The time Doris Day wrote ‘F**k tha Police’ for Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much

James Stewart and Doris Day’s characters Ben and Josephine McKenna are getting ready for dinner.

They are staying in a beautiful hotel in exotic Morocco, and their little boy Hank sits with his mother Jo in the bedroom as she brushes her hair.

Ben is tying his tie in the main room and smiles as he hears the beautiful voices of his wife and son break into song.

‘F**k the police coming straight from the underground, a young n***a got it bad ‘cos I’m brown.’

“Cut!” calls director Alfred Hitchcock.

The song just wasn’t working.

“I was very flattered to have been picked by Hitch to work on the picture,” said Ms Day in a 1993 Wogan interview.

“It was a serious role in a serious film, so when he asked me for a song for the picture, I wanted to give him something really quite special.”

Known for her work in Calamity Jane and her radio show, Doris Day was arguably the most popular musical star in America.

However, when she produced a furious piece of righteous rap about the plight of young black America in the early 1990s, no one quite knew what to make of it.

“I remember Doris when she first came down on set and was so excited with her new song,” wrote co-star James Stewart in his autobiography.

“It was an exciting song, and passionate. But there were an awful lot of curse words, and she didn’t seem to be singing rather angrily shouting in a sort of rhythmic fashion.”

Ultimately, director Alfred Hitchcock took her aside and asked if she had anything else that would be more suitable for a middle-class, middle-aged American couple in the fifties.

“Well, I sang him Que Sera Sera, and he seemed to like it a lot more than F**k tha Police, which did rather surprise me, but who was I to argue. Hitch was a genius.”

The song went on to win an Academy Award for best song and reach number two, whereas F**k tha Police languished in Doris Day’s collection of songs for thirty-five years.

“Well, I was ever so pleased that NWA liked the song,” said Ms Day of the song’s unlikely resurrection.

“I got talking to a nice young man called Ice Cube one day, and he mentioned that he had formed an angry rap group with some friends and so I said I may have something that would interest him.”

She rapped the first verse and Cube knew immediately it had the potential to become NWA’s signature hit.

“He asked if I’d like to perform on the record, I said no. Well, I was getting a little too old by then.”

Although the public never got to hear Doris Day’s version of F**k tha Police, Ice Cube made sure that she is credited as the writer on the record and even has a cameo in the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton.

Next time you watch it, keep an eye out for a nice old lady at an NWA concert who can be seen singing along to F**k tha Police with a knowing smile on her face.