David Jason: My Life

by David Jason

  The fee I was paid for rendering these services over the course of three days, incidentally, was £74 2s 8d – an exponential leap from the £15 I had earned for a week’s theatre at Bromley. If I hadn’t already known that television was where the money was, I certainly did after that. If one could get by in the theatre on £15 a week, £74 was no slap in the face with a wet lettuce.

  That Christmas, at Lodge Lane, the family gathered around the box to witness my broadcast debut. There was my mum, my dad, my sister June, my mum’s sister Aunt Ede and my cousin Ken. I’m sure they were as made up as anyone could be to see a close relative of theirs swinging from a cable, in uniform. Mind you, you have to bear in mind that TV was very unsophisticated at the time, and that the only close-ups you saw were of the stars. The rest of us were in rather blurry long-shots. Afterwards, I gave my parents a relaxed, smiling look, designed to convey the message, ‘You see – it seemed like a big risk at the time, but I told you I’d be all right, career-wise.’ And they gave me a look back designed to conceal their probably still raging anxiety.

  That wasn’t the only time in my career that I bumped into Terry Scott. Not long after this, thanks to David Croft and his memory of my trolley business in Diplomatic Baggage, I got a one-off part as a waiter in Hugh and I, the very popular comedy series that Scott starred in, along with Hugh Lloyd, before he went on to even greater sitcom glory in Terry and June. My part involved a couple of lines and some of the aforementioned funny business from the stage play. Before this piece of business there was some dialogue exchanged between my character and a couple in the restaurant. In rehearsal, the crew were clearly enjoying it – often the first sign you get that something is going to work. It was at that point that I noticed Scott taking the director aside and having a little whisper in his ear. And the next thing I knew the director was coming over to me and saying, ‘You know what? I’m not sure that line works particularly well there. I think we’d better give it to Terry.’ Of course, I had to do as directed, and got on with it, like the diligent new boy that I was. But inside I was thinking, ‘Ah, so that’s how it works, is it?’ – and other much less charitable things.

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, AT BROMLEY Rep, the Christmas pantomime was Aladdin – and once again a police uniform was called for. I played Flip, from Flip and Flop, the comedy policemen. Flop was Robert Fyfe, who much later played Howard Sibshaw, the funny old fart on the bike in Last of the Summer Wine. Fyfe was a Bromley regular who lived locally enough to walk into the theatre.

  I’m not sure that the roles of Flip and Flop necessarily drove either Robert or me to our best or most complex work. Indeed, if there had been an award for least funny comedy policemen in a pantomime setting, my feeling is we would have stormed it that year. Then again, being so unfunny that you almost came back round the other side as funny was part of what panto was about and a big reason people bought tickets. I don’t think we sold anyone short.

  Anyway, my happy reward for these efforts was that David Paulson (who ran Bromley Rep and was known, broadly across the company, as ‘Poofy Paulson’ on account of his fine head of wavy hair) put me on a year-long contract – one of the last such contracts that Bromley offered. Shortly after that the idea of contracts went out the window, because they realised it was more economical and flexible to recruit actors piecemeal.

  Fortuitous timing, then – and wonderful training. I was playing a different character every two weeks and being met head-on by all sorts of different challenges. In Murder at the Vicarage, for example, adapted from the Agatha Christie whodunnit, I had to play the part of a haemophiliac vicar who, on his first entrance, discovers a dead body slumped over his writing desk and utters the immortal line, ‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’ Every time I did this, the audience laughed. It didn’t matter what inflection I put on it, whether I shouted it or muttered it, whether I gave it the full Shakespearean welly or spoke it without a flinch in my finest stab at Eastern European minimalism – a titter ran through the auditorium. It drove me nuts. I ended up asking senior members of the cast, ‘What can I do to stop them laughing?’ The reply in each case was, ‘Nothing, love. You’re stuffed.’ For as long as the play had been staged, it seemed, that line had got a laugh.

