Over the years, I’ve written plenty about comedy writers reusing jokes. Today’s topic is one of the most famous and most-quoted examples of the lot.
So let’s turn to ersatz Bond film Never Say Never Again, which premiered in the US on the 6th October 1983. Oh dear, James Bond isn’t having much fun.
NURSE: Mr. Bond? I need a urine sample. If you could fill this beaker for me?
BOND: From here?
The tale surrounding this is well-known by now. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais did some emergency rewrite work on Never Say Never Again, coming in three weeks after the film had started shooting, and staying with the production for three months.1 Of course, they nicked the above joke from their own Porridge, and both writers have openly and repeatedly discussed this.
For instance, in the Omnibus edition “Whatever Happened To Clement & La Frenais?”, broadcast on the 20th July 1997:
DICK CLEMENT: We’re always tempted to recycle jokes, We did use one… it’s not a similar joke, it’s the same joke, in Never Say Never Again as in Porridge. If you see them back-to-back, it’s quite amusing.
IAN LA FRENAIS: We call it homage. We don’t call it recycling. (laughs) But it doesn’t happen very often.
The joke was actually taken from the very first episode of Porridge2, “New Faces, Old Hands”, which first aired on 5th September 1974:
DOCTOR: You see those flasks over there? I want you to fill one for me.
FLETCH: What, from ‘ere?
For me, it’s the lightning-fast reaction from Barker which really sells it. He knew when you shouldn’t have time to anticipate the gag.
Obviously, this scene has become one of those clips over the years – if not quite rivalling Del Boy falling through the bar, then definitely in the ballpark. You do get to the point where at least as many people remember the clip from documentaries and anecdotes as they do from the actual show.
With that in mind, it’s worth noting at least one newspaper reviewer enjoyed the joke so much on first transmission, that they quoted it in their column the very next day. Peter Fiddick, in The Guardian:
“The jokes are there though both verbal and visual. (“I want you to fill that glass” says the prison doctor to Barker. “What – from here?” – and the camera cuts away from them precisely to emphasise the distance.)”3
So far, so standard. But the big question is: can we trace the joke back even further?
* * *
Before we get onto that, it’s worth pointing out where the gag doesn’t appear. I’ve repeatedly seen it stated that the joke also appeared in Clement and La Frenais’ Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? An obvious candidate is “One for the Road”, broadcast a few months earlier than the opening episode of Porridge, on the 22nd January 1974. As the plot involves Bob getting arrested for drink driving and being asked to give a urine sample, the joke would slot in nicely.
There’s just one problem: it’s not there. Nor does it appear in any episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, or indeed The Likely Lads itself.4 To be fair, it’s perhaps easy to see where the idea comes from. For a start, it easily sounds like a gag which could have come from those two shows.
Or maybe there’s an even more obvious source of confusion. Because the gag does appear in a Man About the House episode written by Brian Cooke, also called “One for the Road”, broadcast on the 13th March 1975. A date which, I would point out, is six months after the episode of Porridge in question.
POLICEMAN: Now, I shall need a sample from you. Could you fill this?
ROBIN: Well not from here, no.
The fact that Barker was funnier than Connery seemed so obvious that I didn’t even bother saying it. I will say that I think Richard O’Sullivan sells the line better than Connery as well, and in a totally different way to Barker.5
So, can we at least find something else from 1974, the same year the gag appeared in Porridge? Yes indeed. Step forward Tom O’Connor, who used the gag in his album Alright Mouth:
“My dad had just come back from the war, because he’d done well in the war my dad, you know – and he fought as well6 – he did fight for this country, my dad. Fought. I remember the night they took him away – he fought them! They got him in the recruiting office, the nurse come out, you know, the nurse, ‘Take all your clothes off, they want to look at your eyes’. […]
She said ‘Right, we want a sample.’ He said ‘What of?’ She said ‘You know, we want you to… thingy.’ He said ‘Thingy what?’ She said ‘You know them jars up there, we want you to wee in one of them.’ He said ‘From here?’ He said ‘I thought I was joining the army, not the fire brigade!'”
Frustratingly, I can find neither an exact release date for the album, nor when it was recorded. All I know is that it came out some time in 1974. Not that it necessarily matters. Because we can find a real, genuine antecedent with this gag – and one which definitely aired before Porridge.
