Producer regrets eerie Harris sketch

The writer and producer of a 1980 BBC comedy sketch that showed young children rounded up and loaded onto a truck bound for a Rolf Harris TV show said it makes his "blood run cold" to think about it.

The video clip which features comedians Rowan Atkinson and Mel Smith surfaced on YouTube and social media comes from the BBC comedy show Not the Nine O'Clock News and was written and co-produced by John Lloyd.

The sketch ran through the ending credits and shows Atkinson and Smith rounding up young children and loading them into a truck which appears to be going to Harris' hit children's show Rolf on Saturday OK?

The Australian entertainer was last week sentenced to five years and nine months jail after several decades of abusing girls, some as young as seven.

Lloyd, who has also worked on Blackadder and QI, told the UK's Independent it was a "pathetically mild" joke about how the audience had to be gathered for the audience of a "terrible Saturday show".

But in the wake of Harris' conviction the video has taken a more sinister tone.

"It is extraordinary how spooky it is, it's almost prophetic," Lloyd said.

"It makes the blood run cold to watch it now thinking about what he had done."

When the video surfaced it was purported to be "banned", but the producer denied that anyone on the writing team had any knowledge of Harris' abusive activities.

"If there had been any rumours at all about Harris at that higher level they would have stopped [the sketch] straight away," he said.

Source: The Independent
Author: Nicholas McCallum, Approving editor: Nick Pearson