by David Jason
I went back to my agent and said I was definitely up for it. We weren’t, I should add, talking blockbuster budgets. However, a three-week shoot was proposed, which could be tailored to fit around my nightly duties at the Strand Theatre, and the film was to be shot entirely at Twickenham Studios, which, if not exactly Pinewood or Shepperton – or, indeed, Universal – definitely sounded pukka enough.
Contracts were tremblingly signed, and soon after that, I was going through the doors at Twickenham with a spring in my step. On-set, I met my co-star – Imogen Hassall, a British actress who had on her CV an appearance in the schlocky 1970 movie When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. But, as she openly admitted herself, she wasn’t as famous for that as she was famous for being famous. Because she was glamorous, the press flocked to her, and she was frequently photographed on the arm of somebody at an awards ceremony, in a stunning dress – normally backless, and quite often fairly frontless, too. For this, she had earned the nickname the ‘Countess of Cleavage’.
I liked Imogen a lot and found her to be smart and sensitive in a way that, at the time, might have been at odds with the public perception of her. We had lunch together a couple of times while we were working and she mentioned being depressed about the way she was perceived. She said she felt trapped in a cartoon image of herself, and didn’t quite know what to do about it. Seventeen years after all this, I was shocked to read that Imogen had taken an overdose and killed herself. She was only thirty-eight.
Also in the cast, playing men from the Ministry, were Tim Barrett, who later played Terry Scott’s boss in Terry and June, and Hugh Lloyd, whom I knew from another Terry Scott series, Hugh and I. These guys were good company, and we were to have quite a laugh together on this project – at least in the early stages.
So, we started shooting Albert’s Follies and, being totally inexperienced and knowing nothing about movie-making, I got on with doing what I was told to do. I turned up when I was told to turn up, I stood where I was told to stand, and I said the words I was told to say – which is pretty much the definition of film-acting, I suppose. I was the star of the film but I had nothing as glamorous as a trailer, I should point out. I had a utilitarian dressing room and went for lunch in the canteen with the props boys, where we all stood in line and moved along with a tray, having food slopped onto our plates by intimidating serving staff.
However, I very quickly got the sense that all was not what it was supposed to be. For one thing, we seemed to be working with extraordinary haste – with so much haste, in fact, that Ray the director didn’t appear to have much time to do anything in the way of directing. Imogen and I would be put into position under the lights, and then we would hear ‘Action!’ and soon after that we would hear ‘Cut!’ and then we would move quickly on to the next scene.
A couple of times we went for a take, and afterwards, I said to Ray, ‘If we do that again, I might be able to …’
But Ray wasn’t really listening, and he would merely say, ‘Right, let’s get on. Next shot, please.’
Every now and again the cameraman would roll his eyes, conspiratorially, and quietly say to me things like, ‘This is a big close-up that he wants. Don’t do too much. You’re doing a bit too much.’ So, in the absence of any other instruction, I was taking direction from the cameraman. Even I, in my state of high excitement and with my eyes set on the Hollywood horizon, realised that this was not how it was meant to be.
Also, was it me, or did bits of the set keep disappearing?
No, it wasn’t me: bits of the set did keep disappearing.
You would arrive in the morning and what had, the previous day, been a replica of a long corridor with numerous doors off it had dwindled to a solitary pair of doors in a small fake wall. It appeared the sets we were using weren’t being built for our purposes – we were borrowing them. Essentially, we were making our film on anything we could find around the place that was free. When the sets were wanted elsewhere, they were being carted away. Which would explain, I suppose, some of the director’s haste. You needed to get the scene in the sitting room done while you could because there was every chance that you would turn your back and find the sitting room had gone off to appear in someone else’s film. I’m not sure Steven Spielberg would have settled for this – or even the person who directed (or should I say aimed?) the Carry On films.
Meanwhile, I was completely knackered. Six days a week, I was getting up at six in the morning and going off to spend the day filming – and then hurtling back to the West End in the evening to fling myself all over the place in No Sex Please. Most of the time I felt like I had just been run over, not by a lorry but by a fleet of lorries. After two of the scheduled three weeks of the shoot, I was nearly dead. I came offstage at the Strand on the Saturday night and headed back to the flat in Newman Street – and almost nothing happened until I was woken by my alarm clock at dawn on the Monday, ready to drive over to Twickenham again. I just crashed out and slept solidly through until about 2 p.m. on Sunday, roused myself sufficiently to fix some kind of lunch, then curled up in front of the television for the rest of the afternoon before dragging my battered body back to bed.
The crisis point was reached in the final week of filming. There came a moment in the day when Imogen and I were required to appear in a scene which involved us walking down a passage together. For some reason, within the plot, I had lost my trousers and was wearing boxer shorts printed with a Union Jack (you’ll get some measure of the quality of the film’s farcical humour here). Imogen and I completed our duties, and then we heard the director say, ‘Cut! OK, that’s good. Now we’ll go again with the second cast.’
Second cast? What did he mean, ‘second cast’?
