by David Jason
We filmed thirteen episodes in all. I can still remember the combination of deep anticipation and high anxiety just before the first show went out – feeling enormously proud and, at the same time, vulnerable and exposed. To promote the series, I was asked to do an article for TV Times – one of those ‘boy, I’ve really arrived’ moments in an actor’s life. They knew that I could ride a motorbike, drive a car, ride a horse (more or less, thanks to those lessons in Weston-super-Mare) and fly a glider. So I was depicted on a picture spread doing all of these things. Showing off, in other words. The photographer was called Bert Hill. I went up in the glider and he went up in the tug that tows the glider up, and did air-to-air shots. We did pictures on a trials bike, and some of me diving – not in the Cayman Islands sadly, but in a lake somewhere in Britain. When the piece came out it was entitled ‘TV’s Man of Action’. Of course, I made out to people that I found it a bit embarrassing, but actually I thought it was great. It made me feel pretty special – like some kind of top gun.
In the papers, critical reaction to the show was good. Edgar Briggs had ‘style and panache’, according to the Daily Telegraph. The Daily Mirror said the show revealed that ‘David Jason is a modern Buster Keaton with most of that great silent actor’s gift of timing, rhythm and skill’. As comparisons go … well, I was ready to accept that one.
One problem: ratings. They started low, and they didn’t get any better. Now, it’s always easy to blame external circumstances for things like this, but, in this case, bear with me: the show was scheduled to go out on ITV on a Sunday evening, at the same time as The Brothers was going out on BBC1. In other words, Edgar Briggs was pitched up against just about the most successful drama series on television at that time. It couldn’t have been a worse clash. In today’s terms, it would be like trying to launch a new comedy show opposite Downton Abbey. The only people likely to watch would be a small hard core of new-comedy fans and the bewildered. In some ways, the scheduling of Edgar Briggs was a compliment: it demonstrated the amount of faith that ITV had in the show. They clearly thought it was competitive. But their confidence backfired. It meant the show was badly hampered from the off. It limped on and petered out. On commercial stations, naturally, ratings rule. There was no offer of a second series. The experience was, as you will readily understand, a bit of a blow for ‘TV’s Man of Action’. I had the big build-up, followed by the big let-down – and then the lingering and very public disappointment, stretched out over thirteen rather gloomy weeks. I was chastened. I went back into my shell a bit.
Still, at least Edgar Briggs had got as far as people’s television sets. In the same period, there was another attempt to launch a comedy series with me in the leading role – this time, a project of the director/producer Sydney Lotterby at the BBC. The show was by Roy Clarke, the writer of Open All Hours, and was entitled It’s Only Me, Whoever I Am. The central character was meant to be a kind of Walter Mitty figure who could never quite get his act together because he was always off on flights of fancy. Again, there was loads of enthusiasm around the project and a big sense of having found something that would work.
We made a pilot, and I remember a scene outside a cinema in which my character went into dream mode and was overcome by a fantasy in which he turned into a military colonel and began ordering the cinema queue around. At the time I felt nothing other than the sense that I was making a show which would end up on telly and really connect with people. It was written by a great writer, directed by a great director. What could possibly go wrong?
The pilot was edited and finished, and Syd and I got together to watch it. Afterwards, Syd said to me, ‘You know what? I’m really sorry, David, but it doesn’t work.’ I agreed with him: it didn’t. I don’t know whether there were ingredients missing, or whether we had approached it in the wrong way, or what had happened – I couldn’t put my finger on it at all. All I knew was that it felt flat. Again: bitterly disappointing.
What could you do? Battle on. Somebody said to me, very early on, ‘If you want to make it in comedy, you have to have an idiotic determination to succeed.’ Well, I seemed to be meeting the requirements. I had the necessary determination and I had the necessary idiocy.