  But there wasn’t much time to dwell on it, of course. Soon after that I hung up the dog collar and pulled on a pair of cut-off trousers to play the lad Jack Hawkins in Treasure Island. The part of Long John Silver in that production was occupied in high style by the great Paul Bacon. Paul was a wonderful actor with a real, deep, actorly voice, a great fop of grey hair and a more gloriously theatrical manner in real life than you could have scripted. He had achieved a degree of fame in Australia, where he had been on television in a soap opera. But he had come to London to become famous globally, because, in those days, that was the route you took. And thus the trajectory of his career had brought him from Sydney to Bromley Rep – and made him quite the local star. Sometimes, in a break from rehearsals, I would pop up the road with Paul to a cheap tea room for a pot of tea and a bun, and every now and again he would be stopped on the street by Bromley theatregoers. He was the darling of the rep and elderly ladies would say to him, ‘Oh, Mr Bacon, I do enjoy your work.’ And he would say, ‘Oh, my dear, how very kind of you to say so …’ and courteously give them five minutes of his time. I was agog in his company.

  He was also extremely committed to his art. To achieve plausible one-leggedness, as the role of Long John Silver required, Paul had his leg strapped up tight behind his thigh, which almost crippled him in reality. Every time he came offstage, there were two people waiting in the wings to unstrap him and ease his leg down, so the circulation could start returning to his foot.

  Our Treasure Island also nobly refused the option of a stuffed parrot in order to go for a real one instead – a huge macaw, a wonderful creature, hired from the local pet shop. However, sometimes it would play, and sometimes it wouldn’t. It was quite compliant about sitting on Paul’s shoulder – and extremely compliant about shitting all down the back of Paul’s costume. Some nights, though, the parrot would get bored and express its boredom by turning round and showing its arse to the audience. Alternatively it would launch an attack on the big hooped gold earrings that Paul was wearing, sometimes managing to yank them out altogether. And sometimes it would go for the earring, miss, and get Paul’s ear instead. Paul would frequently end the night with big lumps taken out of his lobes.

  Of course, for as long as the bird was onstage the audience would be watching it, rather than the play, so the entire cast knew the indignity of being upstaged by a parrot. But Paul knew that indignity most keenly of all. There was a moment where he had to perch the parrot on a balustrade for a while, and then later collect it by putting out his arm. If the parrot was in the right mood, it would walk up Paul’s arm and back to his shoulder again, earning a giant round of applause. If the parrot was in the wrong mood, it wouldn’t budge – much to Paul’s increasing irritation. But he was a pro, and he got on with it, bloodied ears or no bloodied ears – an example to us all, whatever our walk of life.

  Those Bromley days were a fiery old baptism altogether, because while you were doing your current production at night, you were rehearsing your next one during the day. New scripts were constantly having to be learned – something which I have always found very effortful – and the threat of accidentally and ruinously dropping a passage from Treasure Island into a Saturday matinee of, say, Hay Fever was ever-present. Or, perhaps even worse, dropping a passage of Hay Fever into a Saturday matinee of Treasure Island.

  Rehearsals generally ran from ten fifteen until four in the afternoon, when you would break for tea and then get ready to be onstage for curtain-up at seven thirty. And given that I was still living with my parents at Lodge Lane when this contract began, by the time I had driven home it was about eleven thirty or midnight and I’d have to be up again at eight fifteen to be ready to drive back down to south London for the next morning’s start.

/>   Eventually, to be nearer the theatre and to start growing up and being a normal adult-type person, I moved into a flat above a hairdresser’s in Thornton Heath. The hairdresser’s in question belonged to my brother Arthur and his wonderful new wife, Joy, whose own towering beehive hairdo in those days was an absolute work of art. The business was named, without fear of confusion, ‘Joy’s’. Arthur and Joy had decided they no longer wanted to live above the shop and, with things going well for both of them, they had put a deposit down on a place on a new housing estate nearby. They offered me the flat at a generously low rent. It was the first rung on the ladder to independence. Every night I would unlock the front door, head through the darkened salon, past the big dryers and, amid the sticky scent of lacquer and shampoo, climb the stairs to bed. At last, no doubt to my parents’ intense relief, I had flown the nest – and at the age of twenty-six, probably not a moment too soon.

