Enjoying her trip
Roger Lewis
HIGH SPIRITS by Joan Sims Transworld, £16.99, pp. 212 The Carry On films saved my life. A few years ago, after I got divorced, my para- mour ran away to Maidstone and commit- ted suicide and I was told I had non- Hodgkinson's lymphoma, all I felt like doing was levelling a gun at my temple. Though the quack prescribed a gross of happy pills and a team of National Health psychothera- pists went into crisis-management mode, none of this did much good, no matter how kindly meant. What fmally raised my spirits, one afternoon, was catching sight of Sid James as Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, Ken- neth Williams as the Khasi of Kalabar and Charles Hawtrey as Private Widdle, carrying on up the Khyber. (I'm now writing a book on Hawtrey — in homage. I'm also happily re-married, to my first wife, and the cancer has gone away. Thanks for asking.) They are abysmal movies, let's make no mistake about that, as lacking in substance as the air. But though they are embarrassing (the hen-pecked husbands, the randy court- ing-couples, the whole Orwell-on-Donald- McGill's-seaside-postcards thing), their appeal is that they transcend embarrassment. The boingggs! and poingggs! of music, the obs- ession with bodily functions; the caterwaul- ing and absurdity: we are transported back to the world of the nursery or playground. The Carry Ons are about England's Great Good Place — the Never-Never Land. (Hawtrey, unsurprisingly, began his career as a child actor in Peter Pan.) Joan Sims, whom I insist is appointed CBE or given (Liz Taylor's coinage) a Dameship, was the series' Wendy, matronly or shrewish, shrieking or softer-toned, as the occasion demanded. I love her in Cow- boy, as Belle the owner of the saloon. (`My intimate friends call me Ding Dong' — 'I'd like to give you a clang sometime,' retorts Sid James.) She's wonderful as Lady Ruff- Diamond in Up the Khyber, taking tiffin as the fort is bombarded; or as Zig-Zig, the madame in Follow the Camel, which was shot in exotic Camber Sands, near Hastings.
At RADA, where the great Athene Seyler was her mentor, she was awarded The Mabel Temperley Prize for Grace and Charm of Movement. As Kenneth Will- iams commented, 'That sounds a bit ironic, considering that you've spent most of your career falling on your arse!' Which is no more than the truth. In Teacher she's involved with a full-scale brawl in the staffroom; in Nurse she stumbles across a hospital trolley. Ceilings collapse on her, suitcases are there for her to come a crop- per — and not only in Carry Ons. She was the subject of slapstick in the Doctor series, with Sir Dirk and Leslie Phillips, in those works, beloved of Albanians, which starred Sir Norman Wisdom, and she was the biol- ogy mistress at St Trinian's.
All these are some distance in the past, however. In demand and quite comfortably off at one time, these days Miss Sims CI never married because the right person never came along') lives in a small rented flat and waits for the phone to ring. This is a scandal. She should be up on the high shelf with Patricia Routledge or Stephanie Cole. The RSC and the National should be offering her Juliet's Nurse, Mistress Quick- ly, gorgons and galleons in Coward and Wilde. Rejection triggered bouts of depres- sion, binge eating and boozing. 'I was a right old mess,' she confesses. The accident- proneness of her characters overlapped with falls in real life. In 1997 she fractured her spine and earlier this year, invited to Sussex, she stepped back to admire the view, fell off a patio and ended up in the flower bed, legs akimbo. An industrial crane had to hoist her over the garden wall and into an ambu- lance. (Sod it! Blast it! Bugger it!') High Spirits is an unsparing, wholly can- did memoir, free of malice and regret, full of marvellous anecdotes and warmth. Dick Emery, making tape recordings 'of his own bouts of flatulence', and replaying them in his dressing-room (I've got some beauties for you today, Joan'), had me gulping with laughter. Anthony Asquith, half a century ago, said she had 'far too happy a face'; it's all credit to the strength of her comic spirit that, to this day, Joan Sims can inspire and emanate a sort of rowdy joy.
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