David Jason: My Life

by David Jason

  Still, thirty-seven years later, this latest scar would outdo all the other ones by coming to star in its own television series. In 1992 I began playing Inspector Frost in the series A Touch of Frost for ITV. In the books by R. D. Wingfield, on which the series was based, Frost is given to fiddling ruminatively with a scar on his cheek, a wound sustained in a gunshot incident. It was a little character detail that we were keen to use. But instead of getting make-up to apply a fake cheek scar, I pointed out that I might as well save time and effort and use the real one by my eye. So it came in handy in the end.

  Blood loss and permanent disfigurement aside, my early days at the garage passed happily enough. I’d jump on my push bike at Lodge Lane in the morning and set off to work with a perfectly light heart. And come the end of the week, I’d return home with some money – give a bit to my mother for my ‘keep’, set some to one side for the Post Office savings account, and have the remainder for going out with. For years, I had been watching my dad come home from work on payday and hand over the brown paper envelope with his money in it. And my mother would take out the housekeeping, then the bit that was going towards the holiday savings, and then the little bit that was set aside for emergencies, and hand the rest back to my dad for his beer money. I felt some pride in being able to do the same. (And that little scene stayed with me. In later days, when I became an actor, I was used to setting money aside. It had become a discipline with me, so, unlike certain of my less fortunate brethren, I was never caught out when the taxman called.)

  So my contentedness at Popes and in the world of paid labour endured for a couple of months. But then winter came, as winter will. The temperature in Popes’ workshop now dropped to somewhere around the level of a beach on the Orkneys in mid-January. There were a couple of square electrical heaters mounted high on the wall, which worked as hard as they could but really only ended up providing a thin layer of warmth for the ceiling. The big wooden front doors were closed against the elements, but there was a gap underneath them which was probably big enough to squeeze a cat through, if you pushed it hard enough. Accordingly, as you lay flat on your back under a car, getting dripped on by oil or water, the wind would come howling through that gap and find its way unerringly up the trouser legs of your overalls. I’m not sure that even Captain Oates would have been ready to withstand discomfort at these levels for very long. And call me a fair-weather mechanic but it entirely sapped my enthusiasm for the job.

  When the winter came to an end, Mr Len came in to see me and offered to upgrade me from garage boy to apprentice mechanic – a five-year deal, at the end of which I’d be fully qualified and ready to crawl under any car that would have me. I thanked him for the offer and asked for a short period in which to think about it. Back home, I told my parents, and they were delighted: I’d got a job and the chance to acquire a set of skills – I was sorted for life. Pats on the back all round.

  So when I told them that I wasn’t going to accept Mr Len’s offer, they weren’t just disappointed, they were completely baffled. My mother, in particular, couldn’t get her head around it at all, and spent a long time trying to get me to see sense. But I resisted. I don’t quite know where I found the certainty to do so. It wasn’t like me at that time to be so sure of myself and swim against the tide – I was quite timid in those years and tended to do as I was told. But I just knew I couldn’t spend five years working like that. And it was mostly the memory of that long winter in the Arctic-cold workshop that did it for me. I declined Mr Len’s offer, and was back at square one.

  Coincidentally, my accountants, who were in Paddington when I first started using them, eventually moved into an office on Popes Drive, not far from the site of that garage. If you’d told me, when I was a wannabe grease monkey with barely enough money in his pocket for a pint of milk, that one day, just along the road, would reside the company I had had to appoint to look after my finances because they had become too complicated for my brain to handle, I would have accused you of indulging in a not particularly subtle or amusing piece of chi-iking. Yet it came to pass. The accountant I appointed was Raymond Freeda, of FMCB, who became a good friend and is still a good friend, and my accountant, today. Does anybody’s accountant periodically send them entire sheets of Jewish jokes? Mine does. Here’s a couple of them.

  ‘I just got back from a pleasure trip. I took my mother-in-law to the airport.’

  ‘Someone stole my credit cards. I won’t be reporting it. The thief spends less than my wife did.’

