Dom Joly: The Ministry of Defence thought I was a foreign spy

Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival yesterday evening Joly explained how a sketch, which began with him playing a spy who approached members of the public, went “badly wrong”.

“I did a character in Trigger Happy who was a spy, and I really liked that,” he said. “I thought it’d be funny just to dress up as an almost Inspector Gadget spy. Trilby hat, terrible mac, bag.

“I’d try to find things that were quite filmic – so the round pond in Hyde Park looked a little bit like a place where spies would meet. So someone was feeding the swans, I’d sidle up to them and go ‘Ze cows fly backwards in my house’. And they’d be like ‘what?””

Another version of the spy sketch

So far, so harmless – then the crew started looking for new locations to film, including a few pleasant-looking gardens near London’s Embankment. What could possibly go wrong?

“I walked round,” Joly continued, “and there’s this man having his lunch and he’s in a suit, and I’m dressed as a spy. And I sit down, and I look at him, and he looks at me and then goes back to his sandwich. And I slide the briefcase across to him, and he looks at it like that – and then I go ‘you have some papers for me?’

“He got up, pegged it out. I thought bloody hell!”

Unperturbed, Joly attempted to start again with another victim – only to get a nasty surprise.

“Another guy sits on the bench, and I’m literally just going in to start and out of nowhere I just get held by two people, banged on the floor, handcuffed – I don’t know what’s going on,” Joly told the crowd.

“Turns out, this garden was at the back of the Ministry of Defence – people in that garden worked in the Ministry of Defence, and were on their lunch break. So they all thought they were being turned.”

Unlike James Bond, clearly real-life spies don't have a sense of humour. The new Trigger Happy TV will have a long way to go before it can top that prank…