by David Jason
‘My … range?’ I said.
‘Yes. You know – how high you can sing, how low you can sing?’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘Do you know the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz?’
I said, hesitatingly, ‘Er, yes …’
They said, ‘Could you just give us a couple of lines from the beginning?’
I said, ‘Bloody hell. Must I?’
Actually I didn’t say that. But it was what I was thinking. You don’t have to know much about music to know that ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ starts with a big sweep, from low to high. The first word of the song is ‘Somewhere’ and the distance from the ‘some’ to the ‘where’ is not a journey for the faint-hearted. It’s quite a test, even in the privacy of your own bathroom, let alone on a stage in front of someone who was possibly Ned Sherrin.
The pianist gave me a note. I went for it, missed, and found a clutch of other notes instead which I then chased as hard as I could in the approximate direction of the song. I must have sounded like a leaf-blower.
‘Thank you,’ they said, again.
I didn’t get the part.
But I did learn an important lesson about myself. I can’t sing.
Hang on, though … didn’t I already know that?
* * *
I HAD A better time at an audition for a production of Peter Pan that I went for in late 1966. There was no singing involved, nobody asked to test my range and I ended up landing a part as one of the pirates. That might not sound much, but this particular Peter Pan was a pretty prestigious production. It was booked to open on a glorious set (a towering mast, a multi-decked pirate ship, the works) at the Strand Theatre in London – my first experience of playing in the West End. And then, after a three-week run, it was scheduled to tour the country – my first experience of that, as well. I was in starry company, too. Peter Pan was Julia Lockwood, the daughter of the famous film actress Margaret Lockwood, and the owner of one of the world’s most wonderful smiles. Captain Hook was Ron Moody.
This was a bit of a dream for me. I was already a big fan of Moody. I had been to the original London stage production of the musical Oliver! and seen him play Fagin. (The film version, which made him enormously famous, came later, a year after the Peter Pan production, in 1968.) A wonderful bit of business he did onstage that night was lodged in my mind forever. It was a scene where Fagin was counting money on a table, very quickly sorting these coins into piles and slapping them down on the surface so that, as well as being a mesmerising piece of quick-handedness, the whole routine had this brilliant noise and rhythm to it – chik-chik-chik-chik, slap! chik-chik-chik-chik, slap! Superb.
Watching him work from close up was a real privilege. The same goes for working with Julia Lockwood, though she could be quite sharp. I was in the wings alongside her one night when Ron made an exit after a scene with his manservant, Smee. The scene had ended with Captain Hook grandly putting out an arm for his cloak – but Smee is standing behind Hook, dutifully holding up the cloak on the other side. So Smee meekly jumps round to take the cloak to the extended arm. But by the time he gets there, Hook has put that arm down and extended the other one. There was a little bit of toing and froing like this, and some knockabout stuff, with Hook getting more and more huffy and Smee wincing and getting into more and more of a mess, before Hook snatched the cloak, and off they both came.
As Ron passed Julia backstage, I heard her say to him: ‘There’s a round there.’ Meaning she thought the moment could get a round of applause, if it were done properly. People had laughed, but they hadn’t applauded. ‘Donald always got a round there,’ she added. She was referring to Donald Sinden, who had played Hook in another production of Peter Pan that Julia was in.
This clearly got to Ron. He didn’t like coming off worse in a comparison with Donald Sinden. He interpreted it as a challenge. Over the next two or three performances, he really began to work at that moment with Smee and the cloak – expanding it and eking the maximum amount of humour out of it. Sure enough, at around the fourth attempt, he left the stage to applause. He had got his round.
Ron was a sensational performer altogether and a terrific improviser when things went wrong. One of Hook’s props was a tin lamp, meant to look like a candle behind glass, which was actually battery-operated, for convenience purposes, with a switch on it. At one point Ron was supposed to enter in the darkness with the lamp switched off and shout, in despair, ‘Something blew out the lamp.’ One night, unfortunately, something hadn’t blown out the lamp. It was still on. The audience began to laugh. Ron looked very slowly from the lamp to the audience and said, ‘Something tried to blow out the lamp.’ He got a round of applause for that, too.
