The Carry On Film & TV Collection

AVI files from DVD. My thanks to the original seeder for the time and effort required to rip over 30 DVD's. Well a little treat for January 2015, not much else to look at so why not split your sides with the antics of the Carry On team, who did so much to keep Great Britain a happier place for over 4 decades.

THIS IS A HUGE DOWNLOAD OVER 40 GIGABYTES! If you do not know what that means and the impact it will have on your internet connection then perhaps this is not for you. If you can not - or have never downloaded at speeds greater than 3 mega bits per second - AGAIN this is not for you, as slow downloaders will take to long to grab this and slow down the average speed of the swarm. Duel seed box feed, from Europe and North America so should be good download speeds for those who know how to torrent.

he Carry On franchise primarily consists of a sequence of 31 low-budget British comedy motion pictures (1958-92), three Christmas specials, a television series of thirteen episodes, and three West End and provincial stage plays. The films' humour was in the British comic tradition of the music hall and seaside postcards. Producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas drew on a regular group of actors, the Carry On team, that included Sidney James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Joan Sims, Kenneth Connor, Peter Butterworth, Hattie Jacques, Terry Scott, Bernard Bresslaw, Barbara Windsor, Jack Douglas and Jim Dale.

The Carry On series contains the largest number of films of any British series; and, next to the James Bond films, it is the second-longest continually running UK film series although with a fourteen-year break (1978-92). Anglo Amalgamated Film Distributors Ltd produced twelve films (1958-66), with the Rank Organisation making the remaining nineteen (1967-92).

Producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas made all 31 films, usually on time and to a strict budget, and often employed the same crew. Between 1958 and 1992, the series employed seven writers, most often Norman Hudis (1958–62) and Talbot Rothwell (1963–74). In between the films, Rogers and Thomas produced four Christmas specials in 1969, 1970, 1972 and 1973, a thirteen episode television series in 1975 and various West End stage shows which later toured the regions.

All the films were made at Pinewood Studios near Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire. Budgetary contraints meant that a large proportion of the location filming was undertaken close to the studios in and around south Buckinghamshire, including areas of Berkshire and Middlesex. However, by the late-1960s (at the height of the franchise's success) more ambitious plots occasionally necessitated locations further afield, which included Snowdonia National Park, Wales (with the foot of Mount Snowdon acting as the Khyber Pass in Carry On Up The Khyber), and the beaches of the Sussex coast doubling as Saharan sand dunes in Carry On Follow That Camel.

The films' humour was in the British comic tradition of the music hall and seaside postcards. Many of them parodied more serious films — in the case of Carry On Cleo (1964), the Burton and Taylor film Cleopatra (1963).

The stock-in-trade of Carry On humour was innuendo and the sending-up of British institutions and customs, such as the National Health Service (Nurse, Doctor, Again Doctor, Matron), the monarchy (Henry), the Empire (Up the Khyber), the military (Sergeant) and the trade unions (At Your Convenience) as well as the Hammer horror film (Screaming), camping (Camping), foreigners (Abroad), beauty contests (Girls), and caravan holidays (Behind) among others. Although the films were very often panned by critics, they proved very popular with audiences.

The series began with Carry On Sergeant (1958), about a group of recruits on National Service, and was sufficiently successful that others followed. A film had appeared the previous year under the title Carry on Admiral; although this was a comedy in a similar vein (with Joan Sims in the cast) it has no connection to the series. There was also an unrelated 1937 film Carry On London, starring future Carry On performer Eric Barker.

The cast were poorly paid — around £5,000 per film for a principal performer. In his diaries, Kenneth Williams lamented this and criticised several of the movies despite his declared fondness for the series as a whole. Peter Rogers, the series' producer, acknowledged: "Kenneth was worth taking care of, because while he cost very little he made a very great deal of money for the franchise."