David Jason: My Life

by David Jason

  However, the idea of using a condom was fraught with complication to the point of impossibility. There was the difficulty of acquiring such a thing, for a start, which would require a staggering act of face-to-face boldness in a chemist or a barbershop. And, in any case, they were joke objects – invented, so it seemed to us, not for the serious purposes of birth control, but entirely so that boys would have something about which to make smutty, but somehow ceaselessly amusing, jokes involving the word ‘johnny’. Encounters were kept to petting – in various weights up as far as ‘heavy’, if you were lucky, which you probably weren’t – and no further. Small wonder that a brief touch of entirely wool-encased and cotton-packed breast was something both prized and glorious. Meanwhile, if amateur dramatics could guarantee to put Micky Weedon and me in a room where girls, with all their distant promise, regularly abounded – well, then Micky Weedon and I were automatically in favour of amateur dramatics, and all power to its elbow.

  And so it came to pass that, on a Monday evening in the early summer of 1954, Micky and I leaned our bikes up against the wall of the former lemonade factory which was the headquarters of the Incognito Theatre Group and, rigid with self-consciousness, shuffled to a position narrowly inside the door. Just as Doug had forewarned, the gathering that met our eyes in that room was almost exclusively female. Did we therefore immediately glide, swan-like, into the centre of the throng and begin to turn on our nonchalant and yet somehow irresistible charm? No. We clung together and refused to let one another out of each other’s sight for the rest of the evening.

  That first Monday, I don’t think we took any active part in the proceedings at all – just watched as Doug put the others through their paces, getting them up onstage in little groups and cooking up scenes in which they could improvise. Slowly, though, over the course of the following weeks, Micky and I thawed enough to get involved. And, clearly, even setting aside purely demographic considerations, we couldn’t have been more fortunate in where we had landed up. The Incognito Group had been running since 1938 and had the exceptional advantage of operating out of its own theatre. That small, red-brick factory, set back from Holly Park Road, had been acquired after the Second World War, and had then been renovated and fitted out with rows of seating bought from a bombed cinema to make a small but perfectly serviceable auditorium. OK, the facilities might not have been West End standard – the upstairs dressing rooms were fairly dingy and what the theatre offered by way of lavatory facilities, to actors and audience alike, was a set of Elsan portable chemical toilets down an alleyway at the side of the building. Inconveniently, there were no lights out there so, on play nights, ladies who desired to powder their noses (such as my mother and my aunts and various family friends, who became unfailing patrons of any Incognito production that I was involved in) were offered a torch to guide them on their way.

  Still, the priceless advantage of having this dedicated space, rather than sharing a hall or a public room somewhere, as most amateur groups had to, was that sets for a production could be built and left up for the run of the play, rather than dismantled every night or partly packed up so that the local Mothers’ Union, or whoever, could have the run of the place the following morning. It gave the Incognitos a bit of an edge.

  The other thing the group was clearly blessed with was Doug Weatherhead, a man who was, I came to realise, tirelessly dedicated to the organisation and to the cause of amateur theatre in general, and someone to whom I would end up owing an awful lot. In due course, Doug coaxed me onto the stage and began to set me those little improvisations. ‘I want you to come up with Janet and Rita,’ he would say, ‘and pretend that you are the husband of one and the boyfriend of the other. How are you going to cope with that?’

  How indeed? But Doug was an excellent coach, who would always say afterwards, ‘That’s very good, but what about the possibility of this? Or what about considering it this other way?’ What he was doing was building our confidence to stand up in front of the rest of the group and let go a little.

  Fat chance of that with me, though, in the beginning. I found those initial improvisational set-ups purgatory. They didn’t just make me uncomfortable: they made me want to shrivel up and post myself down a crack in the floorboards. But when Doug eventually handed out some sheets of paper and we started to run through a bit of a play, things were totally different. Then I had something to grab hold of and I felt less exposed. I discovered that if I could add the confidence I had found as a freelance impressionist in the school playground to some written lines, then I was away.

