David Jason: My Life

by David Jason

  Nice lad. I wonder what happened to Phil Collins. It would be good to think that it had worked out for him and that he’d had some success somewhere down the line.

  Carol and I went out together for two years and then we broke up. There was no particular reason; it just happens like that sometimes. Then one afternoon in 1972, when I was working in the West End in No Sex Please – We’re British, I bumped into her. I was walking to the Strand Theatre – something I loved to do in those days, ambling through the London streets, anticipating the show ahead and feeling generally glad to be alive – and there she was. We hadn’t seen each other in ages and I invited her to see the show. We talked afterwards and almost straight away I was right back where I used to be with her and we were off again. I was on my own at the time, and she was as well – two lost souls.

  And, actually, I do know what became of Phil. Carol took me to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to see Genesis. I had never been to a rock concert. But Carol was the squeeze and this was her brother, so along I went. It was an eye-opening experience – and very theatrical, actually. Tremendous lighting, deafening sound, high production values. In one of the numbers, they had the singer, Peter Gabriel, strapped to a cross and, with smoke billowing and lights flashing, they slowly flew him out to the flies and away. I thought, ‘How do they get away with that?’ Everybody in the audience went potty. I’d never seen anything like it. The ringing in my ears took forty-eight hours to clear.

  Soon after this, Carol and I separated again. Nothing to do with Genesis, I hasten to add, or the night they crucified Peter Gabriel. The split was my fault. I began to feel I was getting in too deep. I was immature and once again I got frightened about going down a road that would lead to responsibilities – responsibilities that might, in turn, take me away from the theatre. I think that was what drove the wedge. There could have been no other reason.

  It happened a number of times. It happened with Fanny Barlow, who wanted us to shack up together. It happened before that, with Sylvia. When the person I was with got too close or I felt that I was getting too involved, I drew away. I was very adept at snuffing out the spark, I’m sorry to say. An absolute expert at it.

  I don’t suppose it exactly helped me to develop long-term relationships in those days I was away from home so much, on the road with touring plays. Touring was a peculiarly Victorian experience in that period – the late 1960s and early 1970s. You travelled on Sunday, when any journey of any length took all day because there would be work on the railway line and a replacement bus service would be in operation much of the way. All routes passed through Crewe, and on Sunday at Crewe station, everything was closed, so you couldn’t get anything to eat. You would have to leave the station and try and find a bun somewhere. Sometimes at the station you would run into other little groups of actors heading off in another direction, and exchange a grudging nod of sympathy.

  Eventually you would arrive at your next location, for the next week or two of work, and the search would begin for digs. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you would have a tip-off: ‘If you’re going to Birmingham, you must get in touch with Mrs So-and-So.’ There were a few famous landladies whom you tried to get to stay with because they had a reputation for being nicer and more tolerant than the others. They would give you a key to let yourself in with, for instance, whereas others would stick to a strict curfew and lock you out if you missed it. Or they might have a reputation for offering cotton sheets and pillowcases, as opposed to the usual cheap Bri-nylon bedding, which either caused you to slip out of bed altogether during the night, or sent a static surge through your system that left your hair standing on end for the next fourteen hours.

  Even the nicest and most liberal establishments, though, operated a firm ‘no overnight guests’ rule. This, too, could be overcome, though only, one keenly felt, at the expense of grave personal risk to both parties. More than once was the occasion when I returned, extremely quietly, to the room of a female colleague, only to be woken in the morning by the inquisitive tapping on the door of the landlady. At which point I would be obliged to take cover by scrambling, partly clothed, into the wardrobe. Farcical, I suppose you might call it. Let no one say that life never imitated art, or vice versa.

  I tremblingly recall staying in one establishment which offered not only a strictly enforced curfew, an unbreakable ‘no overnight guests’ rule and Bri-nylon sheets, but also the presence of the landlady’s four cats, meaning that most of the surfaces were lightly coated in moulted fur. I came down in the morning to a breakfast of bacon, egg and beans, and hungrily raised my knife and fork above the plate, only to look down and notice a cat’s hair floating on the yolk of the egg.

