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IT’S CHOCKS AWAY FOR CHITTY!
CAN DAVID WALL IA MS REALLY GET THE FAMOUS CAR AIRBORNE? TUNE INTO HIS NEWS HOW TO FIND OUT ...
As a child, David Walliams’s favourite movie was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the 1968 musical fantasy about a flying car, its eccentric inventor Caractacus Potts and the brilliantly scary Child Catcher. But the thing that really captured David’s imagination was when Chitty took to the air. ‘Those scenes were absolutely magical,’ recalls BGT judge David, ‘I really thought that car was flying.’
In reality, Chitty never got off the ground. Weighing a whopping two tons, the specially built vehicle was used for road scenes while a replica was employed for aerial shots at Pinewood Studios. Dick Van Dyke, who played Caractacus, and his co-stars simply had to pretend they were racing down the sides of cliffs or soaring over oceans. But what if there were a way the famous old motor could actually become airborne? David, and fans across the world, would be over the moon.
‘A dream come true,’ he beams at the start of his Channel 4 documentary Chitty Flies Again With David Walliams. ‘But maybe impossible? Cars don’t look anything like planes and planes don’t look anything like cars, and that’s probably no accident.’
However, David pulls out all the stops in his efforts, with the help of a man who could give Caractacus a run for his money. Aircraft engineer Tony Hoskins once built a glider from bits of scrap and bedsheets and flew it off the roof of Colditz Castle in Germany to replicate an Allied escape plan in World War II.
When we first meet him he’s foraging in a Norwegian forest looking for bits of a Spitfire that crashed during the war, which he plans to rebuild. So you might imagine making a replica Chitty
The car in the 1968 film, with Dick Van Dyke at the wheel Chitty Bang Bang and getting it off the ground is straightforward...
But the documentary is largely a tale of spectacular setbacks and increasing levels of frustration. ‘I’m a little underwhelmed, it feels like a dustbin on wheels that drives like a golf buggy,’ David says when Tony first invites him to take his Chitty for a spin.
As the weeks pass and Chitty remains stuck on terra firma, David’s frustration grows. Tony sends him a video of the chassis being lifted off the ground by remote control, but it crashes to the floor seconds later. ‘I’m not impressed,’ says David, seeming genuinely angry. ‘You’ve neither built something that looks like Chitty, nor something that’s got off the ground and stayed up.’
His frustration is partly because he wants to spring a surprise on some schoolchildren. At the start of the show he visits a
London primary school that’s planning a production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with help from dancer Wayne Sleep, who played the Child Catcher in the West End. David wants to give the cast a treat – an airborne Chitty. ‘At the moment, the cardboard Chitty they’re using in the play is giving ours a run for its money,’ says David.
Chitty Flies Again not only shows British engineering at its most endearingly eccentric, but pays homage to a much-loved family film. David meets a Chitty superfan who watches the movie weekly and has a tattoo tribute. He learns about the real motor car that was the starting point for the film, and reveals how the original idea came from Bond author Ian Fleming’s book Chitty Chitty
Bang Bang: The Magical Car. He was recovering from a heart attack when he wrote it in 1961 for his eight-year-old son Caspar.
The documentary also claims Roald Dahl changed large parts of Fleming’s story when he wrote the film, including adding the Child Catcher. These additions got the movie off the ground – you’ll have to tune in to see if Tony can do the same for the car.
Tim Oglethorpe Chitty Flies Again With David Walliams, New Year’s Day, 7.30pm, Channel 4.