Carry On Trivially

Carry On Camping Trivia

Bernard Bresslaw uses his famous catchphrase "I Only Arsked" for the first time on screen since leaving The Army Game behind.
Jim Dale was originally considered for the coach driver, but he was unavailable, and so the part was cut back and given to Julian Holloway.
Barbara Windsor wanted to play the school girl 'Babs' with a public School accent, but the first day of filming, the shower where she looks through the knot hole and sees Sid's beady eye, she blurts her line out in typical Cockney style. Gerald Thomas didn't want to do another take, so she was stuck with it for the rest of the film.
The famous bra flying scene when Babs and the girls are doing the exercises caused some problems for Barbara Windsor. He bra was connected to a fishing line and an old stagehand was to pull it off at the given time, but he pulled her over in to the mud. When it was successfully done she was determined to keep covered up at all costs, but then Kenneth Williams says "Matron - take them away", and so Matron grabs her arm, uncovering her for all to see. The yell she lets out at this point is real.
The film is set at the height of summer, but it was in fact filmed in October/November and so was wet and cold. The grass was all mud, so they sprayed it green and laid down boards to walk on. the leaves had to be stuck back on and sprayed green.
Barbara Windsor was trudging through the mud and freezing weather, complaining to Kenneth Williams, calling Peter Rogers all the names she could think of, but she had forgotten to take off her throat mike, and so all what she was saying was being recorded. The next day when Peter was looking at the rushes, he could hear her slagging him off. He decided to leave it all in for the showing the next day to the cast. When Barbara heard it she has horrified and thought she would be sacked when Peter saw them. It was only later in the day she found out he new all the time and he had been winding her up - apparently the air was blue again.
Peter Rogers had registered the title Carry On Camping with the Film Producers Association as far back as May 1962 just after finishing work on the pioneering Carry On holiday film, Carry On Cruising. Still in mind, though on the back burner, during the Anglo Amalgamated years, the title’s registration was renewed in 1966 and initially considered for production after Don’t Lose Your Head. Uncertainty over resurrecting the Carry On title and scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell’s misunderstanding of what the producer wanted, resulted in the foreign lesion comedy, Follow That Camel, being put into production instead.
The misunderstanding on Tolly Rothwell’s part had been down to a conceived desire, on the parts of the Rank Organisation and, to a lesser extent, Peter Rogers, to make the films more international. Tolly had drafted the first few scenes for the Camping film, taking the usual gang of British eccentrics abroad for their holiday. This, along with an unsolicited wartime Italy-based Commando comedy screenplay, Operation Kokkup, was rejected by the producer although, as Peter wrote on 23rd January 1967, “in fairness to Tolly, it was Gerald’s idea to make “Camping” a caravan subject”. A subject that would later be made, with a different scriptwriter Dave Freeman, under the title Carry On Behind.
Once with the home-based, under canvas scenario firmly fixed, Talbot Rothwell wrote the script with ease. The title, with its double meaning of camp sites and camp comics, had not by-passed either Kenneth Williams “thinking it was an appropriate title for the fifteenth in the series” (discounting the first two Rank efforts in his 1985 memoirs Just Williams) or the writer. Tolly’s first draft for Carry On Camping features a sketched tent on the front cover with the cut-outs of the rear quarters of a cow protruding from the flaps. The two camp comics of the team are added, with a cut-out photo of Kenneth Williams’s head poking through the flaps of the other end of the test and a cut-out photo of Charles Hawtrey’s head sticking out from a hole in the top of the tent.
Clearly Tolly Rothwell was firing on all cylinders during the revival and reshaping of Carry On Camping. Sid James, who had had the script sent to his Torquay base during his 1968 summer season in Wedding Fever at the Torquay Pavillion, wrote to producer Peter Rogers with glowing anticipation on 2nd September 1968. “Many thanks for the script. Very funny! I drove Val [his wife, Valerie James] potty laughing aloud. That doesn’t often happen when one reads! There are some wonderful moments. So clean too???”
Despite all the positive feed-back, the Rank Organisation were concerned over the film’s potential budget. Naturally, with the fields and orchards in and around Pinewood Studios utilised for most of the location work, it was not a patch on the budget for the costume romp Carry On…Up The Khyber. However, Peter Rogers had to justify the escalating production cost since Carry On Doctor the previous year. A week longer on the shooting schedule and the need for more artistes were amongst his reasons in a letter dated 30th September 1968. Moreover he maintained that Rank “have five pictures…for a good deal less than one million pounds.”

Continuity

When Joan Sims tells Sid that they are already "soaking wet" after having put up the tent for the girls, their clothes look rather dry, not wet.
If Bernie can poke his head through the canvas of the men's tent after they have put it up, it must be a flimsy one that should disintegrate at the first sign of rain.
As they are about to leave in the car in front of the house, Mrs. Fussy is right behind Sid as he walks round the car. However, when you see the next shot she is far behind him.
Dr Soper is already halfway out the back of his tent when the matron invades it, However, in the next shot he is wholly inside.
As Mr Soper and the matron follow the truck on Potters' tandem, they wobble from side to side as if they would fall off any moment. In the next shot, however, they are sitting on the cycle as steady as a rock.
With the noise in the next field Sid complains to Mr Fiddler that they wouldn't get any sleep with all that noise. Mr Fiddler replies that he believes Sid didn't intend to do much sleeping. If he has heard that onthe grapevine, it would certainly have come to the ears of the matron and Mr Soper, not to mention the two girls of Sid and Bernie.