Peter Rogers RIP

From The Times, April 16, 2009
Peter Rogers: producer of the Carry On films
Late in 1957 an unsolicited script about army recruits called The Bull Boys landed on the desk of Peter Rogers and transformed the life and fortunes of a producer who had spent much of the 1940s and 1950s working fastidiously but with little recognition in the lower reaches of the British film industry.
The rights to R. F. Delderfield’s play belonged to Rogers’s fellow producer, and brother-in-law, Sydney Box, who had been unable to find backing for the project. Rogers thought the script as it stood was unfilmable and approached the leading comedy writers of the day to knock it into shape.
One by one they declined. Rogers’s approach to Spike Milligan was particularly discouraging. Entering Milligan’s office he found the creator of The Goon Show waving a loaded revolver around his head and shouting: “I can’t see anybody just now. I’m just about to kill myself.”
John Antrobus did work on the script but it was still not right, and Rogers fell back on a lesser name but a trusted colleague, Norman Hudis. Delderfield’s romantic drama was completely reworked, turned into a broad farce and given a different title, taken from the well-known Army command, Carry On Sergeant.Thus was born, almost by accident, the most successful and longest-running comedy series in the history of British films, totalling 30 titles. Like all the Carry Ons, Carry On Sergeant was shot at Pinewood Studios. Rogers recruited a cast of comedy actors from radio and television including Bob Monkhouse, Kenneth Connor, Hattie Jacques, Charles Hawtrey and Kenneth Williams. Apart from Monkhouse and William Hartnell, who played the sergeant, the core of the Carry On team was already in place.
In what became a Carry On tradition the film was derided by the critics but loved by audiences. Rogers decided there was more to be squeezed from the formula and Carry On Nurse, Carry On Teacher and Carry On Constable did for hospitals, schools and the police what Carry On Sergeant had done for the Army. Along the way the series picked up two more of its stalwarts, Joan Sims and Sid James.
Having run out of institutions to mock, the Carry Ons turned to parodying films and film genres. Carry On Spying was inspired by the Bond films, Carry On Cleo by the troubled epic Cleopatra, Carry On Screaming by the Hammer horror cycle and Carry On . . . Up the Khyber by tales of the North-West Frontier. The last was Rogers’s own favourite and is generally considered to be the best of the series.
The switch to parody was associated with Talbot Rothwell, who took over from Hudis as scriptwriter in 1963 and stayed almost to the end. Under Rothwell the Carry Ons secured their particular niche in low humour, a cocktail of dreadful puns, sexual innuendo and scatalogical jokes delivered by characters drawn with a very broad brush and regardless of what became known as political correctness.
Rogers had total control. As a writer himself he kept a close eye on the scripts, did the casting and even contributed to the musical scores. Not a man to waste money, he kept budgets down by shooting quickly, often completing principal photography in only five weeks. This meant that he could complete two films in the same year.
Nor did he go for expensive locations, rarely straying far beyond Pinewood. For Carry On . . . up the Khyber Snowdonia had to do duty for imperial India. Cobham Common in Surrey replicated the Wild West in Carry On Cowboy. When Carry On Cruising was announced, the cast looked forward to a rare trip overseas but got no farther than Southampton Water.
The films made Rogers rich but not his actors, who received a flat fee, modest by industry standards. A further bone of contention was that the women were paid half as much as the men. Nor did the cast benefit from showings of the films, or compilations of them, on television or their translation to video and DVD.
Rogers always maintained that the Carry On brand was more important than any one person. When Charles Hawtrey demanded top billing and a star on his dressing room door, or he would not appear in the film, Rogers called his bluff and replaced him with another actor. Although the Carry Ons were full of sexual antics, Rogers took a strong line about liaisons between actors and crew. When Joan Sims started dating a carpenter on the set, Rogers made clear his disapproval.
The Carry Ons were the principal but not the only contribution made by Rogers to British cinema over a career of more than 40 years. He was born into a well-to-do middle-class family in Gillingham, Kent, in 1914. His father was a valuer of licensed properties and an amateur musician from whom Peter inherited a love of music.
From 7 to 18 he attended King’s School in Rochester, the local public school. He did not shine scholastically but in his spare time became a prolific writer of plays. When he left school, rather than follow his brothers into his father’s business, he was happy to stay at home and write, supported by an allowance from his father.
After a string of rejections two of his plays were produced in London but both flopped. He worked briefly on a local newspaper. A serious bout of cerebral spinal meningitis, which kept him in hospital for a year, exempted him from service in the Second World War. He resumed writing plays, but this time for radio, and had a number broadcast by the BBC.
But radio was short-lived, as was writing scripts for J. Arthur Rank’s religious films company. When, after his mother’s early death, his father remarried, he ended Rogers’s allowance and evicted him from the house. Rogers had to find a permanent job. He worked briefly for Picture Post and then joined the trade paper World’s Press News. When the latter started a film section, Rogers was put in charge.
One of his assignments proved momentous. An interview with the producer Sydney Box, the head of Gainsborough Studios, led to writing work on Holiday Camp and he became a full-time scriptwriter. He also met Box’s younger sister, Betty, herself a producer who went on to make the Doctor films with the director Ralph Thomas (brother of Gerald Thomas, who directed the Carry Ons). Rogers and Betty Box were married in 1948 and though they pursued separate careers they had a close and happy partnership over more than 50 years.
Rogers progressed to associate producer and producer, while continuing to write screenplays. In the main his films were modest, low-budget affairs. They included To Dorothy a Son, taken from a stage hit and starring the American actress Shelley Winters, The Gay Dog, a vehicle for Wilfred Pickles, and a Francis Durbridge thriller, Vicious Circle.
Even after the Carry On series was in its stride, Rogers continued to produce other films, often comedies which used the Carry On actors. Kenneth Williams and Joan Sims starred in Twice Round the Daffodils, and Sims, Sid James and another regular, Jim Dale, featured in the bank robbery caper, The Big Job. In 1972 Rogers made a cinema version of James’s television sitcom, Bless This House.
The Carry Ons maintained their vigour, if not their quality, until the mid-1970s. But the formula was getting tired, and the death of Sid James in 1976 seemed to signal that the time had come to call it a day. The two subsequent films, Carry On England and Carry On Emmannuelle, both failed at the box office and Rogers decided to cancel the next project. The brand was, however, kept alive by regular showings on television and it was later hailed by cultural commentators as a cherishable British type of comedy.
Rogers never completely abandoned the idea of reviving the Carry Ons and eventually, in 1992, he returned with Carry On Columbus. It was generally regarded as a disaster. Two years later Rogers was declared bankrupt. He blamed this not on his films but a failed investment in a television company.
Betty Box died in 1999, aged 83. There were no children.

Peter Rogers, film producer, was born on February 20, 1914. He died on April 14, 2009, aged 95