by David Jason
In 1970 Humphrey offered me a piece of work which, it’s no exaggeration to say, changed the course of my professional life. It was just a tiny thing, really, yet it set off a whole chain of reactions – though not before it had cost me my relationship with my agent.
It all began one day when Humphrey rang me and said, ‘You’ve seen Hark at Barker, haven’t you?’ Of course I had seen it. It was Ronnie Barker’s comedy series for London Weekend Television, with Ronnie playing a bumbling but forthright old aristocrat, Lord Rustless, and delivering pricelessly out-of-touch lectures on life from his ancestral home at Chrome Hall. I loved it. Indeed, I had sat and watched it and thought to myself, ‘Now, that’s a programme I would love to be in.’
‘There have been some references in the show to a character called Dithers,’ Humphrey went on. ‘He’s Lord Rustless’s gardener. So far we’ve only seen him zip past the window on a lawnmower. Well, Ronnie wants to bring him into the show properly. Ronnie thought about playing the part himself but we all think it would be better if someone else did it. What do you reckon about taking it on?’
‘I’d love to do it,’ I said.
‘Great,’ said Humphrey. ‘We reckon Dithers is about a hundred years old, and the way we see him is, he’s covered in hair and has a floppy hat, and the only thing that sticks out is his nose.’
‘I’d definitely love to do it,’ I said.
I had always wanted to work with Ronnie Barker, ever since I had seen him on The Frost Report in the sixties. He was already a legend in the business. This was a dream offer as far as I was concerned.
I told Humphrey to talk to my agent and arrange it all, as per usual, and hung up feeling rather giddy and very pleased with life in general.
A bit later, though, Humphrey phoned back.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you, as a friend: I know you deserve it but your agent is asking far too much money for that part. He’s asking for money I haven’t got. Seriously. I can’t afford you.’
I was shocked to hear that. I expressed to Humphrey again how much I wanted to take this chance to work with him and Ronnie, and I asked him to keep the part open while I had a word with Derek.
I then rang Derek straight away. I said, ‘Look, I really want to do this part.’ He said, very bluntly, in the crisply enunciated manner that Derek had, ‘They’re not offering you enough money.’ I said, ‘But I really, really want to do this part.’ He said, again, ‘They’re not offering you enough money.’ I said, ‘Can I come and see you?’
I went straight round to Derek’s office. I can still picture the scene: me standing rather tremblingly like an errant schoolboy in front of Derek’s desk, Derek seated with, as ever, a cigarette going. Derek smoked for Great Britain at Commonwealth and Olympic levels – and smoked flamboyantly too, holding the fag aloft in his fingers, sucking on it with pursed lips, exhaling tightly. A fag wasn’t just a fag with Derek: it was a five-minute drama.
I explained again that I wanted to do the part. Derek, who clearly felt he was being crossed, said, ‘I advise you not to.’
I said, ‘But I’m not interested in the money. I want to work with Ronnie Barker.’
I was quite choked up about it. Derek looked at me silently for a short while. Then he said, ‘Right.’
He picked up the phone receiver and inserted his finger into the dial. (Rotary dials in those days, my children.) Then he waited while the line connected. And then he said, ‘Give me Humphrey Barclay’s office.’
A pause.
‘… Hello? Is that Humphrey Barclay?’
And with that Derek handed me the receiver and sat back, staring at me.
Rather stunned by this behaviour, I put the receiver to my mouth and spoke to Humphrey. ‘Er … it’s David. I’ve just … well, I’ve spoken to my agent and … I told him to accept and … I want to do the part.’ Humphrey could tell from my voice that I was a bit tremulous. He said, ‘Great. Thank you.’
I handed the receiver back to Derek and he dropped it onto its cradle and said, rather tartly, ‘Anything else?’
And I said, ‘No,’ rather sotto voce, and turned and left.
That was the beginning of the end for me and Derek Marr – and a pretty salutary lesson for me, I guess, about doing the things you want to do. If I had followed the money and not my heart, I wouldn’t have got to work with Ronnie B. I simply couldn’t turn that opportunity down. It didn’t concern me what I was getting paid. In truth, the way I felt about it, I would have quite happily paid ITV for the privilege. I’m sure Derek thought he was only protecting me from myself, and looking after the interests of his client. But in this case, I knew myself and my interests better than he did. I have never been a naturally assertive or confrontational person. But right then I knew what I wanted and I made sure I stood firm and got it.
I’ll talk about working with Ronnie B. later. Suffice to say for now that I went ahead and did the part of Dithers and had a fantastic time, making a connection with Ronnie that profoundly affected the course of my life thereafter. So I’m quite glad I took the trouble to go round and face up to Derek.