Incidentally, we shot some of that failed pilot for It’s Only Me in the north of England. In the evening we used to let off steam by playing snooker back at the hotel where we all stayed. Syd’s first assistant on that shoot was a bloke called Ray Butt, and Ray’s accent was so East End, you could cut it with a knife. I couldn’t help taking the piss out of him, walking around the table, flexing my neck and saying, ‘Awright, Ray? Awright, son?’ We should bear this harmless and apparently negligible piece of mimicry in mind because without it I might not have landed a certain cockney part later in my career, in a series that definitely did work.
* * *
IN 1975, PRISONER and Escort, from the ‘Six Dates with Barker’ sequence, became a series called Porridge, with Ronnie B. in one of his best and eventually most popular roles as Norman Stanley Fletcher, the cunning but always deeply humane lag. The series was produced by Sydney Lotterby. After my performances as Dithers, Ronnie knew I could play funny old farts and there was a character in Porridge called Blanco, who was meant to be a seventy-year-old prisoner whom Fletcher had a soft spot for and kept an eye on. Ronnie requested that I play him.
I was two hours in the make-up chair, doubling my age in order to become Blanco. It had been a similar time for Dithers – quite uncomfortable and not a little boring, if the truth be known, but you lump it. The way Ronnie turned into Fletcher, by contrast, was breathtakingly effortless. He’d spend a little bit of time in hair and make-up, put the chewing gum in his mouth and he was off. He put on that character like he put on a coat. When he was Fletcher, he was Fletcher. When it was time to go to the canteen, he was Ronnie Barker again. He could slip in and out of it at the click of a finger – which, I guess, is the sign of true comfort in a role. Some actors never come out of character. Apparently this is true of David Suchet when he’s playing Hercule Poirot, the Agatha Christie detective. Talk to him at any point during the working day, and you’ll be talking to Poirot, complete with the accent. He stays in character. Why not, if it helps you? That wasn’t how it was for Ronnie, though: he was in and out.
They built HM Prison Slade, with its Victorian-looking gantries and stairways, on a special set inside an old water-storage tank at Ealing. I would come out of my cell and walk along the gantry and then go down the stairs to the ground floor and sit there in the communal area, with all the lags, playing chess. It looked and felt extraordinarily believable.
All the scenes in the prison cells, though, were filmed at Television Centre. So, too, were the scenes in the prison hospital. There was a lovely moment where Blanco is in the prison hospital bed next to Fletcher, talking about the possibility of being released on parole. ‘No, Fletch. They’ll never release me. They’ll have to carry me out,’ he says. ‘I’m too old now. They’ll be taking me out in a wooden overcoat.’ Fletcher says, very gently, ‘No, you’re not old.’ Then there’s a pause while he thinks about it. ‘You look old. But you’re not old.’ That lovely line was made up by Ronnie during rehearsal. I think all the script had for that moment was: ‘Don’t talk like that.’ What Ronnie came up with was funny and touching, so in it went.
Porridge, of course, went on to be an extremely highly regarded sitcom, routinely mentioned right up there among the very best when the lists get written. People always say that the essence of a sitcom is people trapped by their circumstances. In that sense, Porridge was the essence of the essence. After all, you don’t get people more trapped by their circumstances than prisoners and their wardens. The comedy that Ronnie and the cast – and, of course, Clement and La Frenais – worked up out of those ultra-restrictive confines is the stuff of genius. I feel enormously privileged to have had a small part in it.
It was on the set of Porridge that I met Richard Beckinsale, who played Lenny Godber, Fletcher’s Br
ummy cell mate. Richard was a handsome, friendly guy with something rather effortlessly glamorous about him. He also had an extremely dry sense of humour. You could never quite tell whether he was winding you up or not. He could spin a story so well that you had no choice but to believe it, and he liked to spend whole minutes building those stories up. He would tell you he had been in Harrods and had seen the Queen come in and buy some makeup, and the tale would be set amid all these effortless details that made it weirdly plausible. And when you said, ‘No, really?’ He would say, ‘You didn’t believe that, did you?’