  Didn’t mean I didn’t eat it, though. I picked the hair off and tucked in. Well, you had to, didn’t you? Otherwise you’d starve.

  Indeed, the trick was to find out what the latest possible time was for breakfast, and then to time your run so that you hit it exactly. Then, if you ate as much as you possibly could, it might mean that you didn’t have to spend any money at lunchtime. Smart thinking.

  It was a terribly frugal existence, then – and also, from time to time, a properly depressing one. The conviviality of the cast and crew and the sense of being part of the travelling circus couldn’t always be relied upon to sustain you. Despondency would creep up and seize its moment to lay you low – often, in my case, during free hours and while availing myself of a brief opportunity for tourism. Up at Hadrian’s Wall was one such occasion. I remember staring at a section of that ancient monument one day and feeling bleaker than if you had asked me to rebuild it.

  But, most memorably, I recall sitting on a bench one afternoon, looking up at the outside of Lincoln Cathedral, and feeling about as far from home and as unutterably lonely as I had ever felt. At that point, the thought uppermost in my mind was, roughly speaking, ‘Why am I doing this? What kind of way is this to spend your life?’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A problem with sugar lumps. A mess made with some yogurt. And a monumental coming-together at the end of a pier with Dick Emery.

  IN THOSE EARLY days, in the mid-to-late sixties, my agent sometimes rang me up and asked if I fancied appearing in a commercial for television or cinema. I invariably did fancy it. Anything that might lead to something else, was my general philosophy of employment back then. And, as a result, I am one of a very small number of actors who can say, in all honesty, that they have dived into a giant teacup in order to outline the unique merits of Tetley tea bags.

  And don’t knock it: it sounds unlikely now, but that may actually have been one of the most dangerous professional appointments I ever took on. The reason I got the job was not just on account of my diminutive stature but also because, as my agent was well aware, I was one of a very small number of actors who was a trained diver. Now, you don’t get many of those in a tea bag.

  (My diving experience at this point: I had some proper lessons with Wood Green Civil Defence Association, on the recommendation of a friend, at the age of about eighteen. We followed up with some open-water diving sessions in a gravel pit in Hoddesdon. It was winter and you had to break the ice to get down. The water was so murky that, frankly, you might as well have been suspended in tea, so this was doubly good training.)

  The set-up required me to squeeze into a white wetsuit and then plunge down into an enormous cup of tea. Then I had to swim to the surface to report that the flavour had, indeed, flowed out of the tea bag, via its cunning perforations, and into the enveloping water, and not got stuck inside, which I suppose could plausibly have been the concern of potential customers in the early days of the tea bag, when the magic was still new. And then, in the visual pay-off, having set everyone’s mind to rest, I had to look above me, say something to the effect of ‘Uh-oh’, go wide-eyed with panic, and then duck to spare myself getting clobbered from above by a pair of giant sugar lumps.

  No CGI in those days, of course: no noodling this scene together on a computer afterwards; no
jumping up and down in front of a blue screen for a few minutes and then going home to let the pixel-boffins do the rest. In the mid-sixties, if you wanted to be filmed diving into a cup of tea and then being pelted with sugar lumps, you had no option but to build a cup of tea big enough to dive into, and a pair of sugar lumps big enough to be pelted with. And then the diving and the pelting actually had to happen. Accordingly, on the day, I arrived to find cup, tea bag and lumps of an appropriate scale ready and waiting, along with a suitable quantity of brown-coloured water. And, of course, that tight white wetsuit.

  Incidentally, the problems they had with that brown water – trying to get the shade of brown right, to the satisfaction of the people from Tetley, who were obviously very fussy about how their product was going to be portrayed. It went through many phases – from puddle to wet dog. It was ages before everyone was happy.