I did need a new agent, though. On the set of Hark at Barker, I met a very attractive actress called Moira Foot, who was playing Lord Rustless’s maid, Effie. (She went on to feature in Are You Being Served? and, perhaps most famously, to play Denise Laroque in ’Allo ’Allo.) Moira and I went out together for a while. Her father, Alistair Foot, was the co-author, with Anthony Marriott, of the play that was about to do big things in the West End, called No Sex Please – We’re British. (We’ll have cause to come back to that play.) Before he turned his hand to writing, Alistair had been a civil engineer who had worked on the construction of the M1, Britain’s first motorway. Not a lot of playwrights can say that, nor that they have a bridge named after them. (The engineers used to take the liberty of loaning their surnames to the bridges they were planning. So Alistair’s allotted bridge – either fortunately or unfortunately, depending how you look at it – was the Foot Bridge.) Alistair and I got chatting one day and I told him about the situation with my agent, and he said he thought he might be able to get me a meeting with someone called Richard Stone, who handled a lot of the top comedy talent at the time – Terry Scott, Hugh Lloyd, Dave Allen, Bill Maynard, Jon Pertwee and a host of people way bigger than I was.
Alistair was indeed able to get me that meeting, and I did indeed meet Richard Stone, and, 4,013 years later, the Richard Stone Partnership still represents me today.
I remember that first meeting with Richard. I was shown into his office and he sat behind his desk where – for carefully calculated psychological purposes, I don’t doubt – his chair was higher than the guest’s. He asked me what I wanted to achieve most. I said to him, ‘I want to work.’ Which was the right answer; some time after, Richard told me that if I had said I wanted to be rich, or I wanted to be famous, he probably wouldn’t have taken me on. As it was, he put me on contract as his client for a year. I never signed another contract with him after that, because I never needed to. Our relationship was understood.
With a new agent looking after me, it seemed a pretty good moment for me to take stock. In 1970, I was thirty years old and I had been an actor for five years. Five years was the period I had set myself when I took the decision to give up electrics. I had told Bob Bevil, my partner, I would give it five years, and if it still wasn’t working out, I’d jack it in and come back to the tools. I didn’t mean I’d give myself five years to become a big star; I meant I’d give myself five years to see if I could get regular enough work as a paid actor. That was the full extent of the master plan. It’s so tempting, when you look back over careers that have worked out OK, to assume that every twist and turn was shrewdly calculated to bring about the desired end. I wonder whether that’s ever really true. It certainly wasn’t true in my case, where things owed so much more to happenstance – to one thing turning up after another. There was no strategy, no graph, no sheet of paper with a ca
refully thought-through mathematical equation on it. The idea, as I saw it, was to get work, lose myself in it and enjoy it while it was there, and then, when it was over, look for the next thing.
In those first five years, I ended up surprising myself. There had been a couple of months early on when I’d been twiddling my thumbs. But apart from that, I seemed to have done a fair old amount of stuff. There was the year with Bromley Rep, the production of Under Milk Wood, the BBC panto with Terry Scott, Crossroads, Peter Pan in the West End, the summer season with Dick Emery, a couple of appearances in Doctor in the House, the two series of Do Not Adjust Your Set, Week Ending, Hark at Barker … And that’s before we even mention the crowning career glory of the children’s series with the Dulux dog. If you had offered me all that on day one … well, I think I would have bitten your hand off faster than the Dulux dog would have done.
One thing slightly nagged at me, however. All the work I was getting – with the exception of Week Ending on the radio, obviously – was very much of a specific kind: physical comedy. In the theatre and the television work that I was being offered, I was doing a fair amount of swinging from wires, and an awful lot of falling over, not to say quite a bit of jumping across soft furnishings. Now, don’t get me wrong, swinging from wires, falling over and jumping across soft furnishings were things I very much enjoyed doing. At the same time, though, swinging from wires, falling over and jumping across soft furnishings hadn’t necessarily been – how shall I put this? – they hadn’t necessarily been the dream at the outset. When I had started out along this road, the dream, really and in all honesty, had been acting: the proper stuff. Five years in, looking back over what I’d been up to, there wasn’t much sign of that. Shouldn’t I now be thinking about changing it up a little bit, and getting involved in a bit of … acting?
I expressed this little doubt to Richard Stone. I explained how it had entered my mind that, just once in a while, it might be nice to be in a play where there was a sofa on the stage and I didn’t necessarily have to jump over it or end up under its cushions. Or (and here was one from left field) perhaps every now and again I could be in a play that didn’t have a sofa in it at all. You know – something like King Lear. (King Lear doesn’t have a sofa in it. I just checked.)
I suppose what I was saying, in a roundabout kind of way, was that I was wondering about broadening myself, pushing for some serious roles. Richard thought very hard about this. Or if he didn’t actually think very hard about it, he did a very good impression of someone who was thinking very hard about it. Then, his ruminations complete, he told me, ‘Don’t swim against the tide. Go with the current. If this is the work that’s coming your way, accept it and go with it. Later, there may come a time when you have established yourself and you can change direction. But don’t start heading upstream when you’ve got something going for you.’
He also, in a manner of speaking, stood up for falling down. ‘People want you because you can do comedy,’ Richard said, ‘and that’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. Actually, it’s probably one of the hardest.’
I took his advice. I haven’t lived to regret doing so.
