Among the many things that annoy me is the phrase “silly season”, a means by which politicians and those who feed off them categorise those who are not and do not. The silly season is the news that happens when Parliament is not sitting. By implication, what they do is serious. Consequently I approached last Saturday’s Archive Hour (Radio 4) expecting to be disappointed.

It was presented by one of the BBC’s plethora of political correspondents, Carolyn Quinn, and it was a 50th-anniversary appreciation of the Carry On movies. It promised to be one of those ghastly exercises by which political wonks like to show how connected they are to the plebs, in this case by considering the legacy of 30 low-budget films, the most recent of them more than 15 years old.

And, to an extent, it was like that. In Carry On Britain Quinn interviewed political commentators who were plainly far too important to put any thought into what they were saying, and so they came up with what anyone who had ever seen a Carry On film already knew – sexual innuendo . . . Donald McGill postcards . . . jolly romps . . . working-class humour . . . It was posited that the films’ attempts at satire were a manifestation of the audience’s willingness to be subordinate to a ruling elite, an observation so fatuous that the talking head who made it perhaps thought he was on another programme altogether.

The programme’s Big Idea – that the Carry On films were a reflection of the age in which they were made – shattered very little earth. It was interesting that the ones set in hospitals were disliked by medical people because they reinforced steretotypes, and that Carry On at your Convenience was a flop because it satirised trade unionism at a time when trade unions were doing what most people thought was a good job, but on the whole three things saved Carry On Britain from being a patronising mess.

Times Archive, 1959: Carry On Teacher

The words 'Carry On' indicate a form of humour that will not make any great demands on the audience

• Getting to the bottom of things

One was the outtakes from the films. Another was the interviews with cast members, notably Fenella Fielding, who retains the sexiest voice on the planet. And a third was the film historian Christopher Frayling, who actually told you things – such as that the first two lines to attract the attention of the censor came in the first film, Carry On Sergeant. They were “You’re all a bunch of chits” (about military bureaucracy) and “Man does not live by sausage rolls alone” (because it was derived from the Bible and might offend).

Frayling also brought to life a significant moment in Carry On life, when Barbara Windsor’s bra exploded in Carry On Camping and a generation that thought she was made of equal parts giggle and bosom discovered she actually had rather small breasts. Saucy.

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