Thread by @_F_B_G_

Right as per this- I’m about to start watching Carry On Cleo, a take on Anthony and Cleopatra that makes Shakespeare’s look like a masterclass in Egyptology.

https://twitter.com/_f_b_g_/status/1247444598219210752

Once again I am using a DVD from the weird set of Ponzi scheme magazines which my mad grandmother thought were a perfect gift for pre-adolescent me.

With it, as a tribute to pisshead to the stars, Charles Hawtrey, I am drinking the remnants of a bottle of Chianti, some Croft sherry and maybe some Glenmorangie.

Famously they robbed all the sets off the bins round the back of the blockbuster Cleopatra, but Taylor, Burton et al had nothing on this cast.

Oh no, our first crudely alluded to phallic symbol, and wedges between Jon Pertwee and Sheila Hancock no less.

Oh Talbot, you card- we all know Shakespeare didn’t have any original ideas!

Right, so we start in some sort of throwback to the Flintstones crossed with eroticised CBBC teen drama ‘Cavegirl’ where Kenneth Connor makes square wheels and Jim Dale makes windows. So far, so true to Shakespeare tbh.

Dale’s character is called Horsa, while Connor’s is called Hengist Pod. His wife is called Senna and her mum got ate of a brontosaurus. In one minute we’ve got a conflation of Anglo Saxons, dinosaurs, and constipation. Talbot Rothwell should have got the OM.

Sid James plays Mark Anthony. Irving, Brando, one of them off of Sherlock (probably)- none have captured the raw ambition of Anthony quite like Sid.

Jim Dale (who I once took part in a drunken contest to make up the dirtiest song about- and lost to a filthy ditty to the tune of the Heartbeat theme) has tried to fight back against the Romans and sent Ken Connor on his square wheeled bike to Carlisle for some reason.

There is literally no better introduction to a titan of global history than this, Ken Williams as Julius Caesar.

They are now discussing how the British have a local god called ‘Crumpet’. Again, the fidelity to the Bard of Avon is touching.

Yes! The first instance of this cracking routine, which I now have in my head as being the actual original dialogue to the extent that I am considering editing both the Shakespeare and Caesar pages of wikiquote accordingly.

Yes! First appearance of pisshead to the stars Charles Hawtrey. He plays Seneca as if he’s a bitchy and lecherous east end hairdresser. Amazing.

He’s also inconceivably the dad of Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife played with scolding brilliance by Joan Sims. She mostly screeches at him and it’s gold.

Nice cameo from future Alf Garnett, Warren Mitchell as Spencius of Marcus and Spencius. A crack at Britain’s declining industry as he tells Sid ‘the British don’t make em like they used to’.

Ken’s in the senate, where Brutus has just made a Gibbon reference (as in Whiggish mistake maker Edmund, not the breed of furious poo slinging monkey).

Kenneth Williams has just delivered the amazing line:

‘...and this other troublemaker’
‘Ptolemy?’
‘I am telling you.’

Followed by a 3 minute Harold Macmillan impression rounded off by screaming ‘You’ve never had it so good’ in his best Kentish Town camp. Gold.

Now a group of ladies of a certain age are getting inconceivably horny for Jim Dale and Ken Connor has been stamped with that lion mark that goes on eggs. Obviously.

Ken’s changed into some booties and has been told that the Eunuchs are on strike.

‘Why?’ he asks

‘Loss of assets’ replies pisshead to the stars, Charles Hawtrey

Pisshead to the stars Charles Hawtrey is having a vision and we’ve just been treated to this flash of his red y fronts. I am now starting on the cooking sherry.

Meanwhile Dale and Connor have escaped to the temple of Vesta.

‘Which one are we?’
‘You should know’

If this doesn’t get to Christmas No.1 there’s no justice in the world.

Anyway- that cut to pisshead to the stars happened while Kenneth Williams was en route to the same temple of Vesta. Here’s Kenneth Connor wearing a plant plot and telling him he’s a eunuch.

If I had unlimited money, I would, as with Khyber, pay a set of ancient experts- Mary Beard, Simon Teabag Montefiore, whoever wrote the Cambridge Latin course etc.- to discuss the events of Carry On Cleo at a deadly serious panel event as if they’d been real.

Here it is. Honestly believe this to be the best line/delivery combo in any British film. No jokes. Come fight me.

Now everyone thinks Ken Connor has saved Caesar from assassination by the Praetorian Guard. It’s like 1 Clavdivs this. Also another cracking outing for this routine:

A group of people have just stripped Kenneth Connor naked while some groovy music plays. This is what the Swinging Sixties were really like, I don’t make the rules.

Here she is! Amanda Barrie as Cleopatra, having killed and scalped the Cookie Monster, she wears his pate as a grim momento.

‘After coitus with Cleopatra, Sid James’s Anthony exclaims “Oh puer, oh puer, oh puer” Explain this joke in the context of the education reforms of Harold Wilson’s first government.’ (30 marks)

Back to Rome- such a hilarious little gag about laurels, also get the impression Ken W is absolutely loving this.

Anthony reports on Cleopatra to Caesar.

‘Ooo I hope she don’t go off- you know they do in these hot countries’
‘Don’t worry about that- she’s got a deep frieze going all round her palace’

Amazing.

Never noticed this gag in Cleo before. The slave Gloria (who’s also Jim Dale’s ex missus from Bristol) asks Ken W:

‘You are not well my Lord!’
‘Just a little sick; transit, Gloria.’

Meanwhile- the unfortunate Peter Gilmore, the Sean Bean of the Carry On films, is about to get killed off of Jim Dale and the other slaves.

There’s some sort of boat based murder-coup going on organised by Anthony. In most Roman films this would be replete with Nero and Agrippina references, but this is a Carry On and so it’s replete with bum references.

Pahahaha goodness me he was good that Shakespeare weren’t he?

Anyway, Hawtrey is also here for some reason. He’s speaking ‘sign language’ to Sosages, Cleo’s mute bodyguard, which mostly involves him eating bananas and thrusting.

I’m also struck this could be an actual promo still from a Young Vic production.

Yes!! The best cameo- sometime Dr Who and Worzel Gummidge Jon Pertwee who plays a rasping cockney southsayer who conjures erotic visions of the future in a big fire. Gold.

Move over Fleabag- *this* is writing.

‘Tony, I am undone! My end is in sight!’
‘Well you better do yourself up again, you can’t see her like that.’

Everyone’s converged on the same room, half of them are wearing each other’s clothes and piss artist to the stars Hawtrey has inserted himself into a giant pot so as to peep at a sex scene. This genuinely is like a Young Vic Shakespeare.

I once had a bed collapse like this in a cheap French hotel. Charles Hawtrey wasn’t watching me from a giant terracotta pot though.

Anyway- Caesar is saved and they go back to Europe only for him to be stabbed while delivering a ‘Winds of Change’ speech in the Senate (I forgot this had so many SuperMac references), with a final, glorious outing for this routine.

It ends, as all films should, with Amanda Barrie and Sid James rollicking in some ass milk.

So there we have it- Shakespeare, the Earl of Stockton, and bums. Sublime.

I actually think the seriousness with which someone has completed the ‘Factual Errors’ section of Carry On Cleo’s IMDb page is as funny as parts of the film itself