The men from literature and medicine who put on a show of vulgarity

The Carry Ons have been invoked for a liberal cause. What infamy!

A new nationwide anti-sex discrimination campaign is to start, and its theme will be based on, if you can believe this, the Carry On films. So, having been belatedly hailed by academics as the very soul of honest British vulgarity, the Carry Ons are now being enlisted to fight for worthy liberal causes.

It is all, you might think, pretty absurd. Weren't the people behind these films some rather spivvy hucksters who ripped off the cast, and had all the artistic sensibility of a wolf-whistler on a building site? Not quite. They were almost as surprising a bunch as the famously dysfunctional comics who appeared on screen.

Of none was this more the case than the writer of the soundtrack for six of the films: Robert Bruce Montgomery, Oxford-educated chum of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, critically acclaimed novelist, literary reviewer for The Sunday Times, and composer of devotional orchestral works. Montgomery produced crime novels under the name of Edmund Crispin; and also, under his own name, wrote concertos, a requiem, and operas (early libretti for which were courtesy of one K Amis). Alcoholic semi-recluse Montgomery may have been, but few men have on their CV the writing credits for both An Ode on the Resurrection of Christ and Carry On Nurse.

Then there was director Gerald Thomas, whose youth was spent studying medicine. After the war he moved into film editing, and worked on such classics as Hamlet and The Third Man; the man whose cameras were to linger lasciviously on Barbara Windsor spent his formative creative years with Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. Producer Peter Rogers started out as a writer of po-faced religious shorts for J Arthur Rank, won an award at the Venice Film Festival before he was 40, and made admired children's films.

Of the scriptwriters, the first of them, Norman Hudis, belied the idea that the Carry Ons were hopelessly parochial by going on to write such American TV shows as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Hawaii Five-O; the second was Talbot Rothwell, a policeman who gave the series its trademark innuendos. Not all his material, however, was original: one of the most famous lines ("Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it infamy!") was written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden for radio 20 years before. Adopted standard-bearers for sex equality they may now be, but Carry Ons cannot be run up the flagpole of every virtue.