Wilf: Memories of Molly

Jul 18 2009 by Clive Bond, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

I WAS sad to hear Mollie Sugden had died.

I can’t say I liked Are You Being Served? in which she played Mrs Slocombe with the never-ending running gag about her pussy. She was my fellow contestant on one episode of Patently Obvious where we competed against another team to guess what strange objects and inventions were.

Spike Milligan, Lulu, Rula Lenska and Paul Daniels were some of the other contestants on the radio show.

I particularly remember when Rula Lenska was my guest she turned to me and whispered: “I’m leaking.” I thought she’d peed herself. I glanced down. Rula saw and quietly said: “No, I’m leaking milk”. She’d just had a baby.

I looked at the appropriate area of her dress and said: “It’s not showing through”.

She said: “I’m worried it will soak the radio mic and shock me”.

The audience was in and the show was ready to roll. Without saying a thing to the floor manager I took her hand and led her out of the studio. She sorted it out and we went back in, everyone wondering what was going on.

I enjoyed working with Molly. She was from Keighley so we were two northerners together against the southerners. The other team was led by Deborah Swallow, an anthropologist from Oxford University. Each week I had to produce an object for her to guess and they had to do the same for me. The thing was Deborah brought anthropological stuff, native pieces probably from the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford.

We were allowed guesses. Anything native can only be one of a few things – a musical instrument, a trap, tattooing device, weapon or a form of transport.

So all I had to do was look at it and go through the list.

We won every week. When Molly was on we were presented with a curious circle of straw with wood spikes stuck through it, rather like a ship’s steering wheel. I ran through my list and the only thing I could think of was a trap. So I said, “ Is it a trap?” Julian Pettifer the chairman was wise to my system. He didn’t say if I was correct.

He told me to hand this straw circle with the spiked wood to Molly.

He then asked Molly what sort of a trap it was. I leaned over and whispered: “Say it’s a giraffe trap.”

Thinking the thing was so small and a giraffe so big, it’d at least get a laugh.

Molly said in her inimitable voice, “Is it a giraffe trap?” It got a laugh. And then another when Pettifer said: ”Yes It’s a giraffe trap.”

I later found out how the giraffe trap worked. They dug a small hole by a tree where the giraffes foraged. The circle of straw was tied with a rope to the tree and put over the hole When the animal put its foot through the trap, the wooden spikes gripped the leg.

The Omnipom of Marsh suffered a similar experience when she stuck her finger in a wet wipe tub and the plastic spikes gripped her finger tightly. It was very painful. The tub had to be cut away.