Where's That Fire?

Will Hay - Captain Viking
Moore Marriott - Jeremiah Harbottle
Graham Moffatt - Albert Brown
Eric Clavering - Hank Sullivan
Hugh McDermott - Jim Baker
Charles Hawtrey - Woodley
Peter Gawthorne - Fire Chief
David O'Toole - Postman

Long regarded as a 'lost' film, and rescued from oblivion by BBC television in 1975, this is an undeservedly forgotten and underrated comedy. Bishop Wallop fire station makes almost as memorable a field of operations for Will Hay (here playing Benjamin Viking) as Buggleskelly, and the campaign of non-co-operation (or disastrous co-operation) waged by Albert and Harbottle against 'the guv'nor' is as massive and malevolent as in Oh, Mr Porter! (Harbottle in fact starts a fire himself to get even with his chief, who he thinks has done him down financially.)

More elaborately staged than most of the team's efforts, Where's That Fire? has a brilliant and sustained sequence in which the trio try to put up their new firemen's pole - causing a traffic jam, wrecking a china shop, terrorising an invalid and finally demolishing his house in scenes of escalating public frenzy. Charles Hawtrey has one of his most amusing cameos as a schoolboy 'swot' who keeps on explaining how to get the pole up by pure geometry, and the pandemonium in the bedroom as the trio, egged on by a crowd of fascinated spectators, try to get the pole through the unfortunate patient's skylight while his bed is jerked about and his plaster-swathed leg callously manhandled, his doctor meanwhile blandly prescribing peace and quiet as he takes his last grape.

But the film offers plenty of other delights, notably the scenes at the fire station where Viking experiments with his formula to revolutionise fire-fighting (stuffing a sock in the alarm bell to make sure he isn't disturbed), and tries out his 'horse walloper', a weird contraption designed to get Percy, the station horse, into the shafts of the ancient engine in record time; the confrontations with the town council who sack the incompetent trio ('What do you expect for a ha'penny rate but two-a-penny firemen? sniffs Viking), but hastily re-engage them when the mayor's own house catches fire, and the visit to London to see how a real fire station works. The only miscalculations are a curious little scene in which Harbottle plays for pathos, quite against the grain of the character, and a rather over-extended finale at the Tower of London where the trio foil a gang of jewel thieves with a sea of foam.