* * *
In 1972-73, Milligan did four seasonal specials for BBC2, starting with Milligan in Autumn, and going right through to Winter, Spring, and Summer. That final edition, broadcast on the 27th August 1973, has a rather familiar joke, as mentioned by Clive James in his Observer TV column a few days later:
“Hidden away on BBC2, Milligan in Summer took another of his quarterly excursions beyond the frontiers of comic knowledge. ‘I want you to pass a specimen into that bottle over there.’ ‘What, from here?’ When Spike’s on focus, there are no other runners.”
Sadly, Milligan in Summer has never had a commercial release, but it is nefariously available online:
DOCTOR: Now, I want you to pass a specimen into that bottle over there.
LEN: What, from here?
Well done to Clive James for quoting it pretty much spot-on.
So, are we done? Not quite. We can actually step back one stage further – and into a very unexpected area. Step forward… Thames sitcom Love Thy Neighbour. Specifically, the fourth episode of the first series, written by Vince Powell and Harry Driver, broadcast on the 4th May 1972.7
You can watch the following clip safe in the knowledge it contains no unpleasantness, beyond conjuring up the image of a jet of urine flying through the air.
JOAN: Let’s face it Barbie, men don’t know what hard work is. They have it too easy.
BARBIE: Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Joan. Bill reckons they’re worked to death at the factory. They hardly have a minute to themselves.Cut to the factory canteen. The gang are not being worked to death.8
ARTHUR: So the doctor said to me: “You see that jar on the shelf?” I said “Yes.” He said “I want you to fill it.” I said “What, from here?”
The above was broadcast over two years before the gag appeared in Porridge. And in the context of the episode, you already get the sense that this was a well-known joke, the kind of thing which gets passed around workplaces across the country for real, rather than being a load-bearing gag for the show.
* * *
Sadly, and slightly infuriatingly, here is where the trail runs cold. I can find no older examples of the gag anywhere, either in print, on radio, or on television.
But at this point, I want to come back to the Tom O’Connor example, where the gag is specifically set in wartime. That album captures his club act at the time – acts which are well-known haunting places for old jokes. It really feels like we’re looking at a traditional gag stretching back decades – an old Forces joke about soldiers going in for a medical, say. A gag which was told verbally, and was originally considered too off-colour for broadcast… but by the 70s, things started to relax, and the joke was able to make its way into a more public, mainstream context.
There are other hints that this may be the case. In Tom Hickman’s book The Call-Up (Headline, 2005), his history of National Service, we get the following anecdote:
“‘Fill the specimen jar, please.’ At his medical in Acton the inventor Trevor Baylis, until then studying to be a soil engineer, could not resist the old reply: ‘What, from here?’ At least buckets were provided to take the surplus. ‘I’ll never forget the ping of the pee on the metal, all those lads, the sighs of relief…'”
If we take the above at face value, that would mean the gag would be considered “old” in 1959.
Or how about a cleaned-up version? This is from the Goon Show episode “African Incident”, broadcast on the 30th December 1957:
MAJOR SPON: Field Marshal Eccles, have you any knowledge of trees?
ECCLES: I was born in one.
MAJOR SPON: Ah, good. Well, see those wooden ones on the opposite bank?
ECCLES: Um, oh, yer, yer.
MAJOR SPON: Do you think you could chop them down?
ECCLES: Um, not from here.
Another link to Milligan, of course.
Still, we almost certainly won’t be able to trace the gag back to its actual source. It’s very likely to simply be a Trad. Arr., as the phrase goes. But it also feels like surely, we must be able to find an example of the proper, rude version earlier than we have now. Maybe not in a sitcom, maybe not even broadcast, but perhaps published in some form.
That’s the challenge, everyone. An example earlier than May 1972. Over to you.
None of this article is my original research; I just put it all together. With many thanks to Phil Norman for inspiring the initial discussion on this topic and much of the rest of this piece besides, Mike Scott for the Love Thy Neighbour information, Ian Potter for the Tom O’Connor reference, and John Williams for further thoughts, especially regarding the suspected origin being Forces humour. Thanks also to Tanya Jones for her usual editorial oversight.
UPDATE (31/7/25): So, when I started this piece, I did highly suspect that we would be more likely to find earlier references in published work, rather than broadcast. But I hadn’t considered that one place to look would be… medical journals.
So thanks to Paul Hayes, who did a bit of digging, and found the following reference in Volume 22 of the Indian Journal of Medical Sciences, from 1968:9
Long-range
During the examination of a patient [sic] took him to the laboratory and, pointing to some bottles across the room on a shelf, told him I wanted him to fill one with urine. He hesitated a moment, then asked “From here, Doctor?” […] (Modern Medicine, January 3 1966)
I sadly can’t find a copy of Modern Medicine itself from the comfort of my living room, but it looks like January 1966 is now the one to beat.