Then, as Imogen and I stared open-mouthed, onto the set trooped eight girls in tiny, ragged bikinis, all of them tied by their wrists to a length of rope, one end of which was in the thick-fingered grip of a large muscle-bound man. I was completely confused. This wasn’t in the script, was it? A scene involving scantily clad girls, attached to a rope, and some kind of slave master? I don’t think I would have missed that. Yet here they were.
Imogen and I simply stood aside as the man, the girls and their piece of rope were filmed passing down the corridor.
Thus was it revealed to us that Albert’s Follies was no longer, strictly speaking, Albert’s Follies. It felt more like Jason’s Folly. And Jason’s Folly was now a film called White Cargo. A whole subplot had been grafted onto the script – a story about selling strippers into slavery. To be frank with you, I’m still fairly confused about how this all worked. But my basic understanding is that, at some point during the filming, the order had come through from the producers to switch the film from a U certificate to an X certificate, in the panicked hope, presumably, that this would give it some life in the adult cinemas – the ‘gentlemen’s cinema clubs’, as they used to be known in the 1970s – if nowhere else. Therefore, obviously, bring on the sex-slave strippers: it was as subtle as that. So Albert’s Follies became White Cargo, which was Albert’s Follies but with some extra slave girls and a random sex scene banged, as it were, onto the end of it. Or into the middle of it. Or whenever the fancy took the director.
Brilliant. My big breakthrough into the movies – and I was essentially making a soft-porn film.
Worse than that, I was making a soft-porn film without even knowing it.
Even worse than that, I was making a soft-porn film without being in any of the soft-porn bits.
Imogen and I made our feelings known to the director and to the cameraman and to anyone else who would listen. We received only shrugs. By this time we were seven-eighths through filming, and also tied to a contract, as tightly as those girls had been tied to the slave-trader’s rope. So we finished up.
Reader, it was a dreadful film: please spare yourself the trouble of looking for it on Netflix, where you probably won’t find it anyway. The finished article, my shining shot at big-screen superstardom, was a patchwork of disasters. Some
of the takes used in the movie were actually camera run-throughs – rehearsals, in other words. At one moment, I am seen climbing over a wall at night-time and landing on the other side of that wall in daylight. To nobody’s surprise, the film duly bombed. It became one of those films where you can fairly confidently say that more people were in it than went to see it. And there weren’t that many people in it. Sex sells, people will tell you. Not always it doesn’t.
Why did I go through with it? Because all I could see at the time was Hollywood, of course. You have to have been in a film to be considered for a film. It’s catch-22 and Equity all over again. So if you somehow do break through and get to make a film, you’re off and running. That’s how it works, isn’t it?
How far from the truth can you get?
Mind you, in fairness, I should point out that also in Albert’s Follies/White Cargo was a Welsh actor whom I had known since I played that part in Softly Softly right at the beginning of my television career. It was this particular actor who had the mixed privilege of attending a Westminster hotel, after the three weeks of principal filming at Twickenham had ended, to romp around on a bed with the actress Sue Bond for the added-on sex scene belatedly deemed necessary by the producers. His name was Dave Prowse and clearly Dave managed to put this embarrassment behind him very efficiently: he later went on to play Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies. What had he got that I hadn’t? Well, let’s put it this way: he didn’t have to wear lifts.
* * *
AS THIS IS an autobiography, it had better be warts and all. So my other less-than-successful attempt to storm the world’s cinemas in the early 1970s had me trying to use, as my Trojan Horse, the British film adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, directed by Andrew Sinclair. Word had got out that Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had signed up to appear. Accordingly, thousands of actors went along to the London auditions, lured, I’m sure, by the enticing prospect of being able to say they had worked with Liz and Dicky. In fact, I think almost anyone who could do a Welsh accent and who was in London that day showed up, irrespective of whether they were an actor or not.
My trump card, though, and the thing that made me stand out from the crowd, was that I had been in Malcolm Taylor’s stage production of Under Milk Wood, both at the Vanbrugh Theatre and then, later, in its six-month transfer to the Mayfair Theatre. This helped swing me a part. (Incidentally, Dylan Thomas’s daughter, Aeronwy, came to see that Mayfair Theatre production and said nice things about it, which made us proud.)
I got cast as Nogood Boyo, and off I went on the train, all expenses paid, to Wales for four days, thinking, yet again, ‘Next step, Hollywood.’ We were billeted in an old-fashioned, badly faded but still rather grand hotel on the west coast, which made a change from the fusty bed and breakfasts of the touring theatre scene, and many was the night that Dicky Burton and I sat at the hotel bar, drinking and yarning and putting the industry to rights until the small hours.
OK, not really. Burton played the narrator, so he wasn’t around at all while I was there. As for Elizabeth Taylor, she was Rosie Probert, the tart with the heart, and none of my scenes put me opposite her. However, on one of the days that I was there, a buzz started to go around the place: ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s on the set!’ I took care to inveigle myself into the room where they were filming and observed from a distance.
And lo and behold, eventually there she was, radiating starriness. She was in a long nightdress and filming a scene where she had to lie down on a bed. There was a lot of pampering and fussing of her and ensuring that she was comfortable where she lay. Once she was settled, the director led in an extra in a grubby costume and brought him to the bedside. This extra was clearly more nervous than he had ever been in his life.
