Leonard here. The following column is written by my colleague Mark Searby highlighting British cinema past and present. Please enjoy A Bit of Crumpet.
The Odd Job
Probably not very high, or even known, for Monty Python fans is this film starring, and co-written by, Graham Chapman. Coming shortly before Life of Brian, Chapman teamed up playwright Bernard McKenna to adapt his own stage play for the big screen. Directed by Peter Medak, who a few years earlier had worked with comedian Peter Sellers on the slapstick flop Ghost in the Noonday Sun. So, when it came to handling outrageous comedians, it seemed like Medak was the man for the job, Odd Job that is.
Because this is something of a curio piece for Python fans (I include myself in that group) as it plays at times like an elongated Python sketch. Then at other times like a safe, inoffensive TV comedy. It’s a film that never finds what ground it wants to play in. I should mention what the story is: Happily married Arthur Harris becomes suicidal when his wife suddenly leaves him. Unable to kill himself, he hires a handyman to do the job instead. But when Arthur’s wife comes back to him, he can’t contact the killer, who is intent on finishing the job, so has to be wary of every step he takes inside and outside of his apartment.
Bumbling assassin. Paranoid central character. It’s all very similar to the little sketches in the Pink Panther movies where Cato tries to kill Inspector Clouseau. In fact, it’s so close to those little scenes that I do wonder if Peter Sellers and Burt Kwouk had played the roles of Harris and the handyman in this film then it would have been a better attempt at slapstick comedy. Chapman’s skittish-ness is entertaining, but that lacks a real fear to the character. This is someone who is afraid for his life yet still goes out to the finest restaurants. He is afraid, but that fear soon turns to idiocy and such the film becomes a bit of an unfunny farce as Chapman overeggs the comedy. And in a film where he isn’t surrounded by other comedians of his style then it becomes painful to watch him try and hold an entire film together that a) does know what angle to take the comedy in and b) how the lead character should be played. By the finale of the film Chapman is just shouting and screaming lines. It’s hard to watch Chapman fall quite so badly as he does here when it comes to his comedy.
On the flip of that, the handyman-turned-assassin is played by beloved British TV actor David Jason. Just a year after wow-ing British TV audiences in the hit show Open All Hours and three years before becoming a national treasure thanks to his legendary performances as Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, Jason gets the bumbling, stumbling-ness of the assassin perfect. This idiotic character can’t even hold a gun correctly and he’s got a dress sense that screams “I HAVE NO IDEA” – shirt and tie coupled with a long brown leather coat topped off with a woolly hat and aviator goggles. How is he? Where did he come from? Nobody knows, yet that’s what makes this character so likeable, even though he is a hired killer, is that he has no background and yet also has no clue in the here & now. He sets traps that either don’t go off or go off at the wrong time. He’s manic and relentless, but also stupid and silly. It’s a bit of a shame we don’t see more of him. But then that would probably kill the entertainment value we get from the brief screentime.
As 1970s British comedies go, The Odd Job is an oddity. Chapman really struggles in the role (He was never a leading man in my opinion, and he needed other brilliant comedians to bounce off of). Yet, David Jason impresses greatly in a role that was meant to be played by The Who’s drummer Keith Moon (I can’t imagine Moon getting anywhere close to the performance that Jason gives). The wackiness of the assassin is what makes the film. This is a curio piece for fans of 70s British comedy.
THE ODD JOB is released by Severin Films on 25 August 2025.
N.B. David Jason had already played this exact character – the assassin – several years earlier in comedian Ronnie Barker’s TV show Six Dates With Barker. This 1971 black & white version ran for only 27 minutes.
