by David Jason
So, now I’d tried it, at least. But that was it for me. Once was enough. It had been funny, and even euphoric. But at the heart of it was the thought that I didn’t have control, and that aspect of it I found frightening, rather than liberating. Obviously it’s about the kind of person you are. Some people are good at letting go, and some people aren’t. But perhaps it was also something about being involved in comedy. If you’re a comic actor, the idea of people laughing at absolutely anything is actually rather worrying. You want to know why people are laughing. You want to be in control of the reason they laugh. You want to know it’s coming from something you’ve done – something you could do again if you had to. The idea of relinquishing control of the laughter to a substance … I couldn’t get on with that at all. Call me timid or old-fashioned if you must, but me and drugs didn’t mix, and from that moment on, I made a pact with myself: sink or swim, it had to be me.
* * *
WHILE WE’RE ON the subject of artificial stimulants, I should perhaps relate how me and alcohol learned to be careful around one another as well. Tales of tippling actors are legion, of course. Many, I’m sure, are the greats (and even more numerous the not-so-greats) who have found that, while out onstage, it helps to have a little something coursing through the system. I was lucky to get a salutary lesson in this area very early in my career.
It happened in the mid-to-late sixties, while I was on tour with a theatre production in Glasgow. Brian Izzard, a flouncy and flamboyant television producer with a large amount of hair (certainly at the back, if not at the front), happened to be in town and, having seen the show I was in, he invited me to meet him for lunch the next day so that we could ‘discuss a few projects’.
I was more than happy to join him. The idea of going to lunch in order to ‘discuss a few projects’ still seemed fabulously romantic to me then, and almost chic – a highly desirable feature of this new life as an actor that I had signed up to. Plus, when you were on tour, the offer of a free meal was never to be declined. It was one of the reasons why, in those early days, I was always delighted when my agent came out to see me in far-flung places around the country, which she loyally did. I knew she’d take me to dinner afterwards and I’d be living high on the hotel restaurant’s hog for once – choosing roast beef and all the trimmings, most likely, and not stinting on the starter and the dessert. Not forgetting, it goes without saying, her warm and exceptional company and her tender concern for all areas of my professional and personal well-being.
Anyway, the producer and I met at some suitably appointed eaterie and, while I browsed the menu for roast beef, he called for a bottle of wine. ‘Oh, why not?’ I found myself saying, as he heartily charged my glass, prior to heartily recharging it barely a few moments later. Before long, over the main course, bottle number one had been drained and my amiable companion was ordering another. ‘Very nice,’ I agreed. Bottle number two also seemed to go down rather smoothly. The occasion had now taken on a warm and comforting glow, which by no means receded with the arrival of bottle number three. Come the pudding course, the producer suggested that maybe a glass of dessert wine would round things off most pleasantly, and I didn’t disagree with him – even though I had never heard of dessert wine and had no idea what it was.
Somewhere around three thirty in the afternoon, I emerged from the restaurant, followed soon afterwards by my legs. The producer and I shook hands and vowed to meet again to take our discussions about projects further – though, to be honest, the details of those discussions and those projects were already beginning to be a blurred and misty memory, as of something that happened in a far-off place, to someone else entirely. I then turned and, relying almost entirely on instinct, made my way back to my digs.
It was about four by now. I lay down on the bed and watched the overhead lampshade begin to perform sickening circles around the room. Clearly there was no way sleep could come to me in this state, so I sat hunched forward on the edge of the bed, rising occasionally to walk the room’s tiny perimeter when the dizziness became too much.
At five, not noticeably more sober, I headed to the theatre where, in just two and a half hours, I would be required to take to the stage and play a part which, alas, could not, by any scope of the imagination, allow me to pass myself off as shit-faced. I asked for a big jug of black coffee to be brought to the dressing room and swigged it down, while pacing up and down. In makeup, I passed the time breathing deeply, hoping the make-up girl would interpret this as some kind of vocal exercise rather than as embarrassing evidence that I was as pissed as a newt.