  Come 1957, though, and seventeen years old, I was off down to the jobcentre again, and again without the faintest clue what I wanted to do with my working life. And this time there was no immediate solution. I checked in at that jobcentre every week for a number of months and they dangled various opportunities in front of me, none of which managed to float my boat, until one day the woman behind the counter said, ‘The Electricity Board are hiring apprentice electricians.’ This at last seemed like something I might find an interest in. There ensued another harrowing and mumbled interview. And two weeks later, I got a letter to say I’d been accepted.

  The Electricity Board took on ten of us as apprentices in our area, which was known as ‘North Met’ and encompassed a large slab of north London. We were sent on day release to Enfield Technical College to learn electrical theory. The rest of the week, we would be assigned to on-site jobs or, on the days when that kind of work wasn’t available, drafted into the Electricity Board showrooms to fix broken electrical appliances – vacuum cleaners, cookers, heaters. These days, if your iron breaks, the chances are you’ll be throwing it away and buying another one the same afternoon. At the back end of the fifties, you got it mended. I was to spend a lot of time nipping about in an electric van, collecting broken irons and equipment from EB showrooms, and rewinding the elements from toasters back at Fortis Green works.

  We clearly had a restless need to entertain ourselves. One time we were sent out to wire tubular heaters into the pews of a huge and terrifyingly cold church in Muswell Hill – a straightforward enough task but clearly not sufficient to absorb our imaginations entirely. Among our number on that job was a little bloke called Dougie – even smaller than me, and therefore officially at the bottom of the pecking order. So, we lured Dougie up to the church’s wooden gallery and used brass nails and buckle clips to tack him to the floor through his overalls. We abandoned him there, stapled to the floor, for a whole day. Cruel? Perhaps it was. But note we had our limits and that a sense of basic human decency prevailed: we didn’t leave him overnight.

  I fear it may also have been Dougie who was the victim of some equally childish and regrettable deviousness involving a bogus mission at the bottom of a lift shaft and a swiftly removed ladder. If you’re building a block of flats, and you’re high up and you need to relieve your bladder, do you climb all the way down and use the appropriate facility? Not when there’s a convenient and as yet empty lift shaft to hand you don’t. Which makes the bottom of a lift shaft in an incomplete block of flats somewhere to avoid if at all possible – as Dougie would no doubt have eagerly confirmed after spending a dank afternoon up to the rims of his rubber boots in unpleasantness.

  Apprentices were made to work pretty hard in those days, and the jobs we had to do were very varied. For example, we wired a block of flats in Golders Green which, strange as it may seem, still stands today. In that block, we put in underfloor heating and I was told to oversee the pouring of the concrete floor, to make sure the builders didn’t trample over our beautiful handiwork and muck it up. (Underfloor heating in those days was done with copper cables, which were both fragile and really expensive.) So it came to pass that I was alone on the sixth floor of this partly completed building, when an Irish navvy, who appeared to share the dimensions, more or less, of a bungalow, climbed onto the service lift at ground level, along with two wheelbarrows fully laden with cement, and called out, ‘Bring her up.’

  Now, I wasn’t technically speaking the world’s mos
t experienced operator of the service lift, but I had seen it done, and knew what the routine was. Basically, there was a rope and you gave that rope a big old tug and it let the clutch in on the motor below and sent the lift’s platform shuddering upwards. Then, at the appropriate moment, when the lift had risen to the desired level, you gently and gradually relaxed your grip on the rope and brought the platform slowly and smoothly to a halt. This could be done at any floor as the lift was rigged up to pass the semi-finished balconies all the way up the building.

  So I duly pulled on the rope, and the large Irishman and his barrows began their groaning and rickety ascent. I, meanwhile, readied myself with the rope to perform the slightly trickier stopping manoeuvre. As the critical moment neared, and when the builder had risen to the point where his knees were level with the floor, I used my skill, judgement and considerable hand–eye coordination to begin to relax my grip on the rope and brake the lift’s upward motion – only to mess up completely and lose control of the rope.

