Talbot Rothwell's vision of history

The screenwriter Talbot Rothwell replaced Norman Hudis as Carry On writer in 1963. His second Carry On screenplay, Carry On Jack (1964) was the series’ first period entry. Over the next decade, Talbot wrote 18 Carry On films, as well as episodes of the TV programmes Carry On Christmas and his sitcom, Up Pompeii (1969-70). A substantial proportion of these scripts were period pieces, comprising settings such as classical Rome, revolutionary France, the Indian Raj, the Renaissance court of Henry VIII, and Georgian England. Throughout these diverse eras and cultures, a consistent pattern of behaviours and characteristics appear in Rothwell’s scripts, which in turn reappear and reassert themselves when Rothwell turns to contemporary Britain and its national institutions, such as the NHS, dating agencies, provincial councils, and Trade Unions.

Mobilising William Blake’s provocation that in Chaucer “we see the same characters repeated again and again”, as expressed in Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue of 1809, in tandem with playwright John Arden’s division of the British character into a “rectilinear” and “curvilinear” typology (1969), this paper argues that Rothwell’s dramaturgy exhibits similar perceptions. Rothwell’s Carry On oeuvre emerges as a developed and consistent vision of humanity in history. A question arises, given that both Blake and Arden were radicals: where does Rothwell’s vision place him politically and socially? In Rothwell’s vision of the world, the progressive Puritans often lose, with priapic fops and monarchs emerging triumphant.

(c) 2024 James Martin Charlton, Middlesex University