Carry On Regardless: The Musical Humour of Eric Rogers

Abstract

The success of the indestructible series of 30 Carry On films produced by Peter Rogers and directed by Gerald Thomas in the UK between 1958 and 1978 (plus a disastrous one-off attempt to revive the series in 1992) was occasioned in no small measure by the vividly comedic scores composed for no fewer than 23 of them by Eric Rogers. Departing from the sophisticated but less memorable music composed for the first six films by Bruce Montgomery, Rogers relentlessly exploited essentially old-fashioned humorous musical techniques redolent of the music hall, the circus, and cartoon scoring (including graphic mickey-mousing and isomorphism). Plentiful genre-aware stylistic parodies and tongue-in-cheek allusions to well-known pre-existing melodies were included along the way. What might have proved to be unsatisfying patchworks of localised musical jokes were generally rescued by the use of solid rondo-like structures governing the trajectories of the scores as a whole. This chapter categorises and investigates Rogers’s various comedic techniques, citing examples from across the entire Carry On canon, and concentrating on the franchise’s (for its time) bold depiction of the working class’s distrust of pompous authority figures and the wider Establishment. At the same time, the chapter considers those broader elements of ‘Britishness’ which both the films and their scores perpetuate, and which is a fundamental reason why the British retain a strong nostalgia for them despite their datedness, often cringeworthy sense of humour, and blatant disregard for modern political correctness.