Madcap inventor and tricycle enthusiast who delighted children on Vision On
inventor/entertainer b March 20, 1942 d December 13, 2023
Wilf Lunn, who has died aged 81, belonged in the great tradition of English eccentrics; he was variously a scriptwriter, prop designer, inventor and all-round entertainer, championing square eggs and spectacles for chickens, and creating a worm-catching tricycle.
With oversized round glasses, an extravagant ginger handlebar moustache and, typically, a straw boater, Lunn was an endearingly madcap figure. Blessed with the flat vowels of his native Yorkshire, he had a child’s riotous imagination with a surrealist twist: if garden worms needed woolly coats or if the goldfish bowl needed a starting handle, he had the solution.
During the 1960s and 1970s he was a regular guest of Tony Hart on Vision On, the children’s show for hearing-impaired audiences, demonstrating an eclectic range of often bicycle-related machines.
They included a humane pigeon-catcher which not only had a large cup into which the cyclist lured the unsuspecting pigeon, but also a guano-guard umbrella “to protect the rider against massive retaliatory bombing by the pigeons’ friends”.
Less humane was the duck-catcher, which had a projecting rubber maggot as bait: the bicyclist made the maggot wriggle, the duck tried to gobble it, and two spiked discs slammed together to crush the bird.
Even worse was his sadistic conceit of a “choirboy tuner”, equipped with a pair of tongs. “The bicyclist pulls a lever and these tongs grip the choirboy by the testicles. By varying the pressure you can tune the boy’s voice,” Lunn explained to The Guardian in 1977, though he added a cautionary note: “If you go too far you caponise him.”
On one occasion he rode an elaborate tricycle from London to Woburn Abbey, the seat of the Duke of Bedford, to protest against artificial foods. To illustrate the point, he tried feeding an artificial parrot to the duke’s pet lion cub, but the big cat showed more interest in his ankles and had to be deterred with oversized “Dreadnought” false teeth.
His stage show, The Huddersfield Novelty Suicide Company, included a giant, sabre-toothed budgie that gets killed, leading all the little budgies to sing The Last Perch, an avian version of The Last Post. Startled audiences were warned about the Ku Klux Katterpillar or treated to a sighting of life after death in the form of Malcolm Maggot.
Other inventions included a rat catcher made of a beckoning plastic finger, a wedge of gruyère cheese and a hidden pistol to shoot the rat; an incontinence sock with an umbrella encircling the hem because “shoes are so expensive”; and a 1977 Silver Jubilee bicycle with a queenly hand that moved up and down in front of a portrait of Elizabeth II, acknowledging the crowd’s cheers – it came with a snow plough-like contraption that was in fact “an oil-fired Jubilee crowd-clearer”.
Wilfred Makepeace Lunn was born at Rastrick in the West Riding of Yorkshire on March 29 1942, the elder of two children of Hubert Lunn, known as Bert, and his wife Irene, née Shaw. They were both deaf, though their son never learnt more than basic sign language. Wilf soon learnt (he said years later) that the smell of “a reverberating fart” was better than crying to attract the attention of his parents.
At a few months old he won first prize in a “war baby competition”, claiming it was because he had emerged “shaped like a bomb”. His family kept a cauldron purporting to contain a memorial head to an uncle eaten by cannibals.
He was educated locally and continued his studies at Huddersfield School of Art before teaching religious knowledge at Odsal House School for the Deaf, near Bradford, where his mother had learnt to lip-read. While there he began making miniature bicycles out of firewood wire.
When Park Methodist Church in
Brighouse asked him to paint images of Adam and Eve for the Sunday school’s proscenium arch, he tackled the commission with typical boldness and flair using “glo-brite” colours to produce unobscured full-frontal views of his subjects.
Asked to tone it down, he painted a bikini on Eve and white spotted underpants on Adam. One member of the church ladies’ sewing circle offered to pray for him.
The ensuing publicity did Lunn no harm, though his ambition of becoming a writer was hampered by his whimsicality: the BBC were not interested in Benny Rolly, a “play without dialogue”.
Fortunately, the actor James Mason, whose parents lived close to Lunn’s home in Huddersfield, introduced him to the theatrical agent Blanche Marvin. She thought Benny Rolly had potential for a deaf audience and arranged for him to meet Patrick Dowling, the producer of Vision On.
Dowling was unable to use Lunn, but suggested an exhibition of his miniature bicycles in bottles. Joan Bakewell was among the opening-night guests and asked if he would like to be on television. Somewhat the worse for drink, he replied yes, and asked when. “Tonight,” she replied. Quickly sobering up, he made his television debut on Late Night Line Up.
That led to appearances on Magpie,
ITV’s answer to Blue Peter, where he did a show about bottles and another about domestic irons. Dowling soon had a change of heart and asked him to join Vision On, where his first invention was a doorbell machine.
He went on to appear on television shows such as Jigsaw, Ask Aspel and Jim’ll Fix It, making a back-scratching machine for one guest.
In the 1990s he was Jonathan Ross’ “resident professor” on Fantastic Facts, producing a cure for hiccups, demonstrating ways to balance babies and creating an expanding mortar board.
Despite the childish humour, his ideas encouraged free thinking and modelmaking skills. His autobiography was My Best Cellar (2008).
In 1989 Lunn opened the Wiz Bizarre Studio Café in Huddersfield as a showcase for his many Heath Robinson-style contraptions – including a cucumber straightener, a walking submarine and a human cannon.
He tried to fire himself across the River Irk, inviting the newspaper headline “Berk falls in the Irk”.
More recently he exported a singing Christmas tree to Iceland.
Lunn married Di North in 1965; they had four daughters and a son. The marriage was dissolved and in 1978 he married Elizabeth Hindle, arriving at the register office on a tricycle, though she travelled by car. She predeceased him.