Name

Talbot Rothwell (1933)

CLAIM TO FAME

Main writer for the Carry On series, In 2007 his line “Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!" was voted the greatest one-liner in movie history by a thousand comedy writers, actors, impresarios and members of the public.

PROFILE

Talbot Rothwell meandered between a number of jobs after leaving Cranleigh before joining the RAF at the start of the war. He was shot down over Norway in 1940 and taken prisoner, and while in captivity he began to write.  After the war he continued to write professionally, submitting work to a number of leading radio shows of the era. In the 1950s he submitted a screenplay, Carry on Jack, to producer Peter Rogers who liked it so much that he asked Rothwell to become the main writer for the Carry On series.

Although he took the genre in a more bawdy direction than the initial Carry On films, he was firm in his insistence that they never strayed into pornography, explaining that they were a continuation of the music hall tradition of Max Miller.  In all he wrote 20 Carry On films as well as a number of Christmas specials.

In 1970 he wrote the first series of the hugely successful Up Pompeii for the BBC and was awarded the OBE in 1977.  He retired through ill health soon after and died in 1981 aged 65.  In 2007 his line “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” (delivered by Kenneth Williams in Carry On Cleo) was voted the greatest one-liner in movie history by a thousand comedy writers, actors, impresarios and members of the public. Carry On director, Gerald Thomas, sent his children to Cranleigh.