Dick Van Dyke reveals he didn’t like classic film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

GENERATIONS of people have grown up loving family favourite Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but one person who isn’t a fan of the film is its star Dick Van Dyke.

The 90-year-old Hollywood veteran played male lead Caractacus Potts in the song-filled big screen jaunt about a magical flying car, but says it took a lot of convincing for him to even appear.

Opening up in his new autobiography My Lucky Life In And Out Of Show Business, he explained: “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a movie that I repeatedly turned down.

“The movie’s producer, Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, known for his tight-fisted control of the James Bond movie franchise, desperately wanted to re-team Julie Andrews and me after the success we’d enjoyed with Mary Poppins.

“I can’t speak for Julie’s reasons, but both of us turned him down. I thought the script had too many holes and unanswered questions. However, each time I said no, Cubby came back with more money. I’m talking serious money – more than seven figures, which in those days was mind-boggling, plus a percentage of the back end, which I never counted on. So I finally agreed.

“I made one last stipulation. I didn’t want to reprise my English accent, which I’d struggled with in Mary Poppins. Not a problem. My character was suddenly an eccentric American inventor. Spanning ten months, production was headquartered in England but also touched down in Bavaria and the South of France.”