  Pretty soon after this, I went to see the company compete at a local drama festival. Another group there put on a play called Dark of the Moon – a strange, alluring piece about witchcraft and superstition and all manner of weird goings-on in the Appalachian Mountains. I remember feeling enthralled, loving the oddness of it. The Incogs won a prize that time, which was quite inspiring, too. My own Incog debut came when Doug put me in a one-act play set in the Far East; as I recall, I played opposite a girl called Rita Chappel, but otherwise memory has drawn a gauzy veil over this production’s majesty and the sensation it no doubt caused across the theatrical world. However, I more sharply remember doing another early show – a one-acter for a drama festival, a piece about crooks taking over a ladies’ hairdressing salon. The crooks in question had hopped into a hairdresser’s to evade the police and then had to pretend they were running the place. As one of the crims caught up in this farrago, it was beholden upon me at one point to call out, primly, ‘Louise – the telephone please!’ Comedy gold, I’m sure – but an uncommon foray into that area for the Incognito Players.

  Indeed (and this might seem odd, given what I would eventually go on to specialise in), comedy was rarely on the bill for the Incogs. Where possible the group liked to go in for pieces of serious drama – with the emphasis on serious. In 1959, for example, we treated Friern Barnet to a production of Easter by August Strindberg. Two hours of furrow-browed Swedish angst in a theatre with an outdoor toilet … it doesn’t really get much more cerebral than that, drama-wise. I’m not sure how much of that play I understood at the time, at the age of nineteen, and I’m not sure how much of it I understand now, to be perfectly honest. But I can certainly tell you that at no point did this production require anyone to go for a big belly laugh by falling through the open flap of a pub bar. Permit me to reproduce the introductory note from the programme for the occasion (handwritten in ink on a sheet of plain A4 and xeroxed, as was the way):

  The play is set in Lund, a small provincial town in Sweden. It was in this town that Strindberg spent the winter of 1896 recuperating after his mental breakdown. Here he watched the spring return and was moved as never before by the sufferings of Holy Week.

  And a happy Easter to you, too.

  Even closer to the cutting edge, I played Cliff Lewis, the Welsh lodger, in an Incognito production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, put on soon after the play’s professional debut at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956 – where it had caused no little shock and horror in certain quarters for its unadorned portrayal of working-class life. That was quite a hot item for an amateur group to dare to pick up on so quickly, but the Incogs knew very little fear in these areas. We also put on Osborne’s Epitaph for George Dillon. We did Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, too, and I also remember playing a shell-shocked soldier in the trenches of the First World War – no bag of laughs. And in an adaptation of the biblical story of Noah, I played Ham, the bad ’un among Noah’s sons. Again – not much in the way of pratfalls here.

  But this was where I cut my teeth – the first stages of my acting journey. I was in the Monday-night juniors, but I was very soon starting to get called over into the senior group, which met on Wednesdays and Fridays. There was a consensus that I was useful – to the point where I even got headhunted, as it were, by another local amateur group called the Manor Players. They performed out of a church hall in Church End, Finchley. One evening, I was b
ack from work, stripped to the waist and washing at the basin in the kitchen, when there was a knock at the door. I casually opened it, still half naked, to be confronted by two tall, imposing gentlemen, one of them with a drooping moustache. I assumed I must have been in trouble with the police again, but in fact it was Chris Webb from the Manor Players, wanting to know if he could have a word. I put a shirt on and took them into the front room, where they explained they were looking for someone who could play a teenager in a production of Escapade, a very witty play by Roger MacDougall, who wrote many of the Ealing Comedy films.

