by David Jason
The walls of the house, meanwhile, were covered with wonderful pictures, of all shapes, sizes and styles. I said to him once, ‘How do you do it?’
He said, ‘It’s easy. If you like something, you put it up on the wall.’
I said, ‘But what about the colour, the size, the question of whether it matches the carpet?’
Ronnie said, ‘Forget all that. Just sling it on the wall and enjoy it.’
But he and Joy had such natural taste that they could adopt that approach and it was bound to work. If it had been me, I would have been worried about getting it wrong. I didn’t have confidence in my own taste the way they did.
Still, I got a bit of an education from Ronnie in this area. When we were on location for Open All Hours, we had Sundays off, and Ronnie would get his driver to take me and him off for the day and go hunting for bric-a-brac in the surrounding villages. (I didn’t have my own driver in those humble days, by the way – I was just the poor errand boy in the Fair Isle jumper, don’t forget.) We would seek out antique shops and junk places and spend hours nosing around. The tinier and the more offbeat the shop was, and the further it was into the middle of nowhere, the happier Ronnie was. I eventually plucked up the courage and picked up a few things which he gave me the nod on. I remember, in particular, getting hold of a large advert for Sunlight Soap, probably dating back to the 1920s and using a primitive 3-D effect. It was made using painted vanes, so that from one angle it appeared to be saying ‘Sunlight Soap’ and then, from a slightly different position, it read ‘The Perfect Wash’. I thought that was amazing, and it was just lying around in a junk shop, where the bloke wanted next to nothing for it. Ronnie was lusting after it, but I got in there first. That advert hung in my kitchen for years.
Ronnie’s house in Oxfordshire was a treasure trove, and a place where I and, in due course, my girlfriend Myfanwy were made to feel extremely welcome. But it was also somewhere where I almost met a premature death – or, at the very least, narrowly escaped life-altering injuries.
It happened one summer. Myfanwy and I were staying for the weekend, and after a very nice evening in which a certain amount of wine had been drunk, everyone went off to bed. We had been put in the spare room, at the top of the house. It was a very hot night, though, and I couldn’t get to sleep, so I thought I would get up and take a bit of air. In our room, I had noticed there was an additional door, set into one of the outside walls and so clearly leading to the outside of the house. Using my by now quite intimate – but at the same time slightly inebriated – knowledge of the layout of Ronnie’s place, I worked out that this door must give onto a flat roof. If I could stand out there and take the air for a while, I might find sleep came a little more easily.
So, I went and opened the door and cool air duly rushed in. Being the countryside, and not, apparently, a moonlit night, it was pitch black outside, to the extent that I couldn’t see any further, really, than the threshold of the door. I certainly couldn’t see anything much below me. There were no street lights – and no stars, even. I stood in the frame of the door and put a bare foot outside, over the edge. I couldn’t feel anything with my toes, but I knew that one step down or so would have to be that flat roof. All I needed to do was step forward and drop down onto it. Maybe I could even sit down in the doorway, ease myself forward over the threshold and get down that way. I was all ready to do this and jump out when it suddenly occurred to me that there might be little stones on the surface of that flat roof, and that these might play havoc with my bare feet. So, instead, I contented myself with standing in the doorway and breathing in the night air for a while. Then I closed the door and went back to bed.
In the morning, I went and opened the door and had a look out again. There was no flat roof there, or indeed anywhere. What there was was just a thirty-foot sheer and immediate drop down onto the disused mill wheel below. I told Ronnie about my night-time adventures with the door over breakfast and saw the blood drain from his face. Within a few days of our departure, a builder was round there putting a nice, secure balcony across the offending door.
One small further, slightly drunk step that dark night, and I don’t like to think what would have happened. Would a mill wheel break a man’s fall? I’m not sure, and I’m not sure I want to find out. Maybe I wouldn’t have died. But I might have struggled to play the trombone thereafter.
The first series of Open All Hours was broadcast at the beginning of 1976. The BBC, in its almighty wisdom, decided to put it out not on the mainstream channel, BBC1, but on BBC2, which was regarded as very much the backwater for a brand-new comedy series. The BBC’s reasoning, as it filtered out to us, was that Open All Hours was ‘a gentle comedy’ and therefore better suited to the calms of the second channel than to the noisier, choppier waters of the first. Obviously, that was a slight blow – and yet BBC2 had its own kudos. What annoyed Ronnie, more than anything, was the use of the word ‘gentle’ in relation to the show. He told me, ‘When they say it’s “gentle”, they normally mean they don’t think it’s very funny.’
