Carry On Cabby, Gender and the Local Industrial Power Nexus

Abstract

This paper argues that the perceived homogeneity of the mass of 'Carry On' films is, to some extent at least, an illusion (fostered, no doubt deliberately, by the fact that they all have the same actors, scriptwriters, titles, and even jokes). Hence, sweeping generalisations about the films as a group are misguided. The paper argues that one film, Carry On Cabby, is actually premised on a highly reasoned and sensitive analysis of Britain’s post war industrial malaise and the effects of that malaise on the working class, together with a subtler than expected view of the way in which the post-war industrial situation affected relationships between the sexes. The theme of Carry On Cabby, as with so much post war British comedy, is “the battle of the sexes”; but it uses that standard to examine closely the need for change in industrial practice, taking a close look at the way in which change would affect the lives of “ordinary people.” Its conclusions are pretty safe and pretty conservative. But its analysis proves to be more prescient than those of either the governments of the 1970s, which, roughly speaking, attempted to preserve the status quo, or Margaret Thatcher’s radical Conservative government of the 1980s.

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ORCID for Kieron O'Hara: orcid.org/0000-0002-9051-4456

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