Originally made as an episode of the Ronnie Barker series Six Dates with Barker (1971) with Ronnie Barker as Arthur Harris and David Jason as the Odd Job Man. For this feature-length remake, Graham Chapman wanted Keith Moon of the Who to play the Odd Job Man, but Keith's recording commitments wouldn't allow him to appear.
Co-writer Bernard McKenna said that Graham Chapman was difficult to work with when he wrote the screenplay with him. He said that he thought David Jason's performance was good, but Graham Chapman's performance was awful.
The plot bears a striking similarity to an unused story-line proposed in the mid-1960s as a possible plot for the second film to star the Beatles. It was rejected then because of a similarity to the plot of a French film of the period, "Les Tribulations D'Un Chinois en Chine", starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, and the Beatles made "Help!" instead.
Based on a story from a decade earlier, the plot of a man who hires another man to kill him happened the same year in Burt Reynolds' The End.