What BBC2 definitely meant was smaller audiences. Open All Hours did modestly well, but the first series came and went without much fanfare. There was no indication that anyone at the BBC particularly wanted to make another one, although we would have to wait and see on that.
Meanwhile, something else which came and went without really taxing the trumpet section: Lucky Feller. This latest Humphrey Barclay project for ITV reached the nation’s screens in the autumn of 1976 and, once again, I had the leading role. You could never accuse Humph of losing faith in me. Alas, as with The Top Secret Life of Edgar Briggs, Lucky Feller didn’t quite manage to flap its wings and fly.
The series was written by Terence Frisby, who wrote the wonderful sixties stage play There’s a Girl in My Soup. His sitcom essentially revolved around two brothers living in the south-east of London. Remind you of anything? But in this case, I was the younger of the brothers – Shorty Mepstead, who was hapless and seemingly virginal – and the drama centred on a love triangle between me, my brother Randolph (played by Peter Armitage) and my fiancée Kathleen, played by Cheryl Hall. Cheryl was married at the time to Robert Lindsay, whose star was very much in the ascendant. The pair of them would go on to appear together in John Sullivan’s Citizen Smith – Bob as Wolfie Smith, Cheryl as his long-suffering girlfriend Shirley. Cheryl and Bob invited me to dinner at the very nice little place they had in Wimbledon, and when the series ended Cheryl gave me a drawing of Laurel and Hardy as a memento, knowing how big a fan I was.
I thought Terence Frisby’s writing for Lucky Feller was great. There was one scene in particular where Shorty takes Kathleen to a Chinese restaurant – which is clearly as exotic as dining out has ever got for either of them. They look at the menu and Kathleen says, ‘Oh, look, they’ve got prawn balls.’ To which Shorty’s rather anxious reply is, ‘Really? I didn’t know prawns had balls.’ That line would sink if it was offered with a nudge and a wink, but voiced by Shorty, in complete naive innocence, it played very nicely. My brother Arthur recently repeated that line to me, so at least it made an impression on someone.
From my point of view, Lucky Feller was a really enjoyable piece of work. I got to drive a bright red bubble car for the opening credits – not the last time I would be associated on-screen with a three-wheeler. These were years when I felt like I was learning all the time. Nevertheless, counting this and Edgar Briggs, that was two opportunities I had been given to carry a television sitcom, neither of which had quite taken off with people, and I guess you have to wonder how many chances like that you’ll be given in a lifetime – especially if you’re now thirty-six, as I was at this point. The industry was certainly more patient in those days than it seems to be now – but even then, patience had its limits. Around this time, somebody wrote in the Stage, the industry newspaper: ‘Somewhere there is a writer whose ideas Mr Jason can execute to great effect, but they have not yet met.’ It was a point of view – and, as it tur
ned out, a rather prescient one. But I’m not sure that was how I was really considering the situation at the time. The most important thing was not to think too hard about the longer term, but just to enjoy the work when it came up, and for as long as it continued to do so. The journey, not the arrival, as they say.
They do say that, don’t they? Ah, well. If they don’t, they do now.
* * *
THROUGHOUT THE 1970S, alongside the television stuff, I continued to work pretty constantly in the theatre, taking roles in the West End and going out on tour. The fact that I had spent eighteen months in No Sex Please – We’re British without wrecking it had increased my reputation and left me in a pretty solid position to be considered for other jobs in that line. In 1974, for example, I found myself teamed up with the actress Liz Fraser, who was quite a star in the British comedy firmament, having appeared in the movie I’m All Right Jack, in several of the Carry On films, and on television in Hancock’s Half Hour and The Goodies. We took over from June Whitfield and Terry Scott in the West End in a farce called A Bedful of Foreigners, written by Dave Freeman, who had written for Tony Hancock, Arthur Askey and Benny Hill. His play centred on two couples on holiday in France who discover, with various levels of dismay, that they have been booked into the same hotel room in a full hotel. Again, we weren’t exactly talking Chekhov – but we were talking seventies-style knockabout fun, which meant that Liz had to appear at least once onstage in a basque. I’m afraid those were simply the rules for this kind of play in that era. The run lasted for six months but, in all honesty, people had been coming for Terry and June, the TV stars, and it went a bit hollow in their absence. Relations between Liz and myself were workable but slightly distant. I think Liz assumed I was gay because, in the whole of the time we were acting together, I never once made a pass at her. It was the only explanation she could come up with.