I went to see him onstage one night, in a play called Funny Peculiar by Mike Stott, at the Garrick Theatre in the West End. He was very good in it. I remember a moment where somebody upended a bag of marbles on the stage. I can’t remember why there was a bag of marbles hanging around at that point: go and see the play or buy the script if you want to find out. But the actors ended up slipping and skating around the stage on them, as though they were on ice: it was well done and very funny.
I went backstage afterwards to say hello to Richard and congratulate him. As we left the theatre together, Richard said, ‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’ I said, ‘That would be very kind.’ We walked round the corner and I couldn’t believe it when he put his key in the door of a massive Bentley saloon car, not all that much smaller than a bungalow. He just grinned, and in we jumped.
I was most impressed. I think Richard’s attitude was, if you’ve got it, spend it, because there’s no point hanging on to it. I was the opposite, but maybe that’s a wartime childhood for you. I still had, burned into my mind, the image on the huge government poster on a hoarding at the end of Lodge Lane when I was growing up – a picture of a dripping tap with the simple instruction ‘Waste not, want not’. That graphic has stayed with me my whole life. Even now, I go round the house turning off lights. (In order not to waste electricity, you understand, not because I think the blackout is still on.)
Richard’s life ended tragically early. One night in March 1979, we were at a party thrown by Ronnie B. He and Ronnie Corbett had both decided to take their families off to Australia for a year, to exploit some work opportunities there and also to avoid Britain’s then crippling tax regime. Before leaving, Ronnie B. held a farewell bash for a few of his mates and his family. He booked a big round table at Langan’s Brasserie near Green Park. There was Ronnie and his wife Joy, Richard, myself and a handful of others. We had a meal, and lots of wine and there was much jollity. Michael Caine, who part-owned Langan’s, stopped by the table, I remember, and had a chat with Ronnie during the evening. At around eleven thirty, Richard got up and came round to us all individually, making his apologies. He said he had to go because he had promised he would look in at another close friend’s party. So he said his goodbyes, shook hands with everyone and left.
Over the next thirty-six hours, the news gradually reached us all that Richard had died of a heart attack at home during the night. It was so shocking. We were devastated for him, and for his wife, Judy Loe. It caught all of us completely off guard but it hit Ronnie particularly hard. He couldn’t work for a number of days because he was so upset.
Richard was just thirty-one years old. He had barely started.
* * *
IN 1975, THE BBC decided to make Open All Hours into a series, directed by Syd Lotterby. Six episodes had been commissioned, to be written by Roy Clarke. Ronnie asked me if I would be interested in resuming the part of Granville. I was more than interested. I was delighted. The chance to play opposite Ronnie in an entire series was a dream outcome.
So, in 1975, work began in what we referred to as the Acton Hilton, a purpose-built block of BBC rehearsal rooms, situated in gorgeous, leafy Acton, west of Shepherd’s Bush. Dances and dramas and comedy shows and all sorts were coming together in this rather low-rent den, which made it, in fact, despite its anonymity, quite a buzzy place to be. On the top floor was the canteen, where we would adjourn for a restorative repast of egg, chips and beans, or chips, egg and beans, or beans, egg, chips and sausage, or sausage, egg, chips and beans. If you could time your lunch break to coincide with the arrival of the girls from Pan’s People in their rehearsal leotards, you considered yourself doubly refreshed.
Returning to Open All Hours was also a chance to renew acquaintance with Lynda Baron, who played Nurse Gladys Emmanuel, the district nurse, Arkwright’s thwarted lust object. Lynda was great company. She was a wonderful singer, and long before she did Open All Hours she had been a cabaret artist and had worked with Danny La Rue. But the most impressive thing about her – and the thing that had Ronnie and I spitting feathers – was that she had a photographic memory. She would do the first rehearsal, which was always a ‘blocking’ day, which is to say, going through the script and working out all the positions on the set during the scenes. Lynda would come in the next morning and she would have absorbed everything from the previous day and be able to work without a script, while Ronnie and I were still fumbling with bits of paper and looking confused. Needless to say she was also DLP (dead line perfect), unlike me, who was still prone to the occasional gentle paraphrase.
