FIFTY years ago, a young screenwriter named Norman Hudis was given someone else's script to re-write. It was an amiable comedy about a motley collection of conscripts doing their national service.

The movie was Carry On Sergeant and no-one could have known it would spawn a succession of films so successful that a 31st sequel would be in production half a century later.

Norman Hudis would go on to write Carry On Nurse, Carry On Teacher, Carry On Constable, Carry On Regardless and Carry On Cruising, before leaving Britain for success in Hollywood. But, as he writes in a new book, he never really severed his connection with the series.

In the book, No Laughing Matter: How I Carried On, he tells how he would keep generating ideas for Carry On films in the hope that one day he'd be asked to return home and write another.

Among those ideas were Carry On Under the Pier If Wet, which sent up both the seaside concert party and the resort boarding house, and Carry On Shylock Holmes.

The Daily Echo interviewed Mr Hudis, now 85, in Mudeford, where he was relaxing after an exhausting round of interviews to promote the book and celebrate the 50th birthday of the Carry On series.

While some of the actors may have grown weary of their association with the Carry Ons, Mr Hudis harbours no such complaints.

"It comes up in anything I do. I don't object to that. Why would I want to shake them off? It founded my career," he said.

"I'm grateful to them. I'm glad I was in the right place at the right time and had the right talent."

Naturally enough, his memoirs start with that life-changing writing assignment from producer Peter Rogers.

"I knew the major attraction would be the Carry Ons. That's why I arranged the book in that order, starting in the middle and going back on my life," he says.

Some of the Carry On regulars were complex, troubled personalities, but Mr Hudis uses anecdotes from his time on the series to shed fresh light on the likes of Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims and Hattie Jacques.

He believes the early Carry Ons were successful because they exploited situations that were familiar to almost everyone in Britain, starting with the national service that was an obligation for a generation of young men.

"All of us - Peter Rogers, director Gerald Thomas and myself - were very fortunate, first of all that we picked on Sergeant to do," he said.

"And when the clamour for another film and then another and another erupted, we were equally lucky in at least the next three - Nurse, Teacher and Constable - because they were all familiar targets.

"People only had to put their money down at the box office to see Carry On Sergeant and there's a familiarity about it - they knew half the jokes before they went in.

"Nurse was even more acceptable because the British concept of hospitals is pretty nurses, lascivious men and mountainous matrons. You've got your archetypes before you start."

Mr Hudis parted company with Peter Rogers after turning in a treatment for Carry On Spying which didn't find favour. He dug the material out again recently and didn't care for it.

After that, the Carry Ons continued under a new writer, Talbot Rothwell, while Mr Hudis went to Hollywood.

There, he wrote for TV shows including The Man from UNCLE, Marcus Welby MD and It Takes a Thief.

In Hollywood, a screenwriter can make a pretty good living from turning in scripts that never get filmed. The memoirs tell how Mr Hudis was hired to write a film for Elvis Presley. But the script, which would have seen Elvis play a secret agent, was never made, and Mr Hudis was left with the consolation of a larger-than-normal fee and an invitation to that year's Oscars.

But such blows are part of the entertainment industry. "By its nature, showbusiness schools you in disappointment," he says.

"I suppose there are some people - writers, actors - who've gone from success to success. But I've never met anybody in those fields, nor have I read anything of their life stories, without at least one bitter disappointment being recorded years afterwards and still with a residual strangled sob."

  • No Laughing Matter: How I Carried On, by Norman Hudis, is from Apex Publishing, priced £7.99.

Mr Hudis was in Waterstones, Poole, recently, signing copies for fans.