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New play about Kenneth Williams and Fenella Fielding s relationship A new play examines the strained professional relationship between Carry On legends Kenneth Williams and Fenella Fielding. Carry On! Screaming Queens has been written by comedy historian Robert Ross, who has penned several books about the film franchise. The play charts the ‘unique and bitchy’ relationship between the two stars, which started in the West End revue Pieces of Eight, written largely by Peter Cook, and peaked with the Hammer Horror spoof Carry On Screaming. And they had a touching meeting in the year before Williams died in 1988 of a drugs overdose, a conversation where they debated their legacy and what it means to them. ....
Screaming that it is most certainly a Carry On film, with its pungent innuendo and sheepish sexism, but its exploration of a genre in this case, the lurid fillips of Hammer Horror reveal genuine skill and appreciation… between its bouts of bawdy humour, it is actually scary… But, at the end of the day, It is still a comedy and a very funny one at that . Andrew Collins began his media career in the mid-80s, laying out pages for the NME, eventually becoming a regular writer for the weekly music paper and then features editor. He has since worked for Select, Empire and Q, and has been the film editor for ....
A good bird: remembering Barbara Windsor A very British icon of both the normal and extraordinary, Dame Barbara Windsor was always in control of her own image. 31 December 2020 Barbara Windsor “She was a good bird.” Such is the obituary Barbara Windsor requested for herself while appearing on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories ten years ago. Like everything about her, it is deceptively simple, another way of saying – there’s nothing to me, I’m just like you, what you see is what you get. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Windsor was extraordinary and deeply unusual – a one-off who came to embody British popular culture in the twentieth century like nobody else. When she took part in the BBC’s flagship Desert Island Discs in 1990, she chose as her luxury item a Union Jack, which she promised to wave, alone on the beach, while listening to Land of Hope and Glory. ....
Inseparable: Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor in Carry on Christmas Credit: Fremantle Media/Shutterstock It was no surprise that the first wave of obituaries for Dame Barbara Windsor, who died this week at 83 following a six-year struggle with Alzheimer’s, featured images of scenes she’d shared with Kenneth Williams. They went together like boiled beef and carrots, and were no less London-flavoured than Harry Champion’s song of that name. Williams could hide it well – most of us think of him first in his posh mode – but his birthplace in Barnsbury, Islington was a walkable distance from Barbara’s first address, in Shoreditch. Powerfully different personalities though they were, each saw something local and familiar in the other; an odd-couple friendship that would last 24 years until his death in 1988. ....
Last modified on Tue 12 Jan 2021 12.38 EST Although physically tiny at 4ft 10in tall, Barbara Windsor, who has died aged 83, was a giant of the British entertainment industry, conquering films, theatre and television in a career that spanned 60 years, 50 of them as a top star. After some notable stage work, Windsor first came to real prominence as a member of the Carry On team for nine hugely popular films starting in 1964 with Carry On Spying. In them she usually played a wide-eyed blonde with a friendly grin, sometimes knowingly sexy and sometimes naive or innocent, but invariably given at some point to what one observer called “the dirtiest laugh in show business”. She identified her appeal with characteristic bluntness: “You could always find a barmaid who looked like me.” ....