After rehearsing the six episodes, we set off up to Doncaster for a couple of weeks to film all the exterior shots. Arkwright’s corner shop was, in fact, a commandeered hairdressing salon. The location scout had found the place, ideally corner-situated, and came to an arrangement with the owner, paying her to go off on a two-week holiday. The props department then moved in and turned the place into a plausible general store. Everybody in the neighbourhood seemed very tolerant of us, even when shooting went on into the night – although there was one occasion when a window flew up on the other side of the street and a bloke leaned out and, very politely, asked, ‘Is this going on much longer? Only I’ve got to get up early in the morning.’ We reassured him that we would be finished very shortly. He said, ‘Well, that’s all right, then,’ and shut the window.
It wasn’t until a subsequent series that a local man came at me on the street with a bread knife. But we’ll get on to that in due course.
In Doncaster, I had to master the use of Granville’s delivery bike – not as straightforward as it may look, because when you turn a corner on those delivery beasts, the fixed container at the front doesn’t turn with you, which is highly disconcerting. But, of course, I was able to tap into that valuable experience I had, working for the Victor Value supermarket at the age of fourteen. You never forget, you know. Riding a bike is like … well, riding a bike.
With location filming completed and edited back in London, we adjourned to Television Centre to shoot the rest of the material in front of a studio audience, one episode at a time, always on a Sunday night. This was my first prolonged taste of filming television in front of an audience and the way it requires you to serve two masters: the audience in the studio and the audience at home. That was quite a difficult balance. When the audience laugh, you have to find a way to ride that laugh and absorb it and then choose the right moment to continue on with the show. You mustn’t crash into the audience but you mustn’t look like you’re waiting for them to stop laughing, either. So there’s a little beat in there which isn’t catered for by the script. The director can extend time by cutting away for a reaction shot, which helps you out. But there’s still a technique to interacting with the audience’s laughter that you only pick up by doing it.
There was no canned laughter, by the way. We never used it. However, before the recording, when the warm-up guy went out in front of the audience to do a little routine and get everyone in the right mood, the director would always make sure he taped the audience’s reaction to the warm-up man’s gags. Then he knew he had some laughter in the can which he could use to cover over any dropouts at edits, should they prove necessary. That was the only sense in which the laughter was ever artificial.
During the filming of that first series of Open All Hours, Ronnie and I grew closer. After Sunday recordings we would set off together to a bistro i
n a mews near the Victoria and Albert Museum where we would order what Ronnie referred to as ‘battery acid’ – the house wine, which was throat-peelingly filthy. Soon I started going to see Ronnie and the family for dinner – first of all in Pinner, in north London, where he and Joy lived with their three children, and then out in Oxfordshire, at the old mill house called Dean Mill which he and Joy bought and restored. The pair of them had excellent taste and Ronnie was a great collector, with a very good eye for stuff from antique shops and junk shops. He didn’t collect things because they were valuable, particularly. He collected them because they appealed to him and he liked to have them around.
Consequently his place was like a house of wonders. There was a tall cabinet, I recall, with three shelves in it, and each of the shelves was groaning with little statuettes of 1920s bathing belles: porcelain figures, in swimming costumes, all a bit risqué for their period, possibly, but with beautifully detailed china faces and bathing caps hung with jewels. When I went to Ronnie’s place, I used to stand in front of that cabinet for ages. I was also struck by a statue he had of a woman in flowing robes, holding a lamp and standing on a rock. At the top of the stairs there was a cabinet full of toy soldiers, the old lead ones, beautifully finished and hand-painted. There were boxes of cigarette cards, too, some of them still in unopened packets, and there were thousands of postcards. Ronnie loved images of the seaside from the turn of the century and dedicated albums to them. I remember, too, leafing through an album entirely comprising postcards made from silk – page after page of them.
