Sir Ranulph Fiennes admits he narrowly avoided prison after blowing up Dr Doolittle movie dam

This headline dates from 2018, so I'm not putting it to the judges, but the story below it is worth repeating because Sir Ranulph is in the news.

SomersetLive reported on the address he gave when he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Law at University of Bristol that year:

The explorer said: "Unfortunately, while on leave back in the UK in the mid-1960s, I got phoned up by an old Eton friend.

"He had moved to a place called Castle Combe in Wiltshire, which had just been voted Britain's prettiest village.

"And this beautiful village was being attacked by 20th Century Fox, who were making a film there called Dr Dolittle.

"This involved turning the stream into a dirty great lake with a 20-foot concrete dam, ruining the village."

Sir Ranulph continued: "My friend decided to bring this outrage to the general attention by blowing up the entire concrete dam the night before the film started.

"I had just completed an army explosives course, where you learn to blow up as much as you can using as little as possible.

"And I was pretty good at this. So he asked me to stand in," Sir Ranulph joked.

"Unfortunately, everybody was caught, we all ended up in Chippenham prison, and I was on police probation in Salisbury for six months."

Finishing his thank-you speech to the university, Sir Ranulph said: "15 years after the Chippenham Assizes which found us guilty and fined us heavily, I went to the Isle of Wight.

"I met with the wonderful judge who had not put us in jail, and he said if we had done that one year later, he would have had to have given us seven years minimum."

Other sources say the dam was made from sandbags not concrete, and I'm not sure what "police probation" is, but that's the story as he told it.

I was taken to see Dr Doolittle for a friend's ninth or tenth birthday treat; another member of our party reckoned this was the sixth time he had been taken to see it. Most film critics of the day would have regarded this as cruel and unusual punishment.