Successful producer of over 30 Carry On films who relied on his own judgment
PETER ROGERS, who has died aged 95, was best known as the cinematic equivalent of the risqué seaside postcard artist Donald McGill.
He became a British institution, the highly successful producer of more than 30 Carry On films, with their broad innuendoes (of the doctor with hypodermic in her hand looking at naked male patient and saying, “just a little prick” variety) completely by accident.
He made his first, Carry On Sergeant, for about £70,000, which was small beer even in 1957. The British film producer Sydney Box had received a script by the then popular novelist and former journalist RF Delderfield.
It was called The Bull Boys, and had begun its creative life as a play about the complications in the love lives of two ballet dancers brought about by military conscription.
Box, unable to get anyone to finance it, passed the script on to Rogers and his director-partner Gerald Thomas. Rogers switched the focus from the romantic to the comic. He produced, with Thomas directing, a broad comedy about conscription.
It was shot speedily at Queen's Barracks, Guildford, Surrey, and with a cast on modest fees, was an unexpected commercial success. It was the beginning of a cult that would spread to many other countries including Japan, Russia and the US, where Carry On Nurse(1959) ran in one Los Angeles cinema for 2½ years.
The first Carry Onwas a success that neatly encapsulated Rogers's working methods for the rest of the films. There were, however, some differences in procedure. Rogers and Thomas showed the first rushes of Carry On Sergeantto executives of the financiers in Wardour Street, whose verdict was: "You think this is funny? It's a load of rubbish!"
Rogers’s response was to stop sending the rushes. Instead he completed the film, and only then, with the money already spent, asked the executives their opinion. By that stage, there was little the suits of the day could do but release the film and hope it was not too much of a disaster.
Rogers refused to watch the film with a preview audience, arguing that this habit indicated that the producer and director did not know what they were doing or what they wanted.
Indeed, throughout his career, Rogers refused to watch his comedies with an audience, saying that it would be torture if they did not laugh in the right places. He relied on his own judgment and showed every sign of enjoying the ribald puns and horseplay devised by scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell (often after Rogers had rung him up with ideas while in the bath), though protesting that he personally preferred vintage Punch magazine humour.
Carry On Sergeantearned £500,000 in its first seven years, a remarkable return on investment by the standards of the faltering British film industry.
With Rogers's next, Carry On Nurse, the nucleus of a virtual repertory company that would stay with the Carry Ons for years began to form: the camp Kenneth Williams, the dozy Kenneth Connor, the weighty Hattie Jacques, the stick-insect Charles Hawtrey, the lumbering Bernard Bresslaw, the curvaceous Barbara Windsor and Joan Sims, and occasionally the outlandish Frankie Howerd, starting with Carry On Doctor(1967).
All these actors were offered a fixed fee. If any of them argued about money, they would see the waspish side of the normally urbane and deaconesque Rogers. The star was the Carry On, Rogers would pronounce – actors were expendable, as he would be expendable one day, but the Carry Ons would carry on.
After the fourth in the series, Carry On Constable(1960), Rogers offered to create a "commonwealth", in which all the players would be paid a percentage of the profits. The actors rejected this because they could not make up their minds about how the profits would be distributed among major and minor roles. This rejection of his idealistic idea suited Rogers's sense of humour and his pocket.
As it was, he acquired two Rolls-Royces, a Bentley and other luxury cars. He had a fine house in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, which had once been occupied by Dirk Bogarde at the height of his fame as a Rank star.
Once he also had, to quote him, "six bullocks, three dogs, two ponies, a donkey and a wife, in that order". His wife, Betty Box, with whom he produced over 100 non -Carry Onfilms, could afford to take such jests in good part.
On leaving King's School in his native Rochester, Rogers started work as a journalist on the Kentish Express, while moonlighting as a writer of plays that were taken up by BBC radio. By the late 1930s, he was an assistant producer in West End theatre.
Ill-health confined him to hospital and writing religious scripts for J Arthur Rank during the second World War, and in 1946 he joined Rank’s Gainsborough Studios in north London. There he met Sydney Box and his younger sister Betty.
In 1949 he married her and received his first associate producer credits. By 1953, he was a producer, going to an office at Pinewood studios in Buckinghamshire, as he was to do almost daily until earlier this year.
Rogers created the Carry Oncult despite – perhaps because of – ignoring the received wisdom which dominated the British film industry of the period: that films could succeed only if they pleased the American market, which in practice meant being expensive.
He was full of sardonic contempt – an emotion that came to him rather readily – for a system in which producers had to pretend that their films cost more than they did, because only then did distributors and exhibitors feel they had a first-class product.
In what other industry, snorted Rogers, would traders prefer prodigal paper losses to modest real profits? He not only declined US money, but refused to set foot in that country.
As a producer passionately devoted to his own control – he claimed rather than admitted that he interfered at every stage of the film-making process – he did not want to be surrounded in the jungle by beasts bigger than himself.
The success of the Carry Onformula, with its chamber pots, double entendres, bulging bosoms and behinds, puns and copious flatulence, obscured the rest of Rogers's work – which was not as overly impressive and sure-footed.
His excursions into straight film-making sometimes failed commercially, although he enjoyed success as writer and producer with To Dorothy a Son(1954) and Time Lock(1957). The latter was based on a play by Arthur Hailey about the race to release a boy accidentally trapped in a bank vault.
Rogers's later days were overshadowed – although the Carry Ons continued to make millions worldwide – by personal bankruptcy brought on by investment in 1994 in a television company that failed to win a franchise.
He had no children to think about, but his knowledge that his father had been a self-made man, his grandfather being poor, inflamed his disregard for the ups and downs of fortune.
He continued to be charitable to redundant pit ponies, for whom he had provided homes, to help the cause of guide dogs for the blind and to be sympathetic to old colleagues in need of help and advice.
His involvement in the revival of the franchise for Carry On Columbus(1992) was nominal, and the participation of a new generation of comedians – among them Julian Clary, Alexei Sayle, Peter Richardson and Keith Allen – could not save a tired echo of the old formula.
Betty died in 1999, but Rogers continued to work. His energies went into novels published by Book Guild and he was still hoping to realise a last film, Carry On London, at the time of his death.
Peter Rogers:born February 20th, 1914; died April 14th, 2009