  So we went for a take. And all went well, until we got to the end. There was a problem with the sugar lumps: they floated, and remained floating for about ten minutes before they sank. Sugar lumps, as practical experiment in domestic settings has long since proved, don’t do that. Sugar lumps sink. So a means had to be devised of causing the sugar lumps to go under. They were made from wire mesh, coated with plaster of Paris, and the method chosen involved splitting the lumps open and putting weights inside them. Big weights. Stage weights, to be specific – the blocks of steel they use to hold stage flats in place, a number of which happened to be hanging around near the set. They started off putting one of these weights inside and then going for a take to see what it looked like. Now it sank – but not in a realistic enough way. So they continued adding weights until everyone was happy that the lumps behaved as sugar lumps might. By the end of this incremental weight-increase process, I looked up from my position, treading brown water in the teacup, and noticed, to my alarm, that it was now taking two props boys to manhandle each one of these cubes.

  I now found myself dressed like a sperm in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and dodging an artificial sugar lump weighing about the same as a baby elephant. As it whistled past me, it felt like I had been blasted full in the face by a strong wind. There is no question that, if I hadn’t managed to flip aside as the sugar lump narrowly slipped past the skin on the end of my nose, I would have been splattered all over the teacup by the second one. Forget the tea bag; the flavour would have ended up flowing out of me. Health and safety: where were you then?

  With a considerably more slender degree of danger, I also did a commercial with my brother Arthur around this time. Arthur and I had a little ventriloquist act that we had worked up for special occasions. He would be the ventriloquist and I would be the doll – an extremely disobedient doll. We got a very small pair of trousers, stuffed the legs with socks and rags and attached small wellington boots to them. I would tie these altered trousers around my waist using a belt, and then stand behind a chair, flopping the wellies over the chair back, and Arthur would stand alongside me, as the ventriloquist, and pretend to work me. If I put make-up on so that my jaw looked hinged and my mouth seemed unnaturally large, the effect was quite amusing.

  A friend of Malcolm Taylor’s was a casting director for commercials and she had seen us do this routine, so one day, when she happened to be looking for a vent act for a yogurt advertisement, she asked us if we fancied having a go. We thought, ‘Nothing ventured.’ So we went along to the audition and ended up sitting in a waiting room with about half a dozen genuine vent acts, all holding their dolls – a slightly awkward scene, as you might imagine. Eventually, it was our turn. The director sat us down and had us do some business with a yogurt pot. I was supposed to conclude the skit by putting the spoonful of yogurt in my mouth. Instead, by way of a final flourish, I took the spoonful of yogurt and rammed it in my ear. It was just something I thought of on the spur of the moment. This seemed to clinch it. We got the job.

  Such were the things I was prepared to do in those slightly unfocused early days. I dreamed of being an actor, and I’d stick yogurt in my ear if I thought it would get a laugh and advance my cause.

  * * *

  IN APRIL 1967, I got a small part in The Dick Emery Show on BBC television. Dick was a damn good stand-up comic and also a drag act, and he was a huge star at the time. His catchphrase entered the language: ‘Oooh, you are awful – but I like you.’ He turned the affectionate but over-forceful whack with a handbag into an art form, and nobody stumbled in heels while walking up a street the way Dick Emery did. People loved him.

  My moment on the show, basking in the light cast by his skirt-wearing glory, came and went in the blink of an eye, but I seemed to make an impression on him. Dick was booked to do a summer season at the Pier Theatre in Bournemouth that year, and when my name came up as a possible cast member, he was instrumental in getting me the job. I spent May in London, rehearsing the two shows we were taking down there, a pair of farces whose names, perhaps, betray their nature: Chase Me, Comrade and Honeymoon Bedlam. And then I packed my suitcase, slung it in the back of my new car and set off for the seaside.

  New car? Yes, I had chopped in the trusty Mini Van for a Mini without the van bit – new, dark blue, found at a showroom in Finchley and bought, of course, on the never-never. I was very proud of that car.

