Carry on Teacher (1959)
Directed by Gerald Thomas

Film Review

With Carry On Sergeant (1958) and Carry On Nurse (1959) both proving to be a major success at the British box office, producer Peter Rogers must have felt he had struck a goldmine and he wasted no time delivering more of the same, beginning with Carry On Teacher. Like the two films that preceded it, Teacher is a gentle send-up of a bulwark of British society (this time state education) and is a far more sedate kind of film than we now associate with the Carry On team.  Mindful of its family audience, it relies mostly on slapstick and wordplay for its humour, with none of the crude innuendo and double entendre which would tend to predominate in later years.  The film seems to be continuing a tradition of raucous but innocent British comedies set in the classroom - from Will Hay's Boys Will Be Boys (1935) to Frank Launder's The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954).  Joan Sims splitting her shorts is about as rauchy as the film gets.

Screenwriter Norman Hudis was a superb gag merchant but not the most imaginative of writers - the plot is mostly a rehash of Carry On Sergeant (and would later be recycled for Carry On Cruising).  The main difference is the change in location from an army camp to a typical London high school (the actual school used for the exteriors was Drayton Secondary School in West Ealing). Whilst its characterisation of teachers and school children is a tad simplistic (the teachers are all eccentrics, the pupils good-natured anarchists), Carry on Teacher is spot on with its lampooning of the crackpot theories that were being put forward by child psychologists at the time, notions which threatened a teacher's ability to maintain discipline in the classroom.  (It can be argued that the crackpots, aided by overly liberal politicians, have won the day, and in doing so have made teaching a far less attractive profession than it once was.)

It may be a fairly minor entry in the Carry On series, but this one benefits from having more convincingly drawn characters, all played to perfection by our happy band of comic performers. Kenneth Connor turns in one of the best performances of his career, for once playing a character who genuinely arouses our sympathy as the man willing to sacrifice his happy bachelorhood for three shiny new science labs.  Hattie Jacques makes a wonderfully tyrannical schoolmistress, of the kind who might well have enjoyed a previous life as a storm trooper (or Attila the Hun).  Even Kenneth Williams manages to put on one side his customary camp excesses and instead he turns in a pukka character performance, playing brilliantly off Charles Hawtrey's maniacal music master (the original Mr Bean) as they wreak more havoc on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet than the Wehrmacht inflicted on the whole of Europe during the Second World War. 'Play with your dagger!' Williams screams in desperation to the dumbfounded Chorus as Hawtrey's nightmarish overture drags on for what seems like three centuries.

The part that would by default have gone to Sid James several Carry Ons down the line was given to Ted Ray, one of the most popular comedy performers in Britain at the time, famous for his Sunday lunchtime radio show Ray's a Laugh.  Ray's sympathetic portrayal of a humane (acting) headmaster loath to use the cane even when his dream of promotion is put in jeopardy helps to make this one of the more heart-warming of the Carry Ons.  And of course we mustn't overlook the talented trio lifted from Carry On Nurse - Joan Sims, Leslie Phillips and Rosalind Knight, all a delight to watch, with Phillips getting to repeat his famous line 'ding dong'.  Playing the chief 'saboteur' is a prolific child actor, Richard O'Sullivan, who would become a fixture on British television in the 1970s in such shows as Man About the House.

Carry on Teacher may not be what we now expect from the Carry On team, but it was another notable success when it was first released, ensuring the series still had many more years left to run.  Of course, the best was yet to come, and with Sid James about to enter the fray in the next film, Carry On Constable  (1960), things could only get better...

Film Synopsis

A week before the end of the school term, acting-headmaster Mr Wakefield tells his staff that he intends to apply for the post of headmaster at a brand new comprehensive.  He also announces that over the coming week the school will be visited by Miss Wheeler, a schools inspector, and Mr Grigg, a radical child psychologist.  Wakefield is dependent on a good report from Miss Wheeler if he is to stand a chance of getting his dream posting.  Unfortunately, this news is overheard by one of the pupils, Robin Stevens, who is dismayed by the prospect of Wakefield's imminent departure.  Enlisting the help of his schoolmates, Robin organises a series of practical jokes that will ensure the acting-headmaster will get into Miss Wheeler's bad books...