  I watched the navvy’s eyes widen as it dawned on him that the bottom could be about to drop out of his world in the most literal of ways. As the platform abruptly went into reverse below his feet, I saw the Irishman’s face disappear earthwards and I let go of the rope altogether, thus bringing the lift to a shuddering stop. The abruptness of the halt bounced the wheelbarrows and the navvy in unison a couple of times and then tipped the barrows’ contents off the edge of the platform. Only the navvy’s irate head was visible above the floor. Fortunately, a suitably qualified floor-layer was on hand to take over the operating and bring the platform up to the right place. Or perhaps unfortunately: did my large Irish friend tip his head back and laugh with the simple joy one feels when one has narrowly eluded death? No. Boiling with fury, he chased me all over the building, calling me every name I had ever heard and several that I hadn’t, and would have probably lobbed me off the roof if I hadn’t found some cement bags to hide behind. I still wonder to this day whether that falling cement ended up permanently encasing some innocent builder who chose the wrong moment to walk below. Apologies to his family, if so.

  This wasn’t my only brush with an ugly and premature ending during those times. Electricity is a powerful and dangerous force, as I learned at college, of course, though perhaps more clearly while rewiring a girls’ school in Highgate. My superior on the job, Johnny Cole, said, ‘Get up that ladder and undo those wires in that distribution box.’ In this case, it was a three-phase one at 415 volts. The normal working voltage was 240, so I asked the obvious question: ‘It is off, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it’s off,’ said Johnny. So I climbed up as far as I needed to go and plunged my pair of standard issue pliers into the void to obey my master’s voice.

  The next thing I know is a flash of light as bright as the dawning of time. And the next thing I know after that, I am lying on my back against the wall on the other side of the corridor, flung the width of the place by the reaction of apprentice’s metal on 415 volts of flowing electricity. Johnny was pale with horror because his initial thought was that he had just accidentally killed me. He was wrong – not far wrong, but wrong. I was dazed and slightly hollow but I very quickly mustered the energy to produce the traditional line: ‘I thought you said it was off.’ The pliers, incidentally, were never seen again. They probably landed in Clapham.

  Volt meters and phase-testers were, of course, available for use, but the standard test for live circuitry for lazy buggers who couldn’t quite be bothered to go and fetch the appropriate piece of equipment was to lick your finger and bring it closer and closer to the wire until you did, or didn’t, get a little shock. Really, it’s a wonder none of us weren’t permanently fried.

  I’d always cycle to work, and most days I would cycle home for lunch as well. I could be on a job down at Hornsey, about four miles away, but, come the lunch hour, I’d be back on my bike, pedalling like fury up Muswell Hill to scoff down lunch at Lodge Lane prepared by my long-suffering mother, and then pedalling all the way back to be on the job sixty minutes later. This behaviour made no sense whatsoever, but it just seemed to be what one did. It also kept me trim at about eight stone and with a rather svelte, if I may say so, 29-inch waist.

  On the days when I really was too far away to cycle home – the other side of Highgate, say, which was a prohibitive six miles distant – lunch would be a bag of chips, at 3d (one and a half pence in today’s money), half a bottle of milk and a couple of rolls from the bread shop. The idea was to fill yourself up as cheaply as you could – and, take my word for it, the combination of fried potato, starchy white bread and full-fat milk will do that for you every time. If I was feeling rich, I would also trouble the fish and chip shop for a pickled onion – a big white thing, the size of a tennis ball, found floating in vinegar in a glass jar on the counter and looking ominously like a biological specimen from a medical school. But that was only for when I felt flush. In general, the question was: how much could you not spend? And then, wadded with chips and milk, I would head back for the afternoon shift.

  * * *

  WE’RE TALKING now of the late 1950s – a period I remember with great affection. On Sunday evenings in those days, I would go round to Micky Weedon’s little terraced house and his mother would make us high tea – cold meat and salad, followed by cake and sandwiches. It became a sort of tradition. And then we would listen to The Goon Show. Other radio entertainments had drawn me in, such as Riders of the Range, the western adventure series, and Journey into Space, the sci-fi drama which started when I was thirteen and had me immediately hooked. There was Dick Barton, Special Agent, too, although my interest in that was mostly in the galloping theme tune. But the big and lasting passion, above all of those, was The Goon Show. That was the number one. The sheer madness in the show’s sense of humour, and the general sense of chaos from which the programme appeared to rise, completely got to us – me, Micky Weedon and Prince Charles alike. ‘Why don’t they make them like that any more?’ the three of us would no doubt shake our heads and ask each other.

