Mark Andrews on Saturday: It's all a right Carry On

FILM producer Brian Baker has acquired the rights to the Carry On franchise, with a view to releasing a new film on an online streaming movie such as Netflix.

He reckons it will be the perfect antidote to today’s smothering political correctness, and promises to retain the movies’ cheeky humour and double entendres.

Good luck to him, the original Carry On films of the 60s and 70s are some of the best comedies ever made, miles funnier than anything around today.

But he will have to do much better than that awful 1992 revival, Carry On Columbus, which I remember turning off after half an hour because it was so bad.

But while Brian’s ambitions are to be applauded, I’m not sure the Netflix generation are going to be the right target market. A bit of nudge-nudge, wink-wink from Barbara Windsor and they will be demanding a safe place.

BESIDES, if Jeremy Paxman is to be believed, the elderly are about the only group we are allowed to make fun of these days.

“They are fair game because they do not bite back,” he writes in the latest issue of Saga magazine, contrasting them with the ever-growing list of ‘protected’ groups now deemed beyond reproach.

He’s almost right, but there is another group he has overlooked. The most important one of all. Black Country folk.

Not only are we hopelessly under-represented in the mainstream media – when have you ever heard of diversity quotas for Yam-Yams? – take a look at the BBC’s latest rich list. Not a Black Country bloke or wench in sight.

On the rare occasions we are portrayed on television, it is invariably as dimwits and losers played by London-based actors putting on silly half-Brummie, half-Scouse voices. The Grimleys anyone?

If that’s not cultural appropriation, I don’t know what is.

Any road up, we ay the sort ter moan, we just gerron with it. So in the interests of rebalancing this gross injustice, I would like to take this opportunity to offer my services presenting clips of football matches once a week in authentic Black Country dialect for a fee of £1.75 million a year.

Or failing that, how about Carry On Tipton? Now that would be bostin’.

YOU may have noticed that the European parliament convened again this week, and what a spectacle it was. For some reason a jazz band was commissioned to play Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the Brexit Party turned their backs on the proceedings, and the Liberal Democrats added a bit of colour to the proceedings by wearing T-shirts with a rude word on them. How very mature.

Then there was our old friend Magid Magid, the former mayor of Sheffield and now an MEP, who claimed he was asked to leave the chamber after turning up in a baseball cap, shorts and a F*** Fascism T-shirt, We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

Mr Magid reckons the reaction ‘says a lot about what people think the stereotypical politician is meant to look like,' and I suppose he’s right. We expect them not to look like The Inbetweeners on a lads’ holiday in Crete.

Amid all this madness, it appears to have gone almost unnoticed that the president of the European parliament referred to the Ode To Joy as Europe’s national anthem’. So the EU is now a nation, and he has now colonised 28 nations? Surely that’s a breach of international law.

Anyway, in these tumultuous times, it is great to see the full spectrum of our politicians representing on the world stage with dignity and decorum.