By curtain-up, I had gathered enough self-possession to step into the lights – and although portions of the ensuing evening seemed to vanish without me really noticing what was going on in them, I was able to leave the stage at the end of the play (and the theatre almost immediately afterwards), congratulating myself on my inner strength and resourcefulness in having got away with it. But, of course, what else is the gift of acting, if not the ability to convince other people that you are something other than what you actually are?
Except I hadn’t. The next day members of the cast came up to me with worried expressions on their faces and said, ‘What was up with you last night? Were you pissed?’ I had missed cues, interrupted speeches, stumbled over lines, and over my own feet, not to mention the feet of other people, and generally turned in a complete and utter howler.
Consider me well and truly warned of the perils of mixing drink and acting. Never again.
* * *
IN JULY 1965, mindful of my glowing and almost certainly box-office-boosting reviews for ‘a small but well-acted part’ in Noël Coward’s South Sea Bubble, Bromley Rep re-employed me – this time in Diplomatic Baggage, a farce by John Chapman. My role? Hotel porter. (Porters and waiters: a theme was very quickly emerging in my early work. Lots of actors wait tables while ‘resting’ between jobs. Not me. I did electrics while ‘resting’, and waited tables while I was working.)
But I was a lot more involved this time – a greater part of the plot, without any artificial or controversial expansion of the character by the director. Being a sixties farce, and typical of the genre, the play was all about going through doors and in and out of windows and cupboards – very much of the classic ‘oops, here comes the wife, better climb in the wardrobe with the mistress and the vicar’ school of theatre. And it got me involved in one bit of business in particular that, in many ways, set the mould for much of my early career.
What happened was, I wheeled a trolley of room-service food into a hotel room, where our philandering protagonist was busy entertaining his mistress. And then I exited. Soon after this, and at the most sensitive moment in the ensuing seduction scene, of course, the philanderer’s wife calls up from reception. (I did say this was typical farce material.) Now in a flap, the philanderer resolves to conceal the mistress in the trolley, hidden by the tablecloth – as you would. Or certainly as you would if you were a character in a British farce. And then he calls up the porter (me) to take the trolley away.
So, in I come and grab a hold of the trolley, ready to whisk it out – only to discover that, for some reason unknown to me (although known to the audience), it is now unexpectedly, almost unbudgeably heavy. What I worked up for this moment was a huge pratfall – one in which, clinging to the trolley’s handle, I appeared to be entirely horizontal at one point, hovering briefly in the air before crashing completely to the floor. Then I got up and began to inspect the trolley suspiciously for the cause of its additional burden – nervously circuiting it, tentatively lifting the lid off the silver salver resting on top of it, and so on, but, of course, never looking in the obvious place.
All this stuff got a big reaction from the audience. It also got a big reaction from the local paper. ‘For me David Jason stole the show,’ reported the drama critic of the Bromley Press. ‘The physical demands made upon him are tremendous and one wonders whether he can keep it up to the end of the fortnight’s run. As the Paris
Hotel porter his acting is superb and the round of applause he received on Monday was thoroughly deserved.’
I did, indeed, survive the physical demands of the fortnight, I’m pleased to be able to report – and with little more than superficial bruising across about 85 per cent of my body’s surface area and some mild hip ache. And, to an extent, the die was cast by that routine. It’s what I became known for: introducing additional physicality into farces. If you wanted an actor who could fall over while trying to move something – or even fall over while not trying to move something – I was a pretty decent bet. If you were looking for someone to play Hamlet, on the other hand – well, it might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the chances of my career setting off down that path were quietly extinguished the minute I showed I could fall trying to move that trolley in Bromley.
