The Carry On team throw caution to the wind and presents an hour and a half of good, clean lavatorial humour. This was the first sign of impending decline in the series and the major flop during a seemingly indestructible purple patch.
Cascading with lavatorial gags, references, and, indeed, lavatories, everything in the film is totally overplayed and flamboyantly characterised. While I’m All Right Jack(1959) was a huge box-office success, Convenience died a death.
However, the Boulting Brothers’ satire was a cleverly written social commentary on the unionists’ problems, giving both management and workers eccentric figures.
Kenneth Williams is WC Boggs, the troubled owner of a small company trying to manufacture fine toiletware. Williams represents the established world of British industry, clinging on to authority while facing threats to traditional ideals.
The incompetent management are constantly at loggerheads with a bolshie union led by the ultimate workforce hero, factory foreman Sid Plummer (Sid James).
Williams’ son, Lewis (Richard O’Callaghan), is the young romantic lead who chases and eventually wins beautiful canteen girl Myrtle (the lovely Jacki Piper), who is also Sid’s daughter, thus joining workforce with management.
Shop steward Vic Spanner (Kenneth Cope of Randall & Hopkirk: Deceased fame) finds himself at loggerheads with the management of WC Boggs & Sons toilet factory and is also suffering pangs of jealousy because Myrtle is dating the manager’s son.
The film goes through every corny gag in the book while the team delight in overtly stereotyped performances.
There is a domestic running gag between Sid and his wife, Beattie (Hattie Jacques), and their budgie Joey (who has a very lucrative talent for picking winners in horse races), creating the tongue-in-cheek, 1970s ‘women in their place’ attitudes towards Beattie’s lazy and bumbling antics.
Various complications arise due to Boggs’ refusal to manufacture bidets until Lewis gets an order for a thousand of them for a Far Eastern harem; Vic’s rowing with his fierce mum (Renee Houston); Sid’s “fancy” for chief packer and next-door neighbour Chloe Moore (Joan Sims), who has a jealous commercial traveller of a husband (Bill Maynard); and finally, the firm’s annual outing to Brighton – a 1970s seaside postcard brought to life – in which WC Boggs loses his inhibitions and joins the staff in all the fun on the pier as the unionists are slapped on the wrist, and all’s right with the world.
Sid Plummer Sidney James
W C Boggs
Kenneth Williams
Charles Coote
Charles Hawtrey
Chloe Moore
Joan Sims
Beattie Plummer
Hattie Jacques Bernie Hulke
Bernard Bresslaw
Vic Spanner
Kenneth Cope
Myrtle Plummer
Jacki Piper
Lewis Boggs
Richard O’Callaghan
Miss Hortense Withering
Patsy Rowlands Fred Moore
Bill Maynard
Benny
Davy Kaye
Popsy
Margaret Nolan
Bunny Waitress
Shirley Stelfox
Agatha Spanner
Renee Houston
Sid Plummer
Bernie Hulke 
Fred Moore 
