The Error World by Simon Garfield

Author:Simon Garfield [Garfield, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Missing T

A stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, one of my favourite childhood films, opened at the London Palladium on 19 March 2002, my forty-second birthday, and to mark the occasion I took a train to Dundee to visit my first Technicolor sweetheart. Heather Ripley, who played Jemima Potts, was seven when the film opened in December 1968, and I was eight, and I saw no reason why she wasn't the girl for me. Thirty-five years later I went to find out if this was still true.

She was now forty-one. She opened the door of her terraced house near where she grew up in Broughty Ferry, on the outskirts of Dundee, overlooking the Tay. 'Hello Simon,' she said. 'I do hope you're not going to write horrible things about me.' She spoke with a strong Scottish accent but timid voice. In the front room there were many dramatic examples of what she called drift art, assemblages of wood and other debris that had come ashore to be made into mirrors and picture frames. This was one of her many interests, along with peace campaigning, website design and getting back to acting.

She told me she was an only child in a fairly affluent family. Her father and grandfather ran an ophthalmic optician's business in Dundee, and they spent summers in France and winters skiing. Her mother got a job as a wardrobe mistress at Dundee Rep, and Heather used to go after school to watch the rehearsals. 'I remember Macbeth in particular,' she said. 'My father made the head for the ending and stuck it on a pole at the bottom of my bed.'

She enjoyed hanging round the theatre, and one day fate intervened. The play Roar Like a Dove was one week from its opening when the young girl in the cast fell ill, and Heather took her place. The thing she remembers best was a scene in which she was given a glass of Coke, not something she was allowed at home. A talent scout saw one performance and sent a note to casting agents with the news that she was a confident performer who might be suitable for other things, one of which turned out to be a film currently casting in London.

Based on the book by Ian Fleming, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a junior James Bond with songs. The star car had all the gadgets: wings, inflatable rafts, rotating blades. There was a mad inventor, some German spies, prim love interest with a woman called Truly Scrumptious, and a grandpa who once shot an elephant in his pyjamas. It also had the most terrifying of nightmares, a Nazified childcatcher with a leery smile and the most crooked finger in movie history.

As a comic counterbalance, Dick Van Dyke reprised his famous English accent four years after Mary Poppins, and there were a few great set pieces—in a sweet factory (marauding dogs, James Robertson Justice) and a fairground (Arthur Mullard, Barbara Windsor). It also had two apple-cheeked children, Jemima and Jeremy Potts, who sang like doves and had perfect manners.

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