You couldn’t help but learn from the experience of being around people like that. Indeed, this whole period was a huge learning curve. One very important lesson I picked up by observation during that production: never be rude, arrogant or otherwise objectionable to the member of the backstage crew whose job it is to fly you on the wire. One of the Lost Boys came to understand this the hard way. He had begun to get above himself, as the production wore on, and he was being a bit high and mighty with the crew – bossing people about, complaining if things weren’t exactly as they were meant to be. Big mistake. When you’re all harnessed up and ready for a flying scene, you’re in a very vulnerable position. You’re basically a puppet – attached to strings that someone else is in control of. Even when you were getting on perfectly well with the crew, they would often muck about and put the fear of God into you. You would be standing in the wings, wired up and waiting to go, and the person responsible for hauling on the wire would just gently lift you up onto your toes, making you panic and think he was about to send you flying out onto the stage before your cue. And then he would equally gently set you back on your feet. And then he would put you up on your toes again, and set you back on your feet again – just twitching the wire, messing with your mind.
The point is, the Lost Boy with the attitude problem had upset the wrong people. One night, for the scene where the Lost Boys flew onto the ship and fought a battle with the pirates, a member of the crew gave that guy’s wire the most almighty tug. He took off like a rocket. Instead of landing gently where he was supposed to land, he went smack into the mast and fluttered down like a smashed butterfly. He then had to sit on the deck in a heap, gathering his senses, while the rest of us fought around him. He was very careful in front of the crew after that.
After the West End run, the show packed up and, with a slightly scaled-down cast, set off on tour. I was enormously excited at the prospect. Indeed, I was so excited that I used it as an excuse to treat myself to a thick fur coat I’d seen hanging in the window of a boutique called Lord John, quite near to the fire station on Shaftesbury Avenue. It was a caramel-coloured coney, with buttons the size of a baby’s head, and it was so huge on me that it had to be taken up at the back to stop it dragging on the ground. When it was buttoned up, I, to all intents and purposes, disappeared and became, instead, a walking teddy bear.
I can’t recall now what I paid for this stately garment but I do know that I flushed as I handed over the cash. I had persuaded myself, though, that, at least to some extent, this was a practical purchase. I reasoned that a big chunk of fur wouldn’t go amiss while out on tour, especially in the colder climes we were set to visit up north, and that it would even service me with an additional bedspread to supply the overnight insulation not provided by certain landladies’ pitifully thin sheets. And I wasn’t wrong about that. Many were the winter nights when sleep was made possible for me in such places as Aberdeen and Newcastle by the primitive method of lumping an animal skin on top of myself.
Deep down, though, I knew that I had bought the coat as a statement. Clothes never really meant all that much to me and, even in the ragingly fashion-conscious sixties, and even though I was located right at the heart of swinging London, were nothing I particularly bothered abo
ut, beyond the odd fancy addition of a jauntily tied silk scarf. But I fancied myself very much the sixties gentleman in that coat – more than that, an actor about town. I wore it until it was completely denuded of fur around the buttons and until the bits of fur that hadn’t dropped off were dry and stiff and only lightly rooted in its cracked leather. That fur served me handsomely as coat and impromptu bedding up and down the British Isles, not just during Peter Pan but for quite a while after. By the end of its life, I looked like a teddy bear that someone had had for eighty years. (And probably smelt a bit like one, as well, but let’s not dwell on that.)
On tour, the atmosphere of a school trip prevailed. The cast travelled together in a hired coach – although not the stars. Julia and Ron went separately. They also stayed in hotels, whereas we had to find our own digs in each city. Transport was provided, in other words, but not accommodation. You would ask around among your fellow actors for tips on the best and cheapest bed-and-breakfast places in which to stay. If that failed, there was always a list of landladies at the stage door. I was to do a lot of time in B&Bs as a touring actor in the early seventies, and I will come on to some of the drawbacks, and even the horrors, in due course. This first time, though, the whole touring life was new to me and I found it all positively romantic.