  And that was the play for which I received my first review. The notice in question was under the byline of W. H. Gelder, the theatre critic of the Barnet and Finchley Press, whose reputation went terrifyingly before him. Gelder clearly fancied himself the Butcher of Barnet and struck terror into local actors’ hearts. He was a tough man to please and wasn’t inclined to go easy on a production just because it was amateur and contained teenagers. Indeed, the sentence ‘Gelder’s in’, passed around backstage before curtain-up on an opening night, was enough to cause buttocks to clench and voices to rise by half an octave, right across a cast.

  Anyway, Gelder, this choosy arbiter of dramatic taste in the north-west London area, somehow found it in his heart on this occasion to commend me. All these years later, obviously, I don’t recall exactly what he wrote, but it was something along the lines of how ‘David White looked like a young James Cagney and played, though only 16, with the ease of a born actor’. (OK. That’s exactly what he wrote.)

  A young James Cagney? I was ready to accept the comparison. The ease of a born actor? I didn’t object to that bit, either, though I did, eventually, when I had finished glowing, laugh it off. It seemed like such an unlikely idea.

  I was co-opted into the senior group of the Incogs permanently after that and, from then on, was expected to play across a broad range. And I was growing in confidence, warming to this business of finding characters to hide behind – coming to know the pleasure of losing yourself in a role. Amateur dramatics offered me an opportunity to escape which I increasingly found myself hurrying towards.

  As for the abundant girls – well, suffice to say that I found myself stepping out with three members of the Incognito Group, on various occasions, in those early years. Innocently and demurely, of course, as the times dictated: a date at the pictures; possibly an arm around the shoulder (a painfully incremental process which, in the planning and nervous execution, could consume as much as seventy minutes of a ninety-minute feature); maybe some hand-holding on the way home; perhaps, if the stars and the planets aligned, as sometimes they did, a kiss goodnight. So, amateur dramatics delivered on that promise, as well.

  Incidentally, the Incognito Players are still in operation – thriving, in fact – with a membership of around 130 actors and staging six week-long productions per year. Furthermore, the place has proper toilets now and in 2010 the building even acquired a foyer. Because of my connection with the place, they asked me a few years ago to become a patron, which I was pleased and proud to do.

  And they’re still setting the bar sensationally high. Not that long ago I went along to see a production of Equus – a play which famously calls on its male lead to be uncompromisingly naked for a while. And, of course, if you’re in the front row at an Incog production, even these days, you’re very tight in on the action … so … well, what can I say? It practically dipped in your box of Maltesers as he walked around.

  I’m not sure Micky Weedon or I would have been on for that – and certainly not on our first Monday night. But well done to the lad in question. And it shows you how far amateur theatre has come since my day.

  * * *

  I LEFT SCHOOL at fifteen with no idea what I wanted to do for the rest of my life – or, really, with any clear concept of ‘the rest of my life’. That’s not a notion a fifteen-year-old boy can very easily get his head around. At that age, it’s rare that you find yourself thinking, on any given morning, much further ahead than lunchtime.

  However, one thing I thought I knew was that my options were limited. In the world I came from, your aspirations weren’t likely to be grand. We were never encouraged to aspire. Maybe it’s different now. But I don’t remember anyone at my school in 1955, as I headed out of the gate for the last time, saying to me, ‘White, the world and all its wonders are out there: which glorious bit of it are you going to try and grab a hold of?’ The assumption was, pretty flatly, that the world and all its wonders weren’t out there. Not for you. So you’d get yourself a decent menial job and that would be that.

  True, my brother Arthur, seven years ahead of me, had somewhat flown in the face of convention. He had started off straightforwardly enough, by training, in the family tradition, as a butcher when he left school. But then, in 1951, when he was eighteen, he was called up for his statutory two-year period of national service. (I was to escape this duty. The scheme was winding down by the time I was old enough and was halted altogether in 1960, so, alas, the British armed forces were never to witness what I could have brought to the battlefield.) Arthur soon discovered that, during national service, you were encouraged to develop interests – perhaps because, with the war being over, they didn’t know quite what else to do with you. So, based in Colchester, he had begun to act, taking up with the repertory company there – quite casually at first, and then more seriously, to the extent that, when he emerged, in 1953, he had resolved to seek himself a place at drama school.