Then I went out on the road with a play called Darling Mr London – and rather wished, in a roundabout way, that I hadn’t. This was a piece that had been co-written by Tony Marriott (one half of the team that came up with No Sex Please) and Bob Grant, who will be familiar to fans of the sitcom On the Buses, in which he played the character Jack Harper opposite Reg Varney’s Stan Butler. My character in the play was an international telephone operator called Edward Hawkins – a set-up which would obviously struggle for traction nowadays, in the age of Vodafone and 3G. However, it was all perfectly comprehensible in the mid-seventies, when, as everybody knew, phone calls were only made possible by someone sitting at a switchboard with a fistful of plugs. Hawkins was meant to be a Mr Nobody kind of figure in real life, but at the same time was someone in possession of an amazingly suave and appealing telephone manner. This had enabled him to charm himself into the affections of girls in various countries around the world, with whom, in his mind, he was having a collection of hot affairs. (Mr Nobodies with rich fantasy lives: are we beginning to detect a certain theme emerging in my professional roles? Granville, Edgar Briggs, even Albert Toddey in the doomed film White Cargo … there would, indeed, seem to be a distinct thread of vulnerable wistfulness linking these characters. Though it was vulnerable wistfulness combined, commonly, let’s not forget, with a properly butch ability to vault a sofa.)
Hawkins has, in the course of these international conversations, omitted to mention the existence of his wife, meaning that he’s in big trouble when all these girls descend on England from their various home countries, in order to take part in a beauty pageant, and suddenly start turning up at Hawkins’s house in order to meet the man behind the voice.
Could I, as an actor, do a convincingly suave and appealing phone manner? Why, yes, I have to say I could.
The aforementioned Bob Grant took the role he had created of Hawkins’s lodger, who was a curate. Well, it could hardly have called itself a farce without a lodger who was a curate, could it? Meanwhile, the plot device of the beauty pageant was a convenient, if painfully thin, excuse for the girls (who were called things like Britt, Ingrid, Sylvana and Monique) to appear onstage in bathing costumes, or otherwise (in the popular phrase of the time) ‘scantily clad’. Most of the girls were played by English actresses putting on accents, but Miss Sweden was played by Leena Skoog, an actress who was so popular with the tabloid photographers at the time that she virtually had her own column, and who genuinely was Swedish – to the extent, indeed, that she could hardly speak English. Also in the cast was Valerie Leon, who had been a big presence in the Carry On films, and Cheryl Hall, my former co-star in the short-lived Lucky Feller.
You may be getting ahead of me here, but it turned out there was quite a lot wrong with the play. For starters, some of the cast couldn’t act their way out of a paper hat. Also there were pieces of farce in the staging that didn’t work, which became glaringly obvious when we put it in front of an audience. I kept saying to Grant, ‘We should have a look at some things.’ There was, for example, a moment where a male character was seen going through a door, in the room beyond which – as the audience has been led to believe – supposedly lurked one of the girls in a state of undress. From behind the door was heard a quantity of affronted screaming and various other bangs and crashes, and then the man returned to the stage, apparently the victim of an assault which had left a broken tennis racket hanging around his neck. He would then stagger about for quite some time, supposedly regathering his senses. This little piece of action went for nothing on a nightly basis. You could almost feel a cold wind blowing off the audience, and then watch a number of balls of tumbleweed bowl silently across the stalls. I gently suggested to Bob that perhaps the actor could try reining in on the staggering a bit, but no. The staggering went on in full. It was the same with another moment in which Bob, playing the curate, was obliged to come on in his pyjamas. For some reason, not explained by anything else in the play, Bob chose to have the pyjama bottoms held up by a lavatory chain, tied around his middle. Bob thought this was hysterically funny, but the audience, on the whole, tended to disagree. Again, I quietly suggested losing the toilet chain, but, again, my suggestion was ignored. It wasn’t as though I could really press any of these points, because Bob was, of course, the co-writer of the play, so he essentially had the authority to do what he thought fit and to wear as many toilet chains as he thought appropriate.
An additional problem was that Bob had something that I suppose might fall into the category of ‘intellectual aspirations’. He was, I believe, a graduate of some sort of university in the East End of London, and he thought he knew about comedy, in the academic sense. In the evening, when we were on the road, I would often share a meal with Bob and his wife, who was on tour with us, and try to discuss parts of the play, only for him, invariably, to set off on a sentence which began, ‘Well, what you don’t understand is …’
My opinions clearly weren’t welcome. About three weeks into the tour, I overheard Bob and Tony Marriott, in the dressing room next to mine, discussing the possibility of having me replaced. I was pretty philosophical at the prospect. I was frustrated that nobody was setting to, and rolling up their sleeves and getting rid of the stuff in the play that didn’t work, and concentrating on the stuff that did. But there it was. The plot to get rid of me seemingly evaporated.
Darling Mr London wasn’t