Don't Drink the Water.

[Glebe]

Over the last couple of days I've binged-watched the full two series of Don't Drink the Water on Dailymotion and YouTube... it's a bit of a curious old chestnut, being a spin-off from On the Buses (and also written by that shows' creators, Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolfe) that sees gormless, fuhrer-like former bus inspector Cyril 'Blakey' Blake (Stephen Lewis) retire to Spain with his sister Dorothy (Pat Coombs).

I found it (sometimes grimly) compelling to watch... Blakey doesn't develop much beyond the gawping nutter of OtB while Coombs is good value as his neurotic sis. Good old Derek Griffiths plays hotel porter Carlos complete with dodgy Spanish accent and of course there are lots of non-PC goings-on and all the usual old Brit sitcoms-abroad cliches - (true to the title) the tap water is dark brown, the poorly-built apartment is falling apart and the workmen haven't even left yet, the plumbing and wiring are all messed up, the lifts don't work, the language barrier causes mayhem and the food is all squids and sheeps eyes and that. Carlos is constantly bribing every last pesato off Blakey with promises of help, and, rather disconcertingly, the Spanish Civil Guard keep turning up and accusing Blakey and Dorothy of all sorts and actually threatening them with knives and guns!

Unsurprisingly it was all shot at LWT studios, with the only location filming being the credits sequence. Anyway, that's yer lot. Discuss.

[Jittlebags]

It's odd that Chesney and Wolfe did this, especially as towards the end of OTB, they were writing fewer of the scripts, and the main characters were falling by the wayside.

Yus my Dear and Come Back Mrs Noah next ?

[Glebe]

It's odd that Chesney and Wolfe did this, especially as towards the end of OTB, they were writing fewer of the scripts, and the main characters were falling by the wayside.

Yus my Dear and Come Back Mrs Noah next ?

Yay, thanks for replying to the thread Jittlebags!

Funnily enough, I've not actually not watched any full series of OTB, just various episodes over the years... mainly on ITV4, which of course have being screening it (and the spin-off movies) for donkey's years. Yeah, it seems like everyone was jumping ship towards the end, I know Michael Robbins did a bunk later on and they had his character go up North to look for work or summit... I just caught an episode recently where Blakey was boarding at Mum's house and there was no sign of Stan! I'm sure you're already aware of this, but there were apparently plans for a comeback in the '80s, as discussed in this Wogan cast interview.

Dunno about Yus My Dear, don't think I could stomach Arthur Mullard... he had abuse allegations levelled at him by his daughter, apparently (was watching Amicus chiller The Vault of Horror recently, he pops up briefly in that). All I know of Come Back Mrs. Noah is that it starred Molly Sugden and was set in space and looks absolutely ridiculous... it featured in some TV doc or something awhile ago.

Not that it was hilarious or anything, but I got a sense watching those two short series of Don't Drink the Water that it was starting to settle down and could have actually run a bit longer.

[Brundle-Fly]

I remember enjoying Don't Drink The Water at the time but can't recall a thing about it. Maybe a scene where Blakey complains about the brown tap water?

That Wogan clip is great, thanks for posting. It's wonderfully charming and Wogan commands the interview so well. Can't have been easy. I love how overexcited Doris Hare gets being on the chatshow and how easily amused by the mildest of quips everyone is. I watch it though with a tinge of sadness because apart from Anna Karen, they've all gone. Gone to that big bus depot in the sky or in Terry's case, that big Wogan's Web in the sky.

[Glebe]

I remember enjoying Don't Drink The Water at the time but can't recall a thing about it. Maybe a scene where Blakey complains about the brown tap water?

That Wogan clip is great, thanks for posting. It's wonderfully charming and Wogan commands the interview so well. Can't have been easy. I love how overexcited Doris Hare gets being on the chatshow and how easily amused by the mildest of quips everyone is. I watch it though with a tinge of sadness because apart from Anna Karen, they've all gone. Gone to that big bus depot in the sky or in Terry's case, that big Wogan's Web in the sky.

Yeah, there's a few scenes where they fill jugs and that with water and it's actually brown! It's the Spanish plumbing, dontcha know!

That Wogan reunion has been posted before, but it is indeed a top clip, nice to see the whole gang together. Yeah, Karen is the sole-survivor of the bunch... she's went on to do a stint on EastEnders, of course (a lengthy stint, going by Wiki, who list her as a cast member from 1996-2017).

It has been suggested that Varney was really already too old for the role of Stan, which is hard to disagree with. Funnily enough, I don't think I recall Cicely Courtneidge, who played Mum before Doris Hare. Michael Robbins' numerous film and TV appearances over the years included the role of the butler in The Pink Panther Strikes Again... here's a couple of outtakes, as posted in the utterly trivial comedy observations thread t'other day.

