From Here?

Over the years, I’ve written plenty about comedy writers reusing jokes. Today’s topic is one of the most famous and most-quoted examples of the lot. So let’s turn to ersatz Bond film Never Say Never Again , which premiered in the US on the 6th October 1983. Oh dear, James Bond isn’t having much fun. NURSE: Mr. Bond? I need a urine sample. If you could fill this beaker for me? BOND: From here? The tale surrounding this is well-known by now. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais did some emergency rewrite work on Never Say Never Again , coming in three weeks after the film had started shooting, and staying with the production for three months.1 Of course, they nicked the above joke from their own Porridge , and both writers have openly and repeatedly discussed this. For instance, in the Omnibus edition “Whatever Happened To Clement & La Frenais?”, broadcast on the 20th July 1997: DICK CLEMENT: We’re always tempted to recycle jokes, We did use one… it’s not a similar joke, it’s the same joke, in Never Say Never Again as in Porridge . If you see them back-to-back, it’s quite amusing. IAN LA FRENAIS: We call it homage. We don’t call it recycling. (laughs) But it doesn’t happen very often. The joke was actually taken from the very first episode of Porridge 2, “New Faces, Old Hands”, which first aired on 5th September 1974: DOCTOR: You see those flasks over there? I want you to fill one for me. FLETCH: What, from ‘ere? For me, it’s the lightning-fast reaction from Barker which really sells it. He knew when you shouldn’t have time to anticipate the gag. Obviously, this scene has become one of those clips over the years – if not quite rivalling Del Boy falling through the bar, then definitely in the ballpark. You do get to the point where at least as many people remember the clip from documentaries and anecdotes as they do from the actual show. With that in mind, it’s worth noting at least one newspaper reviewer enjoyed the joke so much on first transmission, that they quoted it in their column the very next day. Peter Fiddick, in The Guardian : “The jokes are there though both verbal and visual. (“I want you to fill that glass” says the prison doctor to Barker. “What – from here?” – and the camera cuts away from them precisely to emphasise the distance.)”3 So far, so standard. But the big question is: can we trace the joke back even further? * * * Before we get onto that, it’s worth pointing out where the gag doesn’t appear. I’ve repeatedly seen it stated that the joke also appeared in Clement and La Frenais’ Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? An obvious candidate is “One for the Road”, broadcast a few months earlier than the opening episode of Porridge , on the 22nd January 1974. As the plot involves Bob getting arrested for drink driving and being asked to give a urine sample, the joke would slot in nicely. There’s just one problem: it’s not there. Nor does it appear in any episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? , or indeed The Likely Lads itself.4 To be fair, it’s perhaps easy to see where the idea comes from. For a start, it easily sounds like a gag which could have come from those two shows. Or maybe there’s an even more obvious source of confusion. Because the gag does appear in a Man About the House episode written by Brian Cooke, also called “One for the Road”, broadcast on the 13th March 1975. A date which, I would point out, is six months after the episode of Porridge in question. POLICEMAN: Now, I shall need a sample from you. Could you fill this? ROBIN: Well not from here, no. The fact that Barker was funnier than Connery seemed so obvious that I didn’t even bother saying it. I will say that I think Richard O’Sullivan sells the line better than Connery as well, and in a totally different way to Barker.5 So, can we at least find something else from 1974, the same year the gag appeared in Porridge ? Yes indeed. Step forward Tom O’Connor, who used the gag in his album Alright Mouth : “My dad had just come back from the war, because he’d done well in the war my dad, you know – and he fought as well6 – he did fight for this country, my dad. Fought. I remember the night they took him away – he fought them! They got him in the recruiting office, the nurse come out, you know, the nurse, ‘Take all your clothes off, they want to look at your eyes’. […] She said ‘Right, we want a sample.’ He said ‘What of?’ She said ‘You know, we want you to… thingy.’ He said ‘Thingy what?’ She said ‘You know them jars up there, we want you to wee in one of them.’ He said ‘From here?’ He said ‘I thought I was joining the army, not the fire brigade!'” Frustratingly, I can find neither an exact release date for the album, nor when it was recorded. All I know is that it came out some time in 1974. Not that it necessarily matters. Because we can find a real, genuine antecedent with this gag – and one which definitely aired before Porridge . * * * In 1972-73, Milligan did four seasonal specials for BBC2, starting with Milligan in Autumn , and going right through to Winter , Spring , and Summer . That final edition, broadcast on the 27th August 1973, has a rather familiar joke, as mentioned by Clive James in his Observer TV column a few days later: “Hidden away on BBC2, Milligan in Summer took another of his quarterly excursions beyond the frontiers of comic knowledge. ‘I want you to pass a specimen into that bottle over there.’ ‘What, from here?’ When Spike’s on focus, there are no other runners.” Sadly, Milligan in Summer has never had a commercial release, but it is nefariously available online: DOCTOR: Now, I want you to pass a specimen into that bottle over there. LEN: What, from here? Well done to Clive James for quoting it pretty much spot-on. So, are we done? Not quite. We can actually step back one stage further – and into a very unexpected area. Step forward… Thames sitcom Love Thy Neighbour . Specifically, the fourth episode of the first series, written by Vince Powell and Harry Driver, broadcast on the 4th May 1972.7 You can watch the following clip safe in the knowledge it contains no unpleasantness, beyond conjuring up the image of a jet of urine flying through the air. JOAN: Let’s face it Barbie, men don’t know what hard work is. They have it too easy. BARBIE: Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Joan. Bill reckons they’re worked to death at the factory. They hardly have a minute to themselves. Cut to the factory canteen. The gang are not being worked to death.8 ARTHUR: So the doctor said to me: “You see that jar on the shelf?” I said “Yes.” He said “I want you to fill it.” I said “What, from here?” The above was broadcast over two years before the gag appeared in Porridge . And in the context of the episode, you already get the sense that this was a well-known joke, the kind of thing which gets passed around workplaces across the country for real, rather than being a load-bearing gag for the show. * * * Sadly, and slightly infuriatingly, here is where the trail runs cold. I can find no older examples of the gag anywhere, either in print, on radio, or on television. But at this point, I want to come back to the Tom O’Connor example, where the gag is specifically set in wartime. That album captures his club act at the time – acts which are well-known haunting places for old jokes. It really feels like we’re looking at a traditional gag stretching back decades – an old Forces joke about soldiers going in for a medical, say. A gag which was told verbally, and was originally considered too off-colour for broadcast… but by the 70s, things started to relax, and the joke was able to make its way into a more public, mainstream context. There are other hints that this may be the case. In Tom Hickman’s book The Call-Up (Headline, 2005), his history of National Service, we get the following anecdote: “‘Fill the specimen jar, please.’ At his medical in Acton the inventor Trevor Baylis, until then studying to be a soil engineer, could not resist the old reply: ‘What, from here?’ At least buckets were provided to take the surplus. ‘I’ll never forget the ping of the pee on the metal, all those lads, the sighs of relief…'” If we take the above at face value, that would mean the gag would be considered “old” in 1959. Or how about a cleaned-up version? This is from the Goon Show episode “African Incident”, broadcast on the 30th December 1957: MAJOR SPON: Field Marshal Eccles, have you any knowledge of trees? ECCLES: I was born in one. MAJOR SPON: Ah, good. Well, see those wooden ones on the opposite bank? ECCLES: Um, oh, yer, yer. MAJOR SPON: Do you think you could chop them down? ECCLES: Um, not from here. Another link to Milligan, of course. Still, we almost certainly won’t be able to trace the gag back to its actual source. It’s very likely to simply be a Trad. Arr., as the phrase goes. But it also feels like surely, we must be able to find an example of the proper, rude version earlier than we have now. Maybe not in a sitcom, maybe not even broadcast, but perhaps published in some form. That’s the challenge, everyone. An example earlier than May 1972. Over to you. None of this article is my original research; I just put it all together. With many thanks to Phil Norman for inspiring the initial discussion on this topic and much of the rest of this piece besides, Mike Scott for the Love Thy Neighbour information, Ian Potter for the Tom O’Connor reference, and John Williams for further thoughts, especially regarding the suspected origin being Forces humour. Thanks also to Tanya Jones for her usual editorial oversight. So, when I started this piece, I did highly suspect that we would be more likely to find earlier references in published work, rather than broadcast. But I hadn’t considered that one place to look would be… medical journals. So thanks to Paul Hayes, who did a bit of digging, and found the following reference in Volume 22 of the Indian Journal of Medical Sciences , from 1968:9 Long-range During the examination of a patient [sic] took him to the laboratory and, pointing to some bottles across the room on a shelf, told him I wanted him to fill one with urine. He hesitated a moment, then asked “From here, Doctor?” […] (Modern Medicine, January 3 1966)