So, I again set aside those National Theatre aspirations, girded my loins, bolstered my nethers and, with a spring in my eye and a twinkle in my step, went back to comedy in the theatre – farcing around, I guess you could call it. In 1971, Richard got me an audition for a part in a play called She’s Done It Again!, originally written for Brian Rix’s company by Michael Pertwee, Jon Pertwee’s brother, and due to be staged at the Playhouse in Weston-super-Mare. The star of the show was to be Bob Monkhouse. It was a piece about a vicar whose wife has sextuplets, delivered one by one over the course of the play. I appeared as a daft old seventy-year-old professor with a white wig and a white moustache, who becomes involved in the delivery of the babies. It was quite demanding, I suppose, although, after Dithers the hundred-year-old gardener, this character was a veritable spring chicken. The part involved lots of throwing myself around and a nice bit of business with (of course, and why the hell not?) the sofa, where I jumped on it and got a foot trapped between its cushions. In the process of disengaging the trapped foot, I would normally manage to get the other foot stuck and draw the action out as long as I dared.
One time, somewhere in the middle of the action, I sat down on the sofa with one leg tucked under myself, and I noticed that this made the leg appear to stop at the knee. So I converted this into another demonstration of the professor’s general ditziness: he now became confused about the whereabouts of the rest of his leg, and made a great show of believing he had lost it somewhere. Then I rolled up a sofa cushion to use as an artificial leg. The play, of course, had to wait while I got up to all this. To put it briefly, I was getting away with murder. But hey: it was a summer season in Weston. The audience didn’t seem to be complaining.
Bob Monkhouse and I became good friends in those weeks. We enjoyed each other’s company enormously. I was very impressed by him: by his professionalism, by his knowledge of comedy, which was vast. Eventually, he and his wife Jackie started inviting me over for dinner at their place near Luton. Bob’s house was even more vast than his knowledge of comedy, and beautifully decorated, hung with an amazing array of paintings. Bob had a cinema in the basement where he screened silent-movie reels from his collection. He had a deep respect for the physical comedy of the silent stars and it was a source of frustration to him that he couldn’t do physical comedy himself.
Our friendship grew out of our attempts to wind each other up and make each other corpse during that absurd farce in Weston-super-Mare. I would have to rush in with the sixth and final newborn baby in a blanket and present it to Bob, who was playing the vicar. The part of the newborn was, of course, played by a doll but because the contents of the blanket weren’t strictly visible to the audience, I was able to make little additions to its burden offstage. One night, Bob found himself staring down at a baby that had been rather rudely adorned with a sausage. Another night, it was wearing a fright mask. A third night, I thrust Bob a blanket containing no baby at all, but just his pants, which I had retrieved from his dressing room.
Bob would have his revenge at the moment in the play where I was required to look offstage through a window in the set and remark on the weather. And there, meeting my gaze where the audience couldn’t see him, would be Bob waving … well, all sorts of things at me. Or I might see him bent over and scandalously in flagrante with the wind machine. Or there would be Bob with his flies open and the sausage would be … But enough. Silly and puerile these antics no doubt were – yet things like that kept up the energy of the show, and I’m sure that energy transferred to the audience, somewhere along the line.
Doing She’s Done It Again! with Bob was a happy experience altogether, and only slightly marred by what eventually happened to my toes. A few of us in the cast decided to fill some spare time in the day by taking riding lessons at a nearby riding school. We thought it would be fun, and also riding is no bad skill for an actor to have on the CV, especially if the makers of a cowboy film come calling. (Casting director: ‘Can ya ride a hoss, kid?’ Jason: ‘Yes, siree.’)
So my riding lesson went fine: I familiarised myself with the controls and fairly swiftly worked out such niceties as how to change gear and which end was the front and which was the back. Afterwards, I climbed out of the driving seat and my instructor showed me how to loosen the bridle and then told me to lead my horse to water to see if it wanted a drink. Well, there’s a famous old saying in this area, isn’t there, and I was about to appreciate the full force of it. The famous old saying is: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t stop it standing on your foot. As we moved towards the trough, I discovered what it felt like to have two tons of steaming animal passing its entire weight through my size-seven toes. And what it feels like, in case you’re wondering, is painful.
So, I was straight off to A&E for, by my calculation, the 741st time in this book alone. Diagnosis: two di
slocated toes. Remedy: a bit of exquisitely painful manipulation to get the toes back to roughly where they had started, followed by the binding of the affected area in a substantial white bandage. My foot now bore the size and approximate appearance of an adult Yorkshire terrier. I could only wear an extra-large slipper over the bruising and was afflicted with a heavy limp, both of which inconveniences seemed to threaten my continued participation in the play. But, of course, the farce must go on, so we had some lines written into the play giving my character the professor a touch of gout. I saw out the rest of the season in a carpet slipper, like the trouper I was and remain.
Bob was a cartoonist – a really rather good one – and every night you’d find another drawing of yourself pinned to your dressing-room door. After my upset at the riding school, I found a caricature captioned roughly as follows: ‘D. Jason, desperate for attention, has his foot broken by a horse to garner sympathy.’ I took the drawing inside and put it on the dressing-room wall with the others. By the end of the run I had two strips of Monkhouse cartoons, Sellotaped to the wall, from the ceiling down to the floor – and nearly all of them insulting.
