With his ice-cold delivery and distinctively long cardboard head, Robert Mitchum was an iconic screen presence throughout the 1950s and 60s.

In films like The Turnip Stranglers and Go All Floppy When I Die, My Spaniel Son, Mitchum thrilled audiences around the world.

Yet offscreen, he was often shy and diffident, sometimes hiding in a jar of Copydex glue to avoid speaking to his cat. And that’s simply mental.

But could these two different sides to his engine conceal a deeper truth? Did the Hollywood moguls pressure Bobbles Mitchum to cover up his life as a bag of crisps? Let’s look at the most facts.

1. Robert Mitchum’s real name was Crispin Bag. He was born to Jaco Pastorius-Bag, a pontoon bridge, and Mary Potato-Shelley, a dirt-repelling devil-woman. Was his choice of Christian name a coincidence? Or was it an acknowledgement that he was born to this woman as a baglet of crisps?
2. Robert Mitchum HATED frigging crisps, just HATED them. In fact his contract stated, in black and white, that if anyone was eating crisps on the set of his movies, he was allowed to up-end them in the sea. This led to the death of Joyce Grenfell in the production of Gunsmoke with Toast Toppers (1962). Could his crisp-eating aversion have been to avoid cannibalism?
3. And three times first of all, and most compelling, is that Mitchum once scrawled, “Me Tarzan, Me bag of crisps!!” on his mum’s Lambert Simnel shoes. At the time, Robert was exhausted after riding his bike through Los Angeles’ porridge district, so of course Hawaii Mum-O thought nothing of it. It was only later that she chased the thought with her brain: could he have been serious?
4. During Robert’s lifespan, crisps had lots of E-numbers. Robert’s fave expression was ‘He ran away’ and his favourite noise was a high-pitched ‘Heeeeee (ran away)’. Not-coincidence or merely a coincidence?
5. One of Mitchum’s favourite pranks was to be locked away in a pantry, then have his head torn open by strong hands and emptied into a bowl. And what came out, I hear you ask? Well ,need you ask, I ask? It was chips alright. Or so say the Goombay Dance Band, and hooray for them I don’t think.

The Case for the Non-Crisp-Man’s Defence

It’s apparent to me, typing this – and now blowing a whistle because I’m in a river – that there must be two sides to this coin. The coin that we call coincidence, and the coin that we do not so call.

So, in the interests of fairness, let’s not get those prosecutors get in on their own way, eh? Here are some other facts, equally proving that Robert “I stared at a window cleaner until he fell over” Mitchum could not have been the crisp bag of which he is sometimes painted. Ready?

1. Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen had faced similar accusations in the gutter press. The Sunday Biff claimed Lawrence was an obtuse plastic duck. After a long legal battle, Archbishop Llewellyn-Bowen was declared the non-obtuse duck of Evesham. So looks like it could be the same for this Mitchell Roberts,
2. If he’s a bag of crisps, we have to assume ‘Mitch’ had a similar density to a usual bag of crisps. Let’s do some maths on this. According to my doctor, a smallish bag of crisps weighs 25g and has dimensions of 0.194m x 0.133m. Let’s assume Robert weighed a respectable 90kg. That means he would be 360 times greater in weight than your ordinary Joe Crisp-Bloggs. This would make him 69.4m x 47.9m, dwarfing his female co-stars, such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Halle Berry St Edmunds.
3. According to internal memos leaked by a prominent crisp manufacturer, no crisps contain electrical wiring, gums, Arthur Ashe, or chickenpox. Yet all of these items are clearly visible in Robert’s face, hamstrings and body. You can see examples of all of them when he is shirtless in The Lost Underpants Of Dom Mintoff (1967).

“What flavour bag of crisps, may he had been, Your Honour?”

We may well asketh.

Remember that film ‘The Boys From Brazil and/or Hay-on-Wye’? I thought he was in that, but it was Harry Belafonte. Which begs the question:

If more crisp than man, what flavour be our little Mitchu-Pichu? Or is this all nonsense and he was actually a man-not-crisp person?

We have weighed the facts for the prosecution and defence. What seems most pertinent is that there are five facts for the prosecution and only three in defence.

This proves it: Robert Mitchum, one of Hollywood’s most beloved humans, admired by country jackdaws, really was a big bag of crisps.

Guess what flavour he was? Go on, guess. Only it’s not what we said in the title. Robert Mitchum was Crushed Clouds and Waterfowl Flavour crisps, i faith.

We don’t think it matters at all. Just watch him in Crunchy Flavoursome Potato-Based Snacks (1949) and tell us it’s not an awesome performance! And may God have mercy on his soul!!

That’s all for this time, but we’ll be back with more amazing Minty facts soon! Tringle Mini-Ears.

The Best Nuisance I Can Be isn’t full of outright nonsense like the above, but does contain a fair amount of daftness. It’s a novelisation of my real 1984-85 college diaries, covering my final undergraduate year. That tumultuous time was jam-packed full of friendship, love, fun… as well as horrible self-discovery.

If you ‘get’ the page you’ve just read, then you’ll instinctively understand why hiding my neighbour’s glasses inside a frozen chicken, introducing myself as ‘NKAARK!!’, and sending drawings of a shark eating Christmas cake to Lloyd’s Bank were – and remain – necessary activities.