It comes as a bit of a shock to hear Bob Grant's posh accent! His passing is the saddest of all, really; he took his own life in 2003, apparently having made several previous suicide attempts over the years (including during an occasion when he went AWOL for a few days and fled over here to Dublin, apparently).

Of course Blakey would be a defining role for Lewis, before he went on to play Smiler in Last of the Summer Wine. He was also in Oh, Doctor Beeching! and popped up in Kemp-tastic gangster epic The Krays!

Oh yeah... the YouTube user's choice of title ruins the reveal, but anyway...

I can never remember who it was on here who posted about going to some event at which Lewis had been hired to greet people in character as Blakey, and apparently Keith Flint (bless 'im) turned up and got all emotional and started hugging him... or maybe that was two different incidents? Can anyone clarify this?

Oh yeah, and on one final OTB trivia note, as the celebrity face of it's introduction into the UK in 1967, Varney was the first person in Britain to use an ATM!

[Bennett Brauer]

It has been suggested that Varney was really already too old for the role of Stan, which is hard to disagree with.

Best pair of legs in the business though.

[Brundle-Fly]

I can never remember who it was on here who posted about going to some event at which Lewis had been hired to greet people in character as Blakey, and apparently Keith Flint (bless 'im) turned up and got all emotional and started hugging him... or maybe that was two different incidents? Can anyone clarify this?

That was me Glebe.

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=49335.0

[Glebe]

That was me Glebe.

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=49335.0

Oh, d'oh, sorry Brundle! I feel like a right knob! In any case, it's a fantastic story... please allow me to quote that here for posterity:

Met him once in the late nineties. I was working at a music industry corporate event and they'd laid on a load of buses to ferry all the punters onto a nightclub after their awards ceremony. The show wasn't over yet and I went out for a fag in the carpark only to see Blakey himself in full station inspector garb hanging around on his tod.  He was booked to usher folk onto these proper London red buses and inexplicably say "I 'ate you, Butler" on a loop. I think the former Suede guitarist was in attendance though.

We got talking and he was surprised (and almost dewy eyed) I knew his actual name and that I remembered his sit-com, Don't Drink The Water. This was when knowing stuff off the bat was impressive because you couldn't covertly Google IMDB on your smartphone for obscure TV credits to ingratiate yourself with British comedy character actors long past their prime.

Lewis remarked he had never done a corporate before and was a bit embarrassed because he felt he was prostituting himself. I told him to stop being so soft, take the money and have a laugh. People went bananas when they saw him and he did look like he had a ball.  My remaining memory is watching a refreshed Keith Flint hugging him warmly.

[Brundle-Fly]

My other OtB story is not so great. I once sat opposite Michael Robbins on a railway carriage heading to London. He was impeccably dressed but looked very frail and had a haunted gaze in his eyes. About a fortnight later, I read he passed away from prostate cancer. I don't think I'll ever dine out on that anecdote.

[Glebe]

My other OtB story is not so great. I once sat opposite Michael Robbins on a railway carriage heading to London. He was impeccably dressed but looked very frail and had a haunted gaze in his eyes. About a fortnight later, I read he passed away from prostate cancer. I don't think I'll ever dine out on that anecdote.

Aw, that's sad.

[Dr Rock]

I bet Reg Varney wasn't the first person in Britain to use a cashpoint. Someone would've tested it to make sure it worked first. Makes me furious.

[Glebe]

I bet Reg Varney wasn't the first person in Britain to use a cashpoint. Someone would've tested it to make sure it worked first. Makes me furious.

It was probably Stephen Lewis, then Varney hogged the publicity. "I 'ate you, Varney!"

[St_Eddie]

Dunno about Yus My Dear, don't think I could stomach Arthur Mullard... he had abuse allegations levelled at him by his daughter, apparently...

I've just looked this up...

He was everyone's favourite Cockney with a face like a bashed- about fruit barrow that would crease into peals of laughter as loud as Bow bells... Arthur Mullard, star of 100 films and countless TV shows like Celebrity Squares and Yus My Dear.

Yet behind that loveable screen smile lurked a sickening sadist who sexually abused his only daughter from the age of 13...and drove his desperate wife to kill herself after a lifetime of physical and mental cruelty.

Bullying Mullard's hold over his family was so great that it is only now - five months after he died aged 85 - that his daughter Barbara is prepared to end the family's silence and talk for the first time of her years of abuse and torment

"It makes me boil inside with rage when people talk fondly about loveable Arthur Mullard, what a marvellous man he was, and how they should put up a statue to him," says twice-married Barbara, 56.