  That was my first taste of the joys of a summer season in an end-of-the-pier show – and I probably couldn’t have found a better comic to undergo my initiation with than Dick Emery. Dick was formidably good at his job, and very serious and diligent in the way he went about what he did. After a while, though, when he got settled into the play and everything was up and running, the comic in him would re-emerge and he would get up to all sorts of nonsense.

  Most of the contents of the plays now evade my memory’s grasp, but I particularly remember a scene set in a hotel bedroom in Honeymoon Bedlam where I had the role of a young policeman sent to interview the hotel manager, who was played by John Newbury. Dick entered, dressed (surprise, surprise) as a woman, and at one point he would have to walk down to the front of the stage and then turn his back on the audience and address John and me, upstage centre. As soon as Dick knew the audience couldn’t see his face, he’d start gurning at us, pulling the most horrendous faces – faces in which his lower lip seemed to pass up over his nose, faces wherein his eyes seemed to grow to the size of tennis balls and his chin to drag along the ground, faces which seemed to express the most alarming of sexual intentions towards us … the worst faces you have ever seen. This was all done, of course, with the intention of getting us to crack up and muff our lines. Dick was merciless. It wasn’t enough for him to see you starting to go. He would keep at it until you went completely. It reached a point where even the audience could sense that he was up to something. They could hear the tremble in our voices and see that we had turned puce and were doing our best not to look at him. The audience didn’t mind, of course. They loved that kind of stuff, coming from Dick, and, after all, this was seaside fare – people on holiday who were out for a good time. This was not the West End.

  Dick was married to a dancer and a choreographer called Josephine Blake. This was his fifth marriage of five. However, there was a girl in the company who was very attractive. She turned Dick’s head, and he decided he had to have her. So he set himself the task. He was quite brazen about it – very open about his courting of her. I couldn’t believe his audacity, in a way. He came in with huge bunches of flowers and chocolates for this girl, wined her and dined her. He was a very charming man and she was powerless to resist. When Dick’s wife came down from London, as she did from time to time, the rest of us had to put our heads down and pretend that nothing was going on. The affair lasted for the season – because that’s all it was, for Dick: a season’s affair. But I think the girl got quite broken-hearted about it at the end. She had taken it more seriously.

  It’s a wonder Dick had the time and energy for all this. When we were in Bournemouth he would do the stage show six nights a wee
k and two matinees, and then on a Sunday, which was supposed to be his night off, he’d drive off to do a stand-up routine at a seaside joint somewhere else. I went with him one night to Swanage Pavilion. It was a revue show for the holidaymakers, with Dick top of the bill. He was on a percentage of the box office, so he was pulling down some tidy money for those appearances. And because it was a slightly different setting, he could do more risky, close-to-the-knuckle routines – be a bit more ‘blue’, as we used to say. The place went mad for him. I count Dick as one of the great British comics of that time. In my opinion, he was right up there with Bob Monkhouse as a gag-teller.

  I loved that summer season. I was on £29 per week, which seemed relatively princely to me. I shared a dressing room at the theatre with John Newbury and on a nice day we could open its door and go out onto a small balcony and smell the briny sea. Of course, when the weather was rough, the entire play took place against the background roar of waves thundering against the legs of the pier. You often wondered whether, by the time the curtain fell, you would be halfway to France on a lump of wood.

  To save a bit of money, I rented a little three-bedroom cottage in a leafy suburb with the actress Doremy Vernon, who later played the canteen manageress in Are You Being Served?, and a young actor who was my understudy. We worked out that it would be much cheaper than going into digs, and it also left us completely free to come and go as and when we pleased. On the occasions when we needed to pop back to London, I would cram Doremy and John Newbury into the Mini and give them a lift, dropping them off in Chiswick before I headed on back to my flat in Thornton Heath. Doremy had to travel in the front seat because she had been a dancer and her legs were too long to go in the back. It was John who had to hunch up back there, much to his chagrin and lasting discomfort.