  At the end of the show, the BBC’s continuity announcer would regularly say, ‘And if you would like tickets to see The Goon Show …’ and give out an address you could write to. And, extraordinarily, these tickets were free – yours for the price of a stamped addressed envelope. So I sent a letter, assuming that pretty much the whole world would be doing exactly the same, so my chances were non-existent. But in fact the whole world must have been doing something different because two tickets for a recording duly arrived.

  This was a pretty sophisticated night out for Micky Weedon and me, who had been known, when we were nine or ten, to entertain ourselves, of a winter’s evening, by getting the cheapest return fare from Woodside Park for the London Underground and then spending the whole evening down there. You could run around the system, changing trains and switching lines, without ever emerging above ground at any point. Somehow, whole hours would happily pass in this manner, with us chatting, people-watching, generally mucking about and not getting up to very much at all. Then eventually we would make our way back to Woodside Park and surrender the return portion of the ticket to the guard at the barrier, who little suspected that we had made something like a thirty-mile round trip for three hours in the meantime, as the guests of London Transport. Talk about budget entertainment. It was perfectly warm down there too, even in winter, at no extra cost, increasing the bargain element. Who needed the internet?

  But now we were grown-ups. We took the Underground from Woodside Park and rose to the surface at Camden Town, where we had to find our way to the Camden Town Theatre – not somewhere we had ever been before. And once there, we queued up in the street and then were finally let into the auditorium – the first time I had set foot in a proper theatre. Obviously, at this point it was set up for a radio recording, but it had once been a music-hall theatre and it seemed kind of musty and yet vividly grand to me.

  We were buzzing with anticipation. The Goons lived in t
he radio, as far as we were concerned. We knew what Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe looked like, but we had a less clear image of Peter Sellers. To watch them doing the show was therefore going to be revelatory in all sorts of ways. I remember things starting with Milligan and Secombe bringing on a large sign saying ‘The Goon Show’ and placing it carefully on the stage. Of course, it was upside down, which set the tone. Milligan was in an old sweater, Secombe was in a sports jacket and trousers. There seemed to be no sign of Peter Sellers at that point. The Ray Ellington Quartet struck up the music and then the show started. It began with Secombe, as Neddy Seagoon, pretending to spot a figure off in the distance and saying, ‘Who would be stupid enough to stand right on the edge of a cliff?’ And at this point a slim man in an immaculate suit stepped forward from the rear of the stage and, script in hand, said, ‘Hellew, my dellings.’

  Here, finally, was Sellers. And it was such a contrast – this ridiculous, high-pitched comic voice coming out of this elegantly dressed, sophisticated man. And it’s still one of the most impressive entrances I’ve ever seen in a theatre. The interplay between the three of them from that point on was magical. One of them would come across a joke and corpse. (‘To corpse’: theatrical term meaning to be overcome by laughter at an inappropriate moment. Said to derive from the ancient sight of an actor shuddering while pretending to play dead.) Then he would try to get back to the script, and the more he tried to get back, the more the other two wound him up further, and the more the other two wound him up, the more the audience laughed. Micky and I were ecstatic afterwards, totally wired by what we had witnessed.

  My fandom endured. In 1963, I went to the Duke of York’s Theatre to see Spike Milligan in The Bedsitting Room, the satirical play he wrote with John Antrobus. I had never seen anyone come out of character onstage and address the audience, as Milligan did that night. I was in the fourth row of the stalls and Milligan spotted a girl at the front, eating sweets. He broke off to ask her what she was eating and whether he could have one – which she gladly gave him. He leaned forward over the footlights and took a sweet from the box she offered up to him. He bit into it and held it up to his ear, saying, in a squeaky voice that might well have been coming from the sweet, ‘Help! I’m a prisoner in a Malteser factory!’ It was the most avantgarde thing I had witnessed. Afterwards I went and hung around in a small knot of people at the back of the theatre, until Milligan came out and sat on the steps for a while, when I was able to get his autograph on a scrap of paper. That autograph meant a lot to me for years after.