More than Likely: A Memoir (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2019). ↩
Not including Seven of One‘s “Prisoner and Escort”, obviously. ↩
Not a perfect quotation, sure, but in 1974 without the aid of home video, let’s not be too picky. ↩
For the missing episodes of The Likely Lads, I listened to the audio recordings where they exist, and the radio shows for those which don’t. ↩
Though we can’t just blame Connery for this, I think; the moment is also weirdly directed. Why is Connery facing away from the camera when he delivers the line? ↩
I love this joke. ↩
At least, according to contemporary newspaper listings, and the TV Times. The DVD release has it as the fifth episode of the run, and suggests this was the intended order. ↩
Incidentally, this episode of Love Thy Neighbour is by far the strongest of the first series of the show, with Powell and Driver seemingly far more at home writing second-wave feminism than any of the racial material. I’m particularly taken with Joan locking the kitchen so Eddie can’t cross her picket line. “The kitchen is my place of work, and while I’m on strike it’s out of bounds to scabs…” ↩
I’ve found it difficult to get a reliable link to the actual page, but just search the journal for “Long-range” to get the (partial) page itself. ↩
29 comments
DaveAA on 30 July 2025 @ 7am
“Why is Connery facing away from the camera when he delivers the line?”
The line could have been dubbed in afterwards perhaps.
James on 30 July 2025 @ 10am
Suprised those Millgans specials weren’t put on the DVDs of the Q series really!
Dave Espley on 30 July 2025 @ 12pm
Dunno if you’ve covered this previously, but interesting if not: I watched all of the 2 series of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads recently, as it was repeated on Talking Pictures TV and it’s astonishing how many fluffed lines were left in. Don’t know if it was budget or time constraints (surely not “can’t be arsed” reasons) but there were loads of serious fluffs that you feel certain would be reshot today. Probably averaged 2-3 per episode I’d say.
Bruce Dessau on 30 July 2025 @ 2pm
Nice and honest of Clement/La Frenais to admit to plagiarising their own work, even though it may have existed before they employed it.
There’s another phrase that cropped up in a serious film I watched the other night that I’m sure i’ve heard used by comedians in a slightly different context. In Don’t Look Now Donald Sutherland is sick in the toilet and when he comes out says to Julie Christie something like “I’d give it half and hour if I was you”. I’m sure someone like Kenneth Williams/Charles Hawtrey used that after doing a number two, maybe in a Carry On?
Any ideas?
Andy Taylor on 30 July 2025 @ 7pm
Regarding “I’d give it half an hour if I were you”, this is from a Kenneth Williams letter dated 8th July 1964:
“I took Sybil Burton to see Carry On Spying…at one point in the picture I have to come out of a cubicle lavatory and say to the man waiting to use it, “I should give it a minute if I were you…” Syb said “Oh Ken – that is really terrible!” and I said yes but we’ve all got to earn a living…”
James on 30 July 2025 @ 8pm
@Bruce. Writers recycling their own gags is far from unknown. Sid Green and Dick Hills recycled a surprising amount of old Morecambe & Wise material when “writing” for Cannon & Ball in the 80s. Most notably the wall sketch (where the two stars squabble over who gets to accompany the female guest star singing perched on a low wall, only to end up hurtling her off it by accident) and which was resurrected by Ant and Dec (with Jess Glynne) in homage a few years ago.
I’m fairly certain that the second best joke in all of Dad’s army was a trad.arr and can be surfaced elsewhere.
Mainwaring (pointing at unseen lewd graffiti): “Have you done this?”
Jones: “Do you mean recently, sir?”
Bruce Dessau on 30 July 2025 @ 10pm
incidentally, while on the subject of the origin of gags, I came across this “delayed signal” Benny Hill sketch from 1969. Remarkably similar to a 1980s Two Ronnies sketch…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMgRMBGZAk8
Andy Taylor on 30 July 2025 @ 11pm
The motorway gag at the end of the Benny Hill sketch evokes an earlier Goons reference to “going up the dual carriageway to Bushy Park”, which evaded the BBC top brass.
Julian K on 30 July 2025 @ 11pm
Given the Milligan connection, might it have appeared in the first volume of his war memoirs (1971’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall)?
Leigh Graham on 31 July 2025 @ 12am
Now do ‘Trigger’s Broom’!!