"The stupid, jolly, smiling man people saw on TV wasn't the real Arthur Mullard. I knew the real him and he was a domineering pervert.

"He made me, his daughter, want to get hold of a knife and cut off all the parts of my body he fondled - my genitals, everything - so I wouldn't be able to feel any more pain.

"My father left me hanging on to my sanity with my fingernails," adds Barbara, whose ordeal led to major mental breakdowns and psychiatric counselling. "Often, all I wanted to do was die."

But as a youngster growing up in Highbury, North London, Barbara was the apple of her father's eye - the middle child, with an older brother Brian, now 59 and Johnny, 51.

"Dad and I had a lot in common," remembers Barbara. "We both liked poetry and art and I loved going on long walks with him across Hampstead Heath.

"It was only after my 13th birthday that everything changed. He suddenly realised that I was growing into a woman.

"My mum Flo had just gone into hospital with polio. He needed someone to take her place.

"First, I became his domestic slave, then I became his sex slave. According to him, satisfying his carnal needs was part of my womanly duties."

Images of the first time it happened still flash across her mind like the recollection of a bad dream.

"I was in the kitchen when I heard a sort of thud on the wooden table," she says. "I turned round and there was what I took to be a long-stemmed mushroom on it, although it seemed to be alive.

"He said, 'Look at that,' I asked, 'What is it?' Is it a mushroom?'

"He didn't answer me. I think I made him a bit embarrassed because of course it was his penis. I was so naive, I didn't even know that.

"He told me, 'I'm your father and I have to instruct you about life. This is my job.'

"That's how he rationalised what he was doing. He was doing his duty as a good father. So when he was groping me and giving me French kisses, that was loving me and being a good father as well.

"He said I should feel honoured and privileged at getting all this tuition. 'You're the fruit that I've grown,' he said. 'I'm entitled to have the first taste.'

"I was so naive I thought he was play-acting at being a movie lover. I said, ''This is what they do in the films.'' That's how innocent I was.

"I never saw my parents show much love towards each other, so it was like he was Clark Gable and I was Vivien Leigh.'I didn't think, 'I'm being sexually abused, this shouldn't be happening.'

"I just thought that if your father does something, you accept it and that it is a new experience you are having." Yet deep down she realised something was wrong and her mid-teens became a living nightmare.

"I sometimes had to wash in the kitchen and because he'd always burst in at such times I'd wedge a chair under the door handle because it didn't have a lock," she says.

"Once, he forced his way in while I stood like a rabbit caught in the headlamps of a car. Then he looked at me naked and said, 'Oh, you're beautiful,' and he started running his hands all over my body.

"I couldn't do anything to stop him because I felt you have to do what your father says. As he excited himself with me he said, 'All girls do this for their fathers.'

"As I got older he thought that having his way with me was part of his conjugal rights. I ceased to be his daughter...I was his partner and I had to provide sex for him, no arguing.

"Afterwards, he'd wash himself, and say, 'Phew! better not let your mother know...she'll go potty if she finds out, she'll have a right go at you,' as though it was me who'd done something wrong."

Barbara's frail mother Flo, who suffered from mengingitis as well as polio, developed severe mental problems brought on, says Barbara, by her father's mental cruelty. And it was made worse knowing what her husband was doing to their daughter behind closed doors.

"Even before the sexual abuse started, he would delight in making us all feel like rubbish," says Barbara. "He referred to my mother as a millstone round his neck. He'd say, 'She's no good to me. She's a useless, lazy, dirty cow.'

But she was such an inoffensive person with lovely eyes. She just used to sit there and take all the abuse my father was throwing at her." Barbara looked at a studio photograph of Arthur and Flo taken just before they were married.

He is dressed in a smart suit and tie, she is wearing a feathered hat perched at coquettish angle.

"You see my mother's pretty teeth?"" she says softly, tears welling up in her eyes. "My father punched those out.

"Mum told me years later what had happened. She'd slept with someone else and she'd left my father. I was very young, two or three, and she'd taken Brian and me to my grandmother's house, just off Hornsey Road, not far from Highbury. My father came looking for her and when mum opened the door he punched her violently in the mouth. They were always quarrelling and fighting.

"He started off the rows and he ended them laughing at her, mocking and belittling her. I never noticed any signs of a loving relationship between them.

"They had stopped sleeping together when I was about 11. I think my mother missed the physical side, but he'd decided he didn't want anything more to do with her.

"She'd been a naturally spirited woman, but my father's behaviour overwhelmed her. He gradually wore her down until she was too tired to put up any more resistance.

"That's exactly what he did to to me," Barbara sighs. "He wore me down. His sexual abuse was something I had to live with, so I would try to keep out of his way as much as possible."

