ABSTRACT
The disparity between critical assessment and popular appreciation apparent in reactions to spiv films and melodramas is even more evident in attitudes to British comedies which from the Pimple films of the pre-sound era to the Carry Ons of the sixties and seventies attracted big audiences but were ignored or disparaged by the critics. Most British comedies were cheaply and sometimes shoddily made and as far as the critics were concerned there was no valid tradition of British comedy until the advent of the Ealing comedies in the late forties. But these bastard children of the film studio and various branches of live entertainment are too numerous to pass over in silence: more than a quarter of the British films released between September 1939 and December 1949 were comedies, and many of them were commercially more successful than the culturally esteemed realist films.