Julia Lockwood remained a little apart from the more humble among us, even on tour. You would get a ‘Good evening’ as she passed through the theatre, but that was about it. Mostly she spent her time in the company of her travelling female assistant. Ron, on the other hand, was happy to muck in and often came out with us all for a meal after shows. We usually ended up in Indian restaurants because they combined the virtues of being cheap and open until late. It was Ron, I believe, who decided to take decisive action against the amount of random flatulence that seemed to beset our social group, particularly on the way back to digs after these curried meals. Wherever we were, Ron took it upon himself to nominate what he called ‘the flatting post’ – which might be a pillar or a lamp post or a postbox, according to his whim. Subsequently, anyone wishing to vacate themselves of accumulated wind had to be touching the post when they did so or else a punishment would be levied. Ron was good company – always ready with a joke or an impression. He did the best impersonation of Alastair Sim I had ever seen.
On other nights, a few of us pirates would take ourselves out to a nightclub in a forlorn attempt to meet girls. You might get as far as opening a conversation in which a girl asked you where you were from and what you did. ‘I’m an actor,’ you would say, as suavely as you could. ‘I’m up from London.’ That was it. The girls as good as turned their backs and fled. It didn’t sink in with us for ages that, if you came out and said you were a visiting actor, a girl immediately knew you were only there for a week, and were most likely only after one thing. It seemed to be just about the worst calling card you could present. Better by far to say you were an electrician, frankly. Accordingly, we couldn’t pull girls to save our lives when we were on tour. By contrast, the gay members of our fraternity seemed to be having a high old time. It didn’t matter which city we were in, they always seemed to know where to go to find willing company. That used to really wind us up. They would come in the next day with their tales of exotic conquests and exhausting nights of passion, and we’d be spitting feathers.
Frustrations aside, this was a happy time, darkened by only one moment. My piratical prop in one scene of the show was, for some reason, a bugle on a lanyard, which I used to sling around my neck. All the props used to be gathered on the props table backstage, so that you could collect what you needed just before your entrance. I always seemed to be beaten to the props table by a particular pirate who thought it was amazingly amusing to say to me, ‘Do you want your prop?’ And then he would toss the bugle towards me but hold on to the lanyard so that, just as the instrument was reaching me, he could tug it back to himself, out of the air, and catch it. It was quite funny at first, I suppose, but slightly wearing after the twenty-third time. Alas, one night this pirate went through his usual bugle-lobbing routine, but accidentally let the lanyard slip.
Result: I was caught smack on the eyebrow by a big lump of brass trumpet.
A wound immediately opened and began to bleed copiously down the side of my face. The pirate was stricken with remorse. Someone grabbed a cloth, which I wadded up and pressed to my eye before heading off to the stage to complete the scene I was due to play, with one hand held to my eyebrow. After curtain-down, I was straight off to hospital for stitches – and not for the first time in my life, as you may recall. I thought the plaster might present a problem. You don’t see too many pirates with Elastoplast on their faces. Conveniently, however, I found I could draw an eyebrow on the plaster in make-up and nobody was any the wiser.
Lesson: the show goes on, even if someone has just brained you with a musical instrument.
Call us opportunistic, but a number of us pirates, looking ahead in the schedule, noticed that our production of Peter Pan was due to perform onstage at Stratford – the home, of course, of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the very pinnacle of acting excellence. Well, here was a chance which a young pirate with ambition in his heart and an Elastoplast on his eyebrow could surely not miss. Four or five of us duly hatched a plan to call the RSC, mention we were going to be in town, and ask if we could come in and see someone about the possibility of joining the company.
Flaming brass neck, I think you would have to call this. But it’s always been true that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. So one of us rang up – I can’t remember who, but we were all in on it, and very much a team in this respect. To our surprise, the RSC’s response was not ‘Go away and stop wasting our time, you horrible little pirates’; it was ‘OK, then, come in and see us one afternoon when you’re in town’.