  In Aladdin I had acted with an actress called Frances Barlow. She was only five foot four, so even I was a bit taller than her. I had seen her in a musical and had been smitten with her and when we acted together I finally plucked up the courage to ask her on a date. We went out for quite a long time in the mid-1960s. She lived with her father, out near Heathrow Airport, so, again, my Mini Van clocked up quite a few miles. Our relationship ran along very easily and pleasurably. Then one day, when, quite by coincidence, we had both been auditioning in the same building, we went for lunch. Somehow the conversation ended up with us discussing the possibility of us moving in together and things becoming more permanent. And the more I thought about it, the more it terrified me. At that stage in my life, I thought of myself as wedded to my career and I was paranoid to an absurd degree about getting tied down and trapped and stopped. Moving in with someone would have scuppered my future – or so my panicked mind thought. So we finished.

  This was a pattern which was to repeat itself several times during those early years when I was struggling to get a footing in the business. I went out with girls and became close to them, but at the first sign of anything more permanent or of the emotional connection strengthening, I would break away and flee, as fast as I could. I wasn’t just phobic about commitment, in the traditional male way, I was phobic about wrecking my chances of making it as an actor, a project from which I rarely relaxed in those days and which preoccupied me to the exclusion of pretty much all else – including, I can only confess, the feelings of the woman I happened to be with at the time. (Frances went on to work as a singer on a Greek cruise liner. And the ship’s captain, who was obviously no fool, invited her to dine and they were wed, I’m very happy to say.)

  Back at the theatre, I found myself cast in Sheridan’s The Rivals. I played Bob Acres and the aforementioned grand thespian, Paul Bacon, played Sir Anthony Absolute. Paul and I ended up sharing a dressing room. He would have been in his forties at this time, and I was twenty-six – but a young twenty-six, and knowing very little, really, about the ways of the world. I certainly had no idea what homosexuality was. I just thought he was very theatrical and a lovely man who could hand down his experience to me. For example, the Restoration was a period that Paul knew well and for The Rivals he taught me all sorts of tricks – how to bow and how to stand and how to shape your hands in the appropriate style. He was a great and generous teacher and I loved him for that.

  What I didn’t realise was quite how much he liked me.

  One day Paul said, ‘You must come round for supper and we can go through our lines together.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that would be a great help – lovely.’ He turned out to be residing in the less than grand circumstances of a tiny Bromley bedsit, and apparently living out of a suitcase. Still, there was a stove in the corner on which he cooked us a wonderful meal, and we talked about the play, did a reading, and sat in the room’s two armchairs having a glass of wine or two. And then, as the hour wore on, Paul rose from his chair, came and sat on the floor in front of me, put his arms across my knees and gazed up at me.

  I thought, ‘This is odd. This is what you’d do if you were a girl. Or certainly if you were a girl in a movie.’

  At that point, Paul started to run his hand up my leg. At this, the hairs rose on the back of my neck. I remember feeling that it was very important to keep talking – to keep talking and, almost as if not noticing, push away that hand. Which I did. But back the hand came, creeping further along my thigh. So I, still talking fast, pushed it away again. Back it came.

  Eventually, Paul said, ‘You know you want this, dear.’ To which, I replied, ‘Actually, I should probably be getting off home.’

  I stood up and stepped round him towards the door. But in that instant he had somehow leapt between me and the exit. I still don’t know how he did that – how he got from a reclining position on the floor to a standing position at the door in the click of a finger. It was like magic – the sort of thing David Copperfield might have done, in his 1980s pomp. I thought there must have been two of him – perhaps a body double, working as a plant.

  And then he put his arms around me and started to kiss me.

  I remembered at that point an expression I had heard girls use: ‘His hands were everywhere.’ Now I knew exactly what they meant. No sooner had you taken one hand out of here than another one went in there. He was like an octopus.

  Pressed back against the door, I eventually got a decent hold on both his forearms, held them tight and said, as firmly as I could, ‘Paul, I don’t want to lose your friendship, but I really must go home. Thank you for a nice evening.’

