Everyone has a love that dare not speak its name. I'm afraid mine is Carry On films. It's intellectually humiliating, I know. Tacky and horribly dated. It won't get me drummed out of the Garrick, because I've never been drummed in. But I may have to forfeit my pass for the University Library in Cambridge.

Nevertheless, I feel that if I don't confess now - 50 years to the week since the first Carry On was inflicted on the unsuspecting public - I will have to live with my shame till I die. And I realise that I need help. Almost four decades after they first protruded into my fevered pubescent imagination (and boy, did they protrude), Barbara Windsor's boobs still exert a strange primordial sway over my sexual fantasies. Almost my entire boyhood knowledge of the British Raj, Tudor England and the French Revolution was gleaned from watching Carry on up the Khyber, Carry on Henry and Carry on ... Don't Lose Your Head (crazy title!). And I still can't meet a senior hospital nurse without the words “Ooh, matron, you are awful!” springing to mind - and sometimes, I regret to say, to lips as well.

I don't think I'm alone. Snooty 1960s critics may have regarded the series as beneath contempt. But an astonishing 29 Carry Ons were made in the 30 years up to 1978 - all directed by the redoubtable Gerald Thomas, and all but three featuring Kenneth Williams, whose high-camp delivery of gloriously smutty innuendo epitomised the whole appeal of the films.

In retrospect the Carry Ons can be seen as the last gasp of a certain tradition of British humour - disrepectful, bawdy, lavatorial and utterly unpretentious - that had its roots in Victorian music-halls and saucy seaside postcards. It has to be said that some of the jokes, and nearly all the plots, were dreadfully lame. Yet the best spoofs - Carry on Cleo, sending up the interminable Burton/Taylor Cleopatra; or Carry on Spying with Babs Windsor improbably cast as a brilliant MI5 agent - hit their targets with an irresistible thwack.

And in their way this gang of ne'er-do-wells - randy Sid James; limper-than-pansies Charles Hawtrey; Joan Sims, eternally exasperated by the lechery and stupidity of the men around her - did offer a cracked mirror-image of working-class preoccupations in the 1950s and 1960s, whether National Service (Carry on Sergeant, the first in the series), package holidays (Carry on Abroad, set in a half-built hotel), or indignities inflicted by the NHS (Carry on Doctor, Nurse, Matron and Again, Doctor).

Since 1978 there have been several attempts to revive the genre. In 1992 the likes of Rik Mayall and Julian Clary tried to flog the dead horse in Carry on Columbus. Now there's a mooted project said to involve Vinnie Jones and Shane Ritchie.

All hopeless. You might as well attempt to bring back Green Shield stamps or duffle-coats. Their era has passed. Still, I was nostalgically overjoyed to see that “Infamy! Infamy” They've all got it in for me!” was recently voted the funniest film-line of all time. And a bit surprised, too. I'm not even sure it was the funniest line in Carry on Cleo.

UKTV Gold is showing a mini-season of Carry On films this weekend; see TV&Radio

Explore What's On

• London Microguides