As he became more depraved, he used his wife's frailty as the perfect pretext for arranging to see more of Barbara... even keeping her off school to cater to his needs.

Flo, worn down by her husband's bullying, was suffering severe mental problems and couldn't cope with even the most simple tasks. For weeks at a time she would be admitted to convalescent homes. "He was really glad when she went away." says Barbara. "He could then lock the front door and have me to himself."

Often it would be up to 45 days a term. "I was just never at school," she says. "I was doing the housework and being abused by my father.

"By now I was convinced what he was doing was wrong, but he had this frightening hold over me. I'd be crying and saying, 'Please don't do this to me...I want you to be my father.' He'd just say ,'Silly girl, you're talking nonsense'."

At 18 Barbara suffered from neurasthenia, a form of nervous breakdown which in her case was triggered by years of abuse.

"I was unable to cope, I was pale and thin, I just broke down," she says. "He could see what he'd done to me, but he never apologised."

Then three years later in 1961 her mother Flo killed herself after taking a massive drugs overdose.

"I blame my father," says Barbara. "He'd created a situation at home where life had become intolerable for her- for all of us.

"My elder Brian had run away from home years before, unable to put up with my father's mental cruelty and the quality of my mother's life was zero. On top of everything else she knew that her husband was having sex with her daughter. I knew she knew. She realised with a woman's sixth sense that something was happening.

"Shee would see him go into the other room where I was. She'd notice that there was no talking going on.

"She would also see him spring guiltily from behind the door when she came in and and see me standing there with a red face.

One day she did actually come in when something was going on. But she blamed me. She attacked me as if I'd seduced her husband, as if I were a romantic rival. She should have saved me from him, but she attacked me.

"Mum must have known that I was being abused, but she was impotent to do anything about it.

"Suicide was her way of dealing with the problem.

"The day she died, my father phoned me at the bank where I was working and said, "Your mother's dead, come home quickly.

"He showed me her suicide note. "She'd written,'I don't want to live any more because of what you're doing with Barbara. Please look after my Johnny.'

"My father then tore the note up in front of me. Only he and I knew about that note." Without the need to stay at home any longer and look after her sick mother, Barbara at last found the excuse she needed to break away from home. But she couldn't escape her father's sexual advances - even after she was married.

Both her marriages fell victim to her blighted past, as memories of what her father had done to her made Barbara less and less willing to have sex with her husbands.

Her first marriage to Geoffrey - just nine months after she left home - lasted three years, although they did have a son, David, now 29.

"Geoffrey was young and I didn't trust him enough to tell him why I was like the way I was," she says.

"Anyway, I don't think he'd have been able to handle it if I had told him what had really been happening while I was growing up."

Her second husband, David Lucas, father of her other three children - Philip, 25, Claire, 24, and Holly, 13 - died of a heart attack six years ago.

Yet her father continued to make any excuse to get her on her own to have "a little cuddle." The only time she could feel safe from his advances was when she was pregnant.

"He didn't like pregnant women, he found them unattractive," says Barbara."So I was always happy when I discovered I was pregnant." Yet, despite the years of perverted abuse, when her father was ill towards end of his life, she nursed him back to health at her home in Essex.

But despite that amazing show of forgiveness, her father still changed his will. He left most of his money, pounds 245,000, to the National Children's Home - while Johnny and Barbara got pounds 5,000 each.

"Neither of us had done anything to deserve this final rejection," says Barbara. "The only 'love' that we'd ever had from our father was this money that he dangled before us like a carrot. When he gave that money away, it was really our love he was giving away."

Barbara is now writing a book about her experiences. She is also a trained hypnotherapist and after years of being a victim of sexual abuse herself, she is now seeking to help others.

Her advice is straightforward. "Get some quality back into your life and start to live," she says.

"Look at me. I have been through the mill, but I've got myself back together again.

"I'm leading the good life now. My days are filled with sunshine. It's never too late. Sooner or later the sun will come from behind the clouds."

Sickening.

[Shaky]

The Mullard stuff is very grim.

On a bit of a tangent, but Wogan doesn't get any near the acclaim he should have got as a chat show host. He really was brilliant. I'd take that wry Irish wit and intellect over Letterman or Leno any day. HE WAS THAT GOOD.

[Glebe]

Yes, those details about Mullard are fucking horrendous, sounds like he was a right manipulative psychopath.

Gone to that big bus depot in the sky or in Terry's case, that big Wogan's Web in the sky.

Or, indeed, weary old Wogan went to that big BLANK in the sky!

[poodlefaker]

Reg Varney, first ATM; Ernie Wise, first mobile phone; Su Pollard, first use of a self-service till in Asda.

[Jittlebags]

Jimmy Jewel. First use of a pocket fanny.