  I still vividly recall a weekend, during his service, that he came home from Colchester in the company of a beautifully dressed, immaculately coiffed actress with whom he was friendly at the time. She sat on the sofa at Lodge Lane, appearing to fill the room with her poise and sophistication, while my father did his best not to look at her too closely and only narrowly failed.

  Anyway, just because my older brother had broken the shackles and cracked open the door to another, more colourful world, it didn’t automatically follow that I could do the same. Quite the opposite, in fact, on the theory of lightning and its well-known general reluctance to alight twice in the same location.

  I duly reported to the jobcentre. There I queued up at a window, filled out a form, and then sat around waiting for someone to call ‘Next’. At which point I was summoned through to a featureless little grey-painted room and given a preliminary interview. The whole set-up felt fantastically, bowel-liquidisingly intimidating to me. ‘What kind of thing do you have in mind for yourself?’ I was asked. To which my less than helpful answer was, ‘I don’t know.’ The only previous work experience I could claim was a brief spell at fourteen as a grocery delivery boy for the Victor Value supermarket on the high street at the top of our road. Hours: two evenings per week, 4.30 p.m.–6.30 p.m., and Saturday mornings. Pay: almost nothing, but if you were lucky you might get a threepenny-bit tip from the housewife you delivered to. Skills: well, those front-loaded delivery bicycles are quite tough to handle, you know, especially if the carrier at the front is stacked so high that the tyre is squeezed down to the rim. (Little did I know that the ability to handle a delivery bike would serve me well thirty years later in a television series.)

  Still, it emerged, in the course of this hobbled conversation at the jobcentre, that I liked mechanical things and that I was quite practical. (Did I already mention in these pages the magazine rack that I made in woodwork at Northside Secondary Modern, the joints of which continue to be crisp and lock-tight to this day?) And, after some riffling of index cards on the part of my interviewer, it further emerged that they had an opening in a garage. And not just the door.

  Popes Garage, to be specific, on Popes Drive, Finchley. I was employed as the ‘boy’ – which is to say, essentially, that I made the tea. But occasionally they’d let me get underneath the cars and be a proper grease monkey and do some fixing. The business was run by a bunch of London-born brothers, and the one in charge of the workshop was known to us as Mr Len – a right hard nut,
it seemed to me, although that might have had as much to do with my own continuing nervousness in front of anyone who represented authority.

  Even so, at first I was happy enough in my new employment and actually rather enjoying myself because I was learning about mechanical things. My fellow mechanics – all older, all taller – were largely welcoming too, although I paid a price for trying to impress them during one of the lunchtime games of football that were played with a tennis ball in the yard between the garages and workshops. All down one side of the improvised pitch was a tall stack of corrugated iron. Demonstrating the tactical acumen and shrewd footballing brain that has served me so well during my long years in the game (or would have done, if I had ever really played football, which I haven’t), I thought that if I could take the ball down the gap between the corrugated iron and the garage wall (and I was sure I was small enough to do so), I would be able to pop out at the other end and score before anyone had really figured out what I was doing.

  It worked a treat. The tennis ball barely left my feet as I burrowed down the narrow passageway, suddenly invisible to teammates and opponents alike. Squeezing out at the other end of the stack, I moved inside and deftly side-footed the ball into the far corner beyond the goalkeeper’s despairing dive. And then, with a loud cry of ‘Yeesss!’, I turned to celebrate both the goal and my extreme cunning with my no doubt enormously grateful teammates.

  Except that everyone in the yard was staring at me in open-mouthed horror – or, more particularly, staring at the river of blood flowing from the head wound I had just unknowingly sustained by clonking my temple against the sharp edge of a sheet of corrugated iron at the far end of the stack. Off I went to the hospital for stitches – yet again. I think I probably only needed to go one more time to qualify for my own set of needles.