‘Miss Taylor,’ the director said, hesitantly and subserviently, with the manner befitting conversation with a megastar, ‘may I introduce you to Darren? He’s going to play the part of the sailor.’
What Darren had to do, following this scanty introduction, was to get into bed with Elizabeth Taylor. Then he had to lie there, on top of her, not moving. This, I have to say, Darren duly did. I’m not sure she even looked at him at any point. The camera was above them, so, in the shot, all you saw was the back of Darren’s head and one of his ears, filling maybe a third of the frame, and then, more predominantly, Liz Taylor’s face, looking up into the camera from the pillow.
Taylor spoke her line: ‘Quack twice and ask for Rosie.’
That was it. Darren then climbed off Britain’s most famous film actress and walked away. But presumably that was his story forever more: ‘I got into bed with Elizabeth Taylor once.’ And I bet nobody ever believed him. Apart from, of course, those who were on the set that day, and the very small number of people who saw the film.
I was so impressed by my surroundings on that shoot: the huge lights, the giant 35mm camera on tracks … this seemed like the full monty to me, the big time. That said, I had my own embarrassing moment. As Nogood Boyo, I had to be, as the Dylan Thomas line put it, ‘up to no good in the wash-house’ with Lily Smalls – a brief cameo moment which required me to come up behind Lily, who was played by Meg Wynn Owen, and reach round to grab her breasts. Maybe less of a cameo moment, then, and more of a camisole moment. Either way, I was consumed with self-consciousness. It was as awkward as I have ever felt in front of a camera – a terribly clinical moment in front of about twelve gawpers.
On reflection, this was one of only two occasions in my acting life when I found myself doing anything that could remotely be described as a sex scene. The other one occurred in a production of Micawber when I was playing opposite Jan Francis – and that, too, was surprisingly mortifying. Micawber was a four-part comedy drama written by John Sullivan, the writer of Only Fools and Horses, who had borrowed the character of Wilkins Micawber from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Episode one aired on ITV on Boxing Day, 2001 – when it went up against the Christmas Special of Only Fools over on the BBC. So, that Christmas, on one channel was a production starring me and written by John Sullivan, and on another channel was a production starring me and written by John Sullivan. It’s all about viewer-choice in the end, isn’t it?
Anyway, Jan was portraying this rather evil woman, Lady Charlotte, who gets Mr Micawber into the bedroom and starts to seduce him. During the course of the action, which requires her to be fairly unsubtle about things, she pulls him down on top of her very hard, essentially planting his nose in her cleavage.
We did a run-through, and Jan yanked my head down to her neckline, as per instruction. At which point, I heard a voice above us say, ‘Hold on, David – stay there while we relight this.’
So, there I was, with my head stuck between the breasts of a woman whom I knew well, but whose husband I knew weller. (He was Martin Thurley, the writer of March in Windy City.) And there I stayed, waiting for a couple of technical hitches to be sorted out. And waiting. And waiting … Jan and I became quite hysterical as these long minutes ticked by, but, on my part, the hysteria was entirely to cover the embarrassment.
Obviously, when you go to the pub after a day like that, and you tell someone with a proper job that this is how you spent your working day, they tend to look at you slightly askance. But what you’ve got to remember about experiences like these is that they take place in excruciating circumstances: witheringly, belittlingly, in a roomful of people and with someone popping up every minute or so with a bit of powder on a puff. (‘You’re sweating, David.’ ‘Yes, I know I am.’) It’s not uncomplicated, is what I’m saying.
Anyway, my other key memory of the Under Milk Wood filming, beyond the embarrassment of the breast-grab, was having to wade out into the sea to film a scene with Mrs Dai Bread, who was played by Ruth Madoc. I had known Ruth since that Malcolm Taylor production. She was now married to the actor Philip Madoc and was three or four months pregnant with their first child at this time. And here we were, dipping in the sea, in March, in Wales, which doesn’t tend to resemble the
Caribbean at that time of year – nor, really, at many other times of the year. It was stunningly freezing. I was fully clothed, but Ruth wasn’t wearing all that much. This was some kind of dream sequence and Ruth had to be in the water, topless, and summon me in after her. We were in the water for about twenty minutes and did the scene about three times over. All the time, I was worrying, saying to myself, ‘This can’t be a good idea for a pregnant woman.’ When I think of that scene, I still shiver. I shot a documentary in Norway in winter once upon a time, and even there it wasn’t as freezing.
It all worked out well, though. With the birth, I mean; Ruth had a boy. The film, on the other hand, worked out less well. People around the production spoke very excitedly at the time about how Under Milk Wood had never been adapted into a movie, and it turned out, retrospectively, that there were very good reasons for that: like the fact that, by definition, it’s ‘a play for voices’. It’s all about the words, and the images created by the words, and making a picture out of it was, fundamentally, beside the point, or even self-defeating. I think the film was slightly below the standing of Burton and Taylor at the time. But Burton did it because he was Welsh and he was, as he never ceased telling people, ‘in love with the bard’. Well, we all were – and also, some of us, in love with the idea of making a movie.