  We never mentioned it again and our friendship, blessedly, continued to thrive. Paul died in 1995, without reaching the level in the profession that he desired and deserved. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he found household-name fame at a remove, as the voice of Hector in the hugely popular children’s glove-puppet show Hector’s House. I was really pleased for him, although, thanks to that night in a Bromley bedsit, I could never hear that floppy-eared dog saying ‘I’m a great big dreamy old Hector’ in quite the way I was intended to.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A short stay in a cheap motel. The Book of Genesis, revisited. And how I did eventually become a pirate.

  IT’S IMPORTANT TO demonstrate range and flexibility in your early years as an actor, so it’s with some pride that I now relate how, within a month and a half of launching myself onto the nation’s screens for a few seconds as a harnessed policeman, I was back again, appearing for a few seconds as an unharnessed criminal.

  This was in February 1966, during the first series of Softly Softly, a CID-oriented drama serial, spun off from the BBC’s popular cop show Z-Cars. Softly Softly starred Stratford Johns, freshly promoted to the plain-clothes force as Detective Superintendent Charles Barlow – not that the star of the show was anywhere near the scene that I was in. My second moment of nationally broadcast action saw me play the part of the co-driver of a getaway van – a character imaginatively named ‘Smith’. Actually, the verb ‘play’ might be a bit of an exaggeration here. I’m not sure I was that convincing. I was meant to be dozing in the van’s passenger seat and to be startled awake by the arrival at the window of a policeman with a torch. When I watched it back later on the television, I almost died with mortification. I woke up in that van quicker than any human has ever awoken anywhere. It wasn’t as if someone had shone a torch on me: it was as if someone had connected my privates to the torch’s battery. I should like to point out, though, that I was used to directors helping an actor to draw the nuance out of a character, as tended to happen in the theatre. In television, clearly, you were supposed to know all that already.

  Anyway, given the absence of wires and the fact that absolutely no one in the cast, so far as I can remember, was wearing a goose outfit, I guess we would have to call this my first venture into serious televised drama. Incidentally, the actor who was sat beside me, playing the driver (and perfectly convincingly, with dialogue and everything), was Brian Wilde, whom I would later come across as Mr Barrowcl
ough, the ineffectual prison warden, in Porridge.

  After my abrupt wake-up on Softly Softly, I wasn’t entrusted with another television role for six months – until August. And even then, critics of a harsh frame of mind might have said the words ‘role’ and ‘television’ were something of an overstatement. The appearance we’re talking about was in the soap opera Crossroads.

  Ah, the Crossroads Motel. Even now, just the mention of the word can cast a chilly hand around an actor’s kidneys – and not only his kidneys. ‘The actors’ graveyard’ they used to call it – a hole into which many a promising career disappeared, screaming, and where you were actively encouraged to bring your own shovel. The motel had opened in November 1964 and already, by the summer of 1966 when I checked in, it had become a byword for low production values and – I’m sorry to relate – iffy acting. Of course, that’s a terribly sweeping generalisation about a series in which a lot of the performances and a lot of the storytelling were really good. In defence of both the production staff and the cast, most of the show’s failures to hit the mark were the result of doing everything in a blind hurry. The series was running at the heart-attack rate of five half-hour episodes per week. In 1967 the producers admitted partial defeat and scaled it back to four episodes in order to give themselves – and everyone else – a bit of breathing space. Three episodes per week was perhaps a more reasonable proposition, but that didn’t happen until 1980, by which time everyone was completely knackered and the programme only had six more years to run. But no one was making allowances for that. Crossroads had become an open goal for satire.

  And yet, for all that, it was a big hit, a television juggernaut – massively popular, the ITV network’s second most-watched show after Coronation Street, and sometimes even capable of nudging ahead of Corrie in the ratings. (It was also, let us not forget, the favourite programme of Mary Wilson, the wife of the then prime minister, Harold Wilson. Could this be the same Harold Wilson who tried to stop my dear mate Malcolm Taylor from running down the country’s currency supplies by leaving Heathrow with more than £50 about his person? I believe it could.) All in all, the show must have been getting at least as much right as it was getting wrong. I wasn’t in a position to be snooty about the offer of work on Crossroads, but, more to the point, I wasn’t inclined to be, either. To me, it meant continuity of work and also an invaluable opportunity to learn about working in front of television cameras, which is such a different discipline from acting in the theatre. I would have been mad not to seize it.