Although the Carry-On films with their bawdy, innuendo-laden, seaside postcard-type humour, do not rank amongst the great film classics there was an interesting and entertaining story here. With family photographs and film clips the backstory of his father was outlined - from merchant seaman to wartime Fleet Air Arm pilot shot down in 1940, he spent five years as a prisoner of war. Involvement with camp theatrical productions designed to keep up morale and function as a diversion to escape activities, Peter Butterworth started on the road to a post-war career in film, theatre and television. This ran alongside that of his wife, Janet Brown, the first female performer in Stars in Battledress, a wartime entertainment group, and later a well-known theatrical impressionist who became a household name after 1975 when Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party.

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The speaker, himself an actor from the age of four, later a documentary maker, was a very proficient storyteller sharing personal and hitherto unknown moments of his parents in their shared life in show business and with friends when family life allowed. The audience laughed at the carefully chosen clips of timeless comic sequences and were able to recognise the host of famous faces which appeared in them. Both parents were subjects of the iconic tv series This Is Your Life, Peter in 1975 and Janet in 1980, one of few married couples to be featured individually. The lecture served to reminded us of simpler times and of our parents’ generation, many of whom lived through the wartime years without talking of their experiences to their families.

Tony Cross