‘To me, to uzi’: why Paul Chuckle as a gangster isn’t such a dramatic career change

Next year a British gangster film will be released, entitled Fall to the Top. Its plot concerns a frustrated labourer who becomes a drug dealer and ends up trying to control London’s entire criminal underground. Its official summary promises “death, deceit and carnage”. One thing it doesn’t promise, however, is what might turn out to be its biggest draw: Paul Chuckle.

Readers of a certain vintage will recognise Paul Chuckle as one of the Chuckle Brothers, the beloved slapstick children’s entertainment duo who starred in 292 episodes of CBBC’s ChuckleVision between 1987 and 2009. A typical ChuckleVision episode would see Paul and his brother Barry take employment at a new workplace, and then essentially destroy everything around them with their dangerous ineptitude. It was brilliant.

And now it seems that Paul Chuckle has a role in Fall to the Top. Today the Warrington Guardian reported the film’s director, Pete Hirst, as saying: “Having Paul in a darker role is something truly special. He’s known for his comedy but in Fall to the Top audiences will see a completely different side to him that will leave them astounded.” In other words, we might get to see Chuckle properly eff someone up.

At first glance, this might seem like the most dramatic career handbrake turn in all of human history. Picturing Paul Chuckle in a gangster film is like trying to picture Badger from Bodger and Badger machine-gunning his enemies in a drug-fuelled rage at the climax of an unmade Scarface remake (although I will contend that this is actually very easy to picture, and in fact it should probably happen soon).

But is it that unusual? After all, in 2011 Keith Chegwin shanked away from his children’s television roots by making a horror film entitled Kill Keith, although it’s probably worth remembering that Polanski had cast him in Macbeth long before Cheggers Plays Pop. And Jeremy Irons has been playing violent monsters for years, despite once being a presenter on Play Away. Paul Chuckle isn’t the first children’s act to dabble in more dramatic work, and he won’t be the last.

Plus, the more discerning Chuckleheads among us will have known that as kids’ entertainers go, Paul and Barry have always had an element of darkness to them. They’ve been able to subvert the momentum of their career whenever needed. They both appeared on the TV show Coach Trip, for example, something that no celebrity would ever do unless they were willing to subject themselves to the nastier impulses of the human condition. And we shouldn’t forget that, in 2014, they released their own grime single. Plus, Paul Chuckle is a man who reacted to the 2020 lockdown not by making twee little videos to help children adjust to the new frontiers of home learning, but by having a succession of banging raves.

More relevantly, however, there was the 2016 video that the Chuckle Brothers made to promote the video game Hitman. Tasked with taking down an army of Serbian arms dealers, the brothers instructed the game’s character to murder a number of enemies in an array of increasingly violent ways. Tellingly, it was Paul who stopped the flow of the game to instruct the character to bleed a radiator, and then chanted “hit her” when confronted with a female colleague. My sincere guess is that Paul Chuckle will be an exceptional villain in Fall to the Top, and is already the reason why I’ll watch it.

That is, unless he’s going to do it in character, and he plays an underworld boss who keeps bumping into things and skidding around in pools of blood. Although to be honest I’d probably watch that, too.