Dawn French reveals how recreating Vicar of Dibley puddle stunt 'left her in pain for years'

11 September 2023, 09:18 | Updated: 11 September 2023, 09:25

Dawn French has described how performing a recreation of her famous slapstick puddle fall from the Vicar of Dibley left her suffering debilitating pain for over a decade.

In arguably her most famous on-screen gag, Dawn, playing Vicar Geraldine Granger, jumps enthusiastically into a puddle that turns out to be chest deep.

She was asked by producers to recreate the bit for an appearance on Paul O’Grady’s chat show in 2009.

But she said the idea was ‘catastrophically misguided,' telling the audience at her one-woman show last week “they constructed a 10ft-high hill out of scaffolding covered in AstroTurf. The idea was that there was a long enough drop for me to disappear into.

“Then some bright spark had the idea of having a shallow silicon membrane containing two inches of water on top of that, as I jumped through, the water would splash up and look like a deep puddle," The Daily Mail reports.

“But what was I falling onto? The answer is absolutely nothing. Except for 10ft below there were two very thin crash mats in a film studio with a flat concrete floor. Any fool would know this was a disaster in the making. Any fool but me.

She said that she “landed very heavily” and heard “the worst twanging noise you could ever imagine.”

After doing the stunt she drove five hours home to Cornwall - and ended up having to walk with a cane for years.

She said she lived with growing knee pain for years and in 2017 saw a surgeon who told her she would need a knee replacement in the future.