Carry On Christmas Special

This double-disc package is a bit of a hit and miss affair. Peter Rogers, the brains behind the Carry Ons, was no doubt a savvy behind-the-scenes operator, but here, plonked in front of a camera and autocue, he's about as charismatic as a piece of two-by-four. The intros are only 30 seconds but seem to last for weeks. Big cheese or not, someone should have done the decent thing and left him on the cutting-room floor.

Disc 2 gets off to a bad start - a 45-minute Q&A with Rogers. What promises to be a real snooze, however, turns out to be surprisingly watchable, as a more animated Rogers, in the comfortable surrounds of what looks like a well-to-do hotel function room, takes a trip down memory lane.

How did he get into the film business? "I'm a writer," he says. "I had two plays on in London. One lasted a week, the other lasted 10 days. The one that lasted 10 days was a comedy, so I thought I should concentrate on comedy."

Thirty-one Carry Ons followed. Some were good (Up The Khyber), some were bad (Emmanuelle) and some were very bad (Columbus). Not that Rogers ever set out to spend the rest of his life making Carry Ons. The first one (Sergeant), shot in 1958 on a budget of £75,000, was just another movie and not the beginning of a 50 year franchise.

He recalls some of the movies that didn't make it. Bob Monkhouse wrote Carry On Spaceman, but Rogers nixed it for fear of the film coinciding with a real-life space disaster. Paranoid? Perhaps, but Rogers appears to have been supremely cautious, even ruling out films about firemen and flying.

He is also very self-deprecating and has no illusions about the raison d'etre of the Carry Ons. "All we think about is being funny," he explains. Grandiose concepts, such as narrative and plot, have no place in the Carry On universe. "Plot doesn't really fit in with the Carry Ons," he says. "I think there was a plot somewhere (in the Christmas specials), but I don't know who found it, or if it was ever discovered by the audience."

Wendy Richard makes no attempt to dress them up either. "I can't understand why people turn their noses up at Carry Ons," she says. "They're seaside postcard humour, that's all. And they're funny. And let's face it, we could do with a few more laughs today."

I'm sure we'll all second that, especially when it comes from Richard, whose alter ego, the funereal Pauline Fowler, could do with a few laughs herself. Richard does have a sense of humour, though. Looking back on the old days, she wistfully shows us a few of her old publicity shots. "I used to look like Jane Fonda," she says, eyeing her younger, more beautiful self, "but now I look like Henry Fonda."