My agent, Ann, came along on one night of the run with her husband, a television producer, director and writer – a certain David Croft, later associated with Dad’s Army, Are You Being Served?, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, Hi-de-Hi! and ’Allo ’Allo or, to put it another way, more than three-quarters of the most successful sitcoms made for British television in the seventies and eighties and an extraordinarily high proportion of the greatest comedy hits of all time. David saw me in Diplomatic Baggage and that piece of business with the trolley chimed with him. He bore it in mind for later, as we’ll see.
* * *
AS HER MAJESTY the Queen so rightly put it, in her Christmas broadcast to the nation in 1965: ‘Every year the familiar pattern of Christmas unfolds. The sights and the customs and festivities may seem very much the same from one year to another, and yet to families and individuals each Christmas is slightly different.’
That was certainly true for my family that year. All the usual sights, customs and festivities were in place: the chicken (cheaper than turkey), the tree, the decorations. But it was the first Yuletide season when, in addition to all that, they had been able to gather together and see one of their own kith and kin on the television, dressed in a policeman’s outfit, hanging from the ceiling. Slightly different, or what?
The location for this once-in-a-lifetime Christmas scene was the BBC pantomime – my first ever appearance on the small screen, and clinched while I was still a nobody, just eight months after my professional stage debut, a turn-up which must have been down to some pretty smart work by my agent. She must have really upped her game since getting me the part as an extra in the advertisement at the racetrack. It was the habit of the BBC in those days to organise a pantomime for Christmas – in this case, Mother Goose. They would sprinkle the cast with TV favourites, and film it, as live, in a traditional theatre, in front of an audience, and then broadcast it on Boxing Day, so that viewers at home could feel they were getting the full panto experience without leaving their armchairs. In the mid-sixties, the BBC panto could expect to get an audience well in excess of 15 million people. (You’re going to tell me, perhaps, that there wasn’t a lot else on. I’m not here to argue. I’m simply setting down the figures.) Accordingly, I was pretty thrilled to get the nod – and still thrilled on the morning of 17 December as I headed for the Golders Green Hippodrome (very handy for those of us who lived just up the road in Lodge Lane).
The big stars of the show that year were Terry Scott and Norman Vaughan. Vaughan had taken over from Bruce Forsyth as the host of Sunday Night at the London Palladium – just about the biggest show on television at that point in time – and would later have a stint as the presenter of The Golden Shot. His catchphrases at the time were ‘Swinging!’ and, its opposite, ‘Dodgy!’ It was still the case, in the mid-sixties, that a comedian had to have a catchphrase, just as it had been in earlier times for Tommy Trinder (‘You lucky people’), for Arthur Askey (‘Hello, playmates!’), for Arthur English, (‘Mum, Mum – they’re laughing at me again’) and countless others.
Terry Scott was a giant star at this point – and, bless him, a fairly sizeable pain in the … well, let me put it another way: he didn’t suffer fools. It seemed to me that fame had temporarily exhausted his patience with lesser mortals, as fame sometimes will. He was certainly way above little people like me.
Someone I warmed to straight away, though, was Jon Pertwee – later, of course, one of the greatest of the Doctor Whos, but then most famous for his part in the BBC radio series The Navy Lark. We chatted and he gave me some very sage advice about avoiding productions with too many comedians in them. Jon had been in the 1963 London stage production of the musical farce A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, with Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Connor. Apparently, partway through rehearsals the director had called the cast together and told them, ‘If you carry on at this rate, you’ll be acting in the theatre next door.’ Members of the cast were constantly moving themselves into a position just behind the shoulder of the last person to speak – it being the comic’s instinct to take the dominant position upstage. Eventually all the action was taking place against the backcloth. I filed this away as something to watch out for.
Jon also ended up showing me some photographs he had of himself in the swimming pool at his place in Spain. I remember thinking that was pretty swish – having a place in Spain. On Jon’s shoulders in one of these photos of sun-drenched bliss was his young son, Sean. The next time I saw that little chap he was a full-grown man, standing on no one’s shoulders, playing a villain opposite me in A Touch of Frost. Sean Pertwee turned out to be a very fine actor.
