Robin Askwith is telling me about his testicles. Specifically, how they took some serious punishment in the 1974 film Confessions of a Window Cleaner, when a woman seduced him in a sea of soapy bubbles.
“They filled the studio with foam, then me and this lovely lady called Sue Longhurst rolled around in it naked,” recalls the veteran actor. “It took a day and a half to film the sequence. Halfway through, I was getting a bit itchy downstairs. It turned out the detergent had bleach in it. There’s a reason my mum wore rubber gloves to wash up. My testicles were on fire for weeks.” Talk about suffering for your art.