General excitement plus much back-slapping ensued. So, come the appointed hour, each of us was seen in turn in a room at the RSC by a kindly young casting director who had taken the time out of her afternoon to meet us. And I, of course, was immediately offered Hamlet, starting that night.
All right, I wasn’t. I couldn’t have done it anyway because I was otherwise disposed, giving my Gentleman Starkey to Ron Moody’s Captain Hook. After a bit of a chat, I was gently sent on my way with the casting director’s very best wishes. All of us were. And fair enough: we were just pirates. But I think we were heartened that the RSC, of all places, had taken the trouble to see us and at least give us a chance. We were all taught an important lesson: big doors aren’t always as locked as they appear to be, not even to pirates. You might as well give them a rattle and see what happens.
The name of that casting director, incidentally, was Meg Poole. There’s an old saying: ‘Be nice to people on the way up because you never know whether you’re going to meet them on the way down.’ And it almost applies in this case. Meg eventually left the RSC, became an agent, joined the Richard Stone agency and, many years after this, ascended to a partnership in the company, where she ended up very skilfully and very patiently looking after the career of … me. Which she continues to do today. It’s a small world, piracy.
Anyway, even if the RSC had turned me down, the future was bright. I knew as much because a psychic told me. Another little on-tour excursion found me in the front room of a council house in Birmingham, having my destiny foretold for the price of a few pieces of silver – or probably a note, actually, allowing for the effects of inflation. I was led this way in a taxi one morning by two excited actresses who swore by the prescience of this famous psychic and insisted I go along with them for a visit.
I regret to say that memory, and the Random House legal team, have erased this august seer’s professional name from my recollection. Let’s be content to call her Mystic Mavis.
To be honest, this kind of thing was more my dear sister June’s area than mine. Nevertheless, when it was my turn, Mystic Mavis ushered me into her humble parlour and, while the girls waited out in the hall, I sat opposite her a
t a small table. She was a neat, middle-aged woman in civvies – no headscarf or spangled shawl, or any of that nonsense. She didn’t use a crystal ball or cards, either. She simply worked from your presence – which is a good trick if you can do it, and very much cheaper on props.
‘You’re in the theatre,’ Mystic Mavis told me.
‘I am,’ I said, because she was right: I was. At the same time, she wouldn’t have needed to be a genius to work that out, would she, with the three of us trooping in, all with London accents? One of us could have let something slip, even if our appearance, manner, underslept demeanour and perhaps even vague but persistent smell didn’t betray us straight away as travelling players.
‘I see sparks around you,’ Mavis went on. ‘Are you possibly an electrician?’ She paused. ‘In the theatre?’
Blimey. Now, hold on. That wasn’t bad. That was quite impressive. I mean, wrong about me being an electrician in the theatre, but right about me being an electrician. Maybe I still bore the aura from that time I got electrocuted while rewiring the girls’ school in Highgate. Mavis then moved on from telling me things about my present that I already knew and began to explore the bigger topic, from my point of view: my future.
‘I can see your name in big red letters,’ she intoned, ‘above the title of a play in the West End of London.’
Yeah, well, nice idea, obviously, and thanks for your time. But dream on, Mavis.
* * *
IN THE LONDON cast of Peter Pan, playing a squaw, was Carol Collins, a dancer and a skater who also worked on ice shows. She was very attractive, a great girl, and eventually she and I started going out – in as much as people working in the theatre could be said to ‘go out’. The hours you worked didn’t make that easy. You really only had Sundays to spend together.
Carol lived with her mother just off the North Circular, near the Hanger Lane gyratory, one of London’s premier congested junctions, made eternally famous by radio traffic reports. Carol had a brother called Phil, I remember, who fancied himself as a bit of a drummer. When I went round to the house to pick her up, he would often be in his bedroom, thundering away like a loony. I don’t think he particularly took to me at first – but then I was the idiot walking out with his sister. However, one day, when he was coerced down from his eyrie, maybe to partake in food, he took a shine to the leather jacket I used to wear. I let him put it on and he had his photograph taken wearing it.