Also present for the BBC panto was Lauri Lupino Lane, the son of the great music-hall actor Lupino Lane, and the undisputed living master of the legendary wallpaper routine – that eternal homage to DIY gone wrong, which could be shoehorned into almost any show, via some subtle line such as, ‘Ooh, I think the kitchen needs redecorating.’ Then out would come the wallpaper, the buckets of paste and the decorating table, and slapstick chaos would duly ensue. There’s a climactic moment where Lauri Lupino Lane’s bowler hat gets filled with wallpaper paste and the hat has a hole in it, so that when he forces it down on his head, the paste fountains out of the top of it. Never fails.
And then there was Kay Lyell, who played Priscilla the Goose. Kay was, perhaps, the most celebrated panto goose of her generation. It was her speciality, and, indeed, the work of her lifetime. She had her own outfit, or ‘goose skin’, which was magnificent and came, of course, with full, top-of-the-range egg-laying capabilities, which I’m sure gave her the edge in this particular marketplace. Kay was said to live in a tiny top-floor flat in Covent Garden and to keep the goose skin in the bath – the only place big enough to store it unfolded. Every time she wanted a bath she had to whip the goose out and lay it somewhere else temporarily. And then, when she had finished, she would dry out the bath and return the goose to its rightful storage place. Personally, I think I might have found that rather tiresome after a while, but, I guess, if you work as a pantomime goose for long enough, you eventually acquire bombproof levels of patience, and Kay seemed to find the arrangement perfectly acceptable.
In rehearsal, she wore only the bottom half of the outfit, which rather let the light in on the magic, I suppose. She waddled about the place in what was essentially a pair of fluffy pyjama bottoms ending in rubber gaiters and big webbed feet. I have to say, she was very adept at walking in those feet without making them flap and smack the floor like a diver in flippers, which would have spoiled the effect. I have to say, also, that the work of the Goose Woman was of more than merely passing interest to me. Not many months before this, at the Incognito Theatre Group, I had had the rare distinction of playing the part of a raven – a role in which I had immersed myself by going to study the ravens in situ at the Tower of London. Executing a passable raven, you might be surprised to learn, is actually quite complicated and physically demanding, particularly in the way they scuttle forwards. There’s more buttock-action than you might think.
Now, I have no wish to run down posthumously an undisputed legend of British pantomime. But, if I may be
frank, her obvious skill with the feet aside, I was a little disappointed with Kay’s goose. From the legs up, she played it very straight, in my opinion – very much a no-frills, no-nonsense kind of goose. She did exactly what it said on the feathers. But I’m probably quibbling uncharitably. It obviously hadn’t hindered her career.
I, meanwhile, played the King of Gooseland, that marvellous, if quite negligible role. And, along with Terry Scott and Jon Pertwee, I ended up in a section of the show called ‘The Flying Policemen’. We were attached to harnesses in Kirby’s Flying Ballet, and we all swung about, hung from the grid, dressed as coppers, flying around and bumping into each other to a piece of music that was so well known at the time that I can’t remember it. Nothing more to it than that, really, but somehow the sight of fully uniformed police officers solemnly flying above a stage seemed to garner a big laugh.
Can I just mention the sheer agony of the Kirby harness? It featured two leather straps, which were passed under the groin area and up the sides of the legs, and, after a while, the weight of your body hanging from its wire would cause those straps to close in on one another, in a slow scissor-like motion. Pain of a rare and intimate order would be felt and, imperceptibly, your voice would begin to rise through the octaves. Words can’t express the joy and relief you felt when your feet touched earth again and the feeling began to return to your nether regions.
Reflect on it from my point of view, though: for those brief moments in-harness, plucked from the obscurity of a very early career in repertory theatre, I was quite literally rubbing shoulders with the greats. And also arms and knees. And even, in some of the more extreme collisions, thighs.
