‘First, it’s a great pleasure to welcome that lovely actress, who you all know as Lizzie Parsons from that very funny series, Who’s Your Friend? — Fiona Wakeford!’
The actress simpered prettily in response to the applause.
‘Tell me, Fiona,’ asked Barrett, ‘are you really as dumb as you appear?’
‘Well, no,’ she replied, bewildered. ‘I can talk.’
The audience screamed at this Wildean riposte.
‘Next we have a gentleman who really packs a punch — Nick Jeffries!’
The audience saluted their faded Great White Hope.
‘’Ere!’ The boxer made a fist. ‘I don’t like your attitude.’
The audience hailed another shaft of wit.
‘Actually, Barrett,’ Nick went on as the noise subsided, ‘that reminds me of a joke about a man with a dog. This bloke — ’
‘I make the jokes around here,’ said the host with a smile on his lips and a deterrent steeliness in his eyes. ‘Next, we have a lady who’s brought happiness to millions — and without taking her clothes off, which has to be a novelty — the country’s favourite Agony Aunt — Joanie Bruton!’
The audience roared as she smiled in a brisk, no-nonsense manner.
‘Tell me, Joanie — or may I call you Auntie? — could you help me with a little personal problem that I have?’
‘Perhaps, Barrett.’
‘Well, my trouble is that I keep thinking I’m a pair of curtains. What do you think I should do about it?’
‘Pull yourself together, love.’ Joanie completed the old joke with commendable promptness and the audience howled their appreciation for this devastating sally.
‘Finally, we have a gentleman who never seems to be off your television screen these days, investigating frauds, righting wrongs, standing up for the little man. . you may know him as Joe Soap — Bob Garston!’
The last panellist gave his gritty, proletarian smile as the audience clapped.
‘Tell me, Bob, have you ever come across a major fraud that involved hats?’
‘No, you’re the first one, Barrett.’
The audience bayed with delight, honoured to be participants in this rare feast of wit. ‘Eat your heart out, Congreve,’ they seemed to say.
Barrett Doran’s smile stayed in place, but the reaction of his eyes to Bob Garston’s crack was less genial. ‘And now, as well as this splendid line-up of celebrities, we also have four brave — or should I say foolish? — members of the public who have agreed to be with us tonight to play If The Cap Fits!’
On this cue, one of the high-pitched jingles was played and, under cover of the music, the four contestants, propelled by the invisible Chita, moved awkwardly on to the set. Barrett Doran, scooping up a little pile of printed cards from his lectern, moved across to greet them effusively.
‘Now first we have a very charming lady who’s come all the way from Billericay. Patricia Osborne is her name, but she’s known to her friends as Trish.’ He beamed the full force of his charm straight at her, and putting on a babyish voice, asked, ‘Can I be one of your friends and call you Trish?’
‘Of course, Barrett.’
‘Terrific. Now I gather, Trish, that you’re not the world’s greatest decorator. .’
‘Not really, Barrett, no.’
‘In fact. .’ He consulted the card, on which the researchers had summarised the answers to the ‘any amusing incidents that may have happened in your life’ part of their questionnaire. ‘. . I gather you once papered your bedroom with vinyl wallpaper and woke up next morning to find it had all fallen off the walls on top of your bed!’
‘That’s right, Barrett,’ Trish agreed over the audience’s hoots of delight.
‘And I bet your husband said, ‘Trish, that’s the vinyl straw!’
‘No, he didn’t actually.’ But Trish Osborne’s response was lost in the audience’s acclamation of their favourite epigrammatist.
The other three contestants were introduced with comparable wit, and then the rules for the First Round were explained. The four contestants were paired with their celebrity helpers. (A last ditch attempt by Tim Dyer not to be landed with Fiona Wakeford was brutally thwarted.) Then, to the sound of another jingle, the hamburger chef, the surgeon, the stockbroker and the actor moved into their pre-arranged positions. The hamburger chef was wearing the Tudor bonnet, the surgeon the bowler, the stockbroker the chef’s hat, and the actor the green hygienic cap. The camera moved slowly from one to the other, while the participants and audience tried to estimate which face went with which profession.
In turn, each contestant and celebrity team rearranged the hats to their satisfaction. Graphics superimposed over the picture recorded their guesses. It was all very riotous. Two out of the four contestants unhesitatingly identified Charles Paris as the hamburger chef.
To much oohing and aahing, Barrett Doran then gave the correct solutions. Contestants and celebrities responded with extravagant hand-over-face reactions to their errors. The four ‘professions’ smiled fixedly as their true identities were revealed. The stockbroker was asked if she really was a stockbroker, the hamburger chef was asked to go easy on the onions, and the surgeon was asked if the first cut really was the deepest. The actor wasn’t asked anything. The four were then fulsomely thanked for their participation and, as soon as the camera was off them, hustled unceremoniously off the set by a Floor Manager. At least one of them went straight to the bar and spent the rest of the evening there, risking topping up the earlier gins with Bell’s whisky.
Which meant that Charles Paris didn’t see the rest of that evening’s rather unusual recording.
Points and money prizes were then awarded to the contestants. They got?50 for each correct hat. Two had scored a maximum of?200. One of these was Tim Dyer, who congratulated himself on his tactic of having ignored everything Fiona Wakeford said. The other was Trish Osborne. A third contestant scored?100. The fourth, who had managed to get them all wrong, was thanked by Barrett Doran for being a really good sport and asked if she had had a good evening. She assured him it had been the best of her life, before she was consigned to the outer limbo off the set. But, the audience was told, she would not be going away empty-handed. No, she would take with her a special If The Cap Fits cap, hand-made in red and blue velvet with a silver tassel. A shot of this artefact appeared on the audience’s monitors and was greeted by the statutory ‘Ooh’.
The three survivors were then detached from their celebrity assistants for Round Two. The lovely Nikki and the lovely Linzi, still (for the most basic of audience-pulling reasons) dressed in bikinis, brought on four red-and-blue-striped hat-boxes which they placed on the long blue desk beside each panellist. Barrett Doran read out a list of five types of hat (one was a red herring), and asked the four celebrities in turn to read out a clue of mind-bending ambiguity about the contents of their box. The contestants then had to hazard guesses as to which box contained which hat. The celebrities responded to these guesses with much elaborate bluffing, double-bluffing, tactical drinking from their water-glasses and heavy gesturing. Again, graphics recorded the contestants’ final decisions and, at the end, Barrett Doran made his startling revelation of the truth. It was all very riotous.
Once again,?50 depended on each hat. With the red herring, that meant a possible total of?250, which Tim Dyer, much to his satisfaction, achieved. This win also earned him the portable video-recorder and camera. Trish Osborne had got two hats the wrong way round, so only won another?150. But she was still in contention. The third contestant, having identified only one hat correctly, departed from the show with?150 in winnings from his two rounds and, of course, with his If The Cap Fits cap.