CARRY ON COLUMBUS

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND ZERO LAUGHS

Is there much more dispiriting than a comedy that just flat out refuses to work despite the best and most strenuous efforts of everyone involved? Well, how about a comedy where no-one seems to care very much? How about a comedy where a clearly talented cast are thoroughly defeated by the dead-on-the-page material and have no real interest in anything other than getting it over with as quickly as possible? You can see it in their eyes that every last one of them would rather be doing absolutely anything even if it's just staring out of the window: they know that no-one is getting out with a shred of dignity intact and this is one of those calamities that seemed like a good idea at the time - except there's no way this ever looked like a good idea. Small wonder then that Maureen Lipman tried to put it into Room 101 when she was the show's special guest. And small wonder the film has disappeared from UK distribution entirely following its VHS release: no-one wants to touch the damned thing. What beats me is why anyone went near it in the first place.

The idea of doing a comedic take on Columbus' discovery of America on the 500th anniversary isn't necessarily a bad one - as a complement to the two serious 1492 films - but Carry On Columbus needed a script that took longer than ten days to throw together and enough of a budget to ensure the shipboard scenes were better staged than the Cockermouth Amateur Operatic Society's last production of HMS Pinafore. The end result looks cheap and tawdry and it's not funny: it meshes the production values of an ITV studio sitcom with the sparkling wit and wordplay of an ITV studio sitcom.

Given the absences of Sid James, Kenneth Williams, the peerless Charles Hawtrey and the rest of the gang, rebooting the Carry On brand makes about as much sense as bringing back Abbott And Costello or George Formby: they were of their time and that time has long gone. Only a handful of familiar Carry On faces were still around in 1992 and not all of them were keen on dancing those old steps again anyway so to fill the gaps a stellar assortment of new comedians (Alexei Sayle, Julian Clary, Rik Mayall, Peter Richardson) try and fail to make anything of the thuddingly awful script. Clary and Richard Wilson do their usual thing, while veterans of the series like Jon Pertwee, Leslie Phillips and June Whitfield are given almost nothing to do and top-billed Jim Dale and Bernard Cribbins are given lots to do, none of it worth doing.

Compensations? Redeeming features? Anything on the positive side? Well, it's fairly short, and it's arguably 0.02% less offensive than Carry On Emmanuelle. But it was still a monumentally bad idea badly executed: a long way from the glory days of Cleo, Screaming, Henry and (my personal favourite) Cowboy. Hardly worth watching, even for series fans and masochists.

*