julie Stevens) are reunited at the end of hysterical historical Carry On Cleo.

When Julie began filming, she wanted her character of Bristolian Gloria to have a Bristol accent. After her first scene:

For Julie, everyone was professional on the set, and she felt it was about as luxurious as her career could ever be. It was fast and it was fun: ‘No one ever changed the script. You had it, you came to work, and got on with it. It was a joy. They were all naughty boys in the nicest possible way.’

DAME SHEILA HANCOCK

Just before starring as the dipsy Carole in The Rag Trade, from October 1961 through to June 1962, Sheila had originally been cast in the role Ambrosine Phillpotts plays in Carry On Regardless. With the chimp! However, Sheila did join the team in Carry On Cleo. She played Senna Pod the domestic ogress who becomes the affectionate mother and sexually eager wife to Hengist Pod (Kenneth Connor). A few months after completing her role, in October 1964, Sheila appeared in BBC2’s Thursday Theatre production of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. She was cast as Olive Leech, the role created by June Jago. Carry On wheels within wheels …

Horsa (Jim Dale) is welcomed by his new next-door neighbours Hengist and Senna Pod (Kenneth Connor and Sheila Hancock): a snarling ancient Briton, ‘without a lick of woad on!’

TANYA BINNING

The buxom Chief Vestal Virgin, Virginia, in Carry On Cleo, Tanya was a statuesque model and showgirl who was paid in cash from the kitty for her three days’ work on the film. Part of the assignment was a prestigious publicity photograph session in London in August 1964. These photos were circulated in the press as an advance coming attraction for the Christmas 1964 launch of the film.

A reflective moment for Tanya Binning, being fitted for her Carry On Cleo part at theatrical costumers Bermans. The Australian-born beauty would follow the film up with an appearance in the musical comedy film Funny Things Happen Down Under.

THELMA TAYLOR

Thelma Taylor is the beautiful blonde servant to Seneca (Charles Hawtrey) in Carry On Cleo. Something of a secretary, the aged sage is teaching her to write; after all, Thelma has little to do but look lovely. She does it beautifully. Of course.

Thelma Taylor’s performance in Carry On Cleo was too funny for words, and she blended perfectly with the ancient Rome decor (even in sixties kinky boots): a gloriously haphazard assortment of sets left over from 20th Century Fox’s epic production of Cleopatra, and from a production of Caligula rented out from fellow Carry On player Victor Maddern. Vic had played Helicon in the stage play so ‘those sets were very familiar to me!’

WANDA VENTHAM

Chalking up two very different, decidedly strong Carry On girls, Wanda Ventham is the determined auction bidder at the Marcus & Spencius slave market, trying to pick up the handsome hunk Horsa (Jim Dale), in Carry On Cleo. She is outbid by Peggy Ann Clifford (1921–86), the rotund character actress who specialised in those over-fed, overly affectionate roles. Wanda’s sheepish shake of the head to the hirsute slave as she is outbid is delightful indeed, and not even Jim’s desperate plea, that he’ll pay her back should she go higher, does any good. He’s destined to be Willa Claudia’s ‘pampered pet of an old Roman bag’. W.C. Oh, no!

Wanda returned four years later, for Carry On … Up the Khyber. Here, as the number one wife of the Khasi of Kalibar (Kenneth Williams) she brings a serene sensitivity to the role. She is part of the package deal that Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond (Sid James) insists upon bedding, thanks to the Khasi, supposedly, seducing Sid’s good lady wife, Lady Joan (Joan Sims). While the scene is played in the broadest of strokes by the Carry On regulars, this was common practice during the days of the British in India, and Wanda’s subtle playing adds just the right touch of authenticity to this right old Carry On.

A frequent face on British screens, Wanda’s first break in Pinewood Studios comedy was opposite Norman Wisdom, in uncredited roles as a debutante in On the Beat (1962), and as a nurse in A Stitch in Time (1963). In between romps with the Carry On team, she played sophisticated Priscilla Blunstone-Smythe, opposite Mark Burns, in the glamorous thriller Death is a Woman (1966); and demure Clare Mallinger in the Tigon horror film The Blood Beast Terror (1968), where Inspector Peter Cushing is on the trail of a murderous moth. Oh, yes. Spoiler alert here: it turns out to be Wanda, the pretty daughter of mad doctor Robert Flemying.

Wanda’s sitcom credentials are high, most notably playing Pamela Parry, wife of Alan (Denis Lill) in Only Fools and Horses, from 1989 through to 1992. Along with second husband, Timothy Carlton, she joined the cast of Sherlock, playing the parents of Sherlock Holmes – the couple being the actual parents of Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch.

Sid James, in character as Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, was whisked into Carry On … Up the Khyber publicity mode, and snapped on the Pinewood Studios village set for concurrent production Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with gorgeous Vicki Woolf and Wanda Ventham, as the Khasi’s wives, the last and first to ‘right the wrong’.

JULIE HARRIS (1921–2015)

Carry On Cleo was the only Carry On assignment for Julie Harris but one of splendour to be sure. Julie, who had graduated from the Chelsea School of Art, was something of the go-to designer for swinging sixties British film. Indeed, she worked on The Beatles films A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Soon after completing work on Cleo, she was employed by director John Schlesinger for Darling. Julie recalled that star Julie Christie ‘badgered me to make the skirts shorter. And she was right.’ Harris was presented with the Academy Award for her designs. The wealth of Victoriana required by Bryan Forbes for The Wrong Box pocketed Julie a BAFTA. She designed the elaborate, flowing threads for former Bond girl Ursula Andress in the James Bond spoof Casino Royale, and later worked on the official...