David Brunt on 31 July 2025 @ 11am
“James on 30 July 2025 @ 10am
Suprised those Millgans specials weren’t put on the DVDs of the Q series really!”
My understanding is that if Q had sold far better there would have been a second set covering all the remaining BBC material – “Muses With Milligan”, “Oh, In Colour”, “There’s a Lot of It About’, etc.
Rob Keeley on 31 July 2025 @ 3pm
Another fascinating article. All those writers using the same gag – were they taking the…? (No, they weren’t.)
Benny Hill did “answering the question before last” several times in different contexts before the Two Ronnies used it in their ‘Mastermind’ sketch.* Their singing Morris dancers sketch echoed an earlier sketch by Hill, too. And he did ‘making breakfast to music’ before Morecambe and Wise.
*Though I’ve also heard it told as a mishap that happened to Jack Warner during a live episode of ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ – getting questions and answers misaligned during a phone call. There could be another article there, John!
DocWallace on 31 July 2025 @ 5pm
@David Brunt. I did take it up with the distributor at the time, and apparently the BBC licence was restricted specifically to Q – even There’s a Lot of It About (Q10 in all but name) was off limits.
I’m sure they had their reasons, but it does feel like the BBC want to distance themselves from the Milligan shows as much as possible.
Nathan on 2 August 2025 @ 5am
It seems everybody did this joke, it pops up earlier than Porridge again in the 27 December 1973 Benny Hill Show at 1:43: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtdPLTcybXc
Joe Dredd on 2 August 2025 @ 11am
I’d love an in-depth study on the recycling in Vincent Powell’s work. There’s great slabs of it all over the place. The discussion about who Adam & Eve’s children married in “George & the Dragon” and “Bless this House”. The endless pile of dishes to wash in “George & the Dragon” and “Odd Man Out”. The revelation that a chief character was adopted, with the implication his parents were someone of lower social standing in “Mind Your Language” and “Never the Twain”, etc. Cap it all off with the Terry Nation script that was made for two different action shows, and then as a coda have the massive wall of stale bread scene in “The Economy Drive” episode of Hancock’s Half Hour followed by Sid’s 24 loaves of brown bread bricking up the front door in “Bless this House”. That last one’s not recycled, but it makes a lovely callback from one sitcom to another, with SId James as the linchpin.
Joe Dredd on 2 August 2025 @ 11am
I like the drink-driving charge episode of WHTTLL, especially the “Terry Collier ’74” line. The MATH episode you mention is also about drink-driving, with (if I remember rightly) Robin trying to mount a defence about his tyres not making a full rotation. There’s a repeated gag in it about whistling making you want to pee. It in turn reminds me of the court episode of “Keep It in the Family” in which Dudley Rush falls asleep in the jury stand, only to tear up a piece of evidence on waking, thinking it’s a suggestive note from the lady sitting next to him. Robert Gillespie connection, circle back to WHTTLL.
Martin Fenton on 2 August 2025 @ 5pm
Lugless Douglas might be the best example of Clement and La Frenais recycling their own joke.
John J. Hoare on 4 August 2025 @ 3pm
Nathan: That’s a great example, thanks!
It actually seems weirder and weirder that these 1973 examples aren’t much mentioned when talking about the Porridge incarnation of the gag. I know we’re all comedy nerds who are going to look closer at this than many people, but it’s still slightly surprising.
Andy Mabbett on 12 August 2025 @ 11am
“‘Why is Connery facing away from the camera when he delivers the line?’
The line could have been dubbed in afterwards perhaps?”
Or perhaps so it could more easily be overdubbed in territories where the joke would not be acceptable?
Jon on 13 August 2025 @ 12pm
The oldest example I could find via Google Books is from 1934, in a volume of a US military medical journal, The Military Surgeon:
https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Military_Surgeon/HQs-AQAAIAAJ?gbpv=0
If you search for “from here”, you’ll find the joke. Be aware, it’s unfortunately accompanied by some rather racist language!
Patrick Hadfield on 13 August 2025 @ 1pm
Given the medical element to the gag, Richard Gordon’s “Doctor” books might well contain the joke.
His kind of humour…
John J. Hoare on 13 August 2025 @ 5pm
Jon: Excellent work, a full 34 years earlier than the previously-known example!
I’m struggling to get Google Books to spit out the entire anecdote unfortunately – just the top part of Page 74, which cuts the second part off. I’ll update the article when I can get hold of a full copy.
