Having enjoyed the sweet smell of success with their eight Carry On films to date, producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas have turned to STENCH and SMUT for their next, Carry On Spying.
Let us hasten to point out that these two provocative nouns are composed of the initial letters of organisations. STENCH is a subversive body, the Society for Toral Extinction of Non-Conforming Humans, who misappropriate an internationally important secret formula. SMUT is the Society for the Monopoly of Universal Technology, who employ a beautiful counter-espionage agent with devastating effect.
If the names of rhese organisations remind you of the equally fantastic sounding set-ups SMERSH and SPECTRE in the James Bond thriller From Russia With Love, you are on the right track. Carry On Spying is, in fact, a skit on that type of film, relating the misadventures of a group of inept trainee spies scurrying rhrough Europe and North Africa, the main one of whom is 00 James Bind.
The principal players are Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor, Bernard Cribbins, Charles Hawtrey, Eric Barker and Dilys Laye.