Jon on 13 August 2025 @ 9pm
So, I did some more searching on Google Books and I found a variation of the joke, where the patient is asked to spit in a bottle instead of urinating it in. It pops up in a couple of places in the 1930s, the earliest being The American Legion Monthly Volume 18 in 1935:
https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_American_Legion_Monthly/ak8LAQAAMAAJ
It then turns up in a bunch of publications in the 1940s, before disappearing in the 50s. I would hazard a guess that this is also a cleaned-up version of the urine version of the joke (especially since they all postdate the 1934 source). I can’t find any reference to it earlier than the 30s. And that makes sense: according to Wikipedia, modern urine testing only became feasible after the the chemist Fritz Feigl invented chemical spot analysis in the 1920s.
Based on all that, I would sketch a possible origin story for the joke: Urine testing gets introduced in the military in the 1930s. As something of a novelty, it causes confusion among some patients. Whether or not the specific misunderstanding ever took place, it becomes an anecdote swapped between military doctors when joking about the ignorance of recruits. The cleaner version is invented around the same time as a way to tell it in more polite company. During WW2, the joke gets spread far and wide amongst conscripted soldiers, presumably in both forms, and after the war it emerges into the wider world and becomes a staple joke, with the urine version supplanting the spit version as attitudes become more relaxed.
However, once urine testing became commonplace, the original form of the joke, which is at the expense of the genuine ignorance of the patient, becomes increasingly unbelievable. Instead, it transforms into a piece of wit made at the doctor’s expense.
Paul Bovey on 16 August 2025 @ 4pm
Clement and La Frenais have form for recycling their jokes. They reuse the “get my goat/up your nose/on your wick” joke from the last episode of Going Straight in the film version of Porridge (although it is Fletcher making the same joke). Also in that film, Mackay’s Schrödinger’s cat-style reaction to a likely non-appearance of a celebrity (an unspecified Goodie to play in the prison football match) is reused by Bill Nighy in the 2002 comeback series of Auf Wiedersehen Pet (Ant & Dec at the transporter bridge ceremony): “He didn’t say we hadn’t”/“I haven’t heard they’re not.” And the dig that Fletcher makes at Mackay in Porridge about feeling middle-class after visiting Scotland is also reused in series 3 of Auf Wiedersehen Pet (with Middlesbrough replacing Scotland).
John J. Hoare on 18 August 2025 @ 3pm
Jon: Brilliant work, and I totally agree with your theory for the origin. It makes total sense.
I’ve been busy with other things, but I will return to this one – it probably needs a new post rather than tacking a new update here!
Clive Morris on 21 August 2025 @ 8pm
Ian Le Frenais and Dick Clement get a free pass for recycling their joke because they pretty much saved the movie with wholesale rewrites. This meant they soon became attractive prospects for beefing up other Hollywood films including Connery’s The Rock and, erm, Pearl Harbor. Connery himself made sure to mention them on his publicity tour for Never Say Never Again, frustrated that their efforts didn’t get them a writing credit due to a technicality. Annoyingly, I’ve never seen a copy of Lorenzo Semple’s original screenplay for Never Say Never Again, there must be a copy somewhere, so I can’t say how different it was.
The joke got a big laugh from the cinema audience at the time but have I misinterpreted it? Other incarnations suggest the gag is, How could I manage to aim my urine into that small bottle from here? But at the time, I took it to be a coy reference to the size of Bond’s manhood – which would warrant a less spontaneous delivery from Connery, and would justify the nurse’s somewhat simpering response.
Re the Carry On gag, Barry Norman took issue in his weekly column for Radio Times with the producer’s claim that the films were never crude by citing that one from Carry On Spying, though a) I really do think that’s an unusual example, most of the jokes were not like that and b) It seems to me that the actual joke was that in the scene Jim Dale is spying on Williams and thinking he’s up to no good in the loo, so the ‘gag’ is as much that Dale is put on the back foot by his intended victim’s unguarded comment as he haughtily exits the cubicle.
Benedict on 22 September 2025 @ 3pm
I’m watching “A Touch Of Cloth” again, and noticed a variant on this joke:
Tom Boss: So, there’s a fresh young face on your team
Jack Cloth: What about her fresh young face?
TB: I’m about to come onto that
JC: From here?
John J. Hoare on 23 September 2025 @ 1pm
Fantastic.
Brian Siano on 5 October 2025 @ 9pm
I heard that joke in an American situation comedy that aired in 1975. It was called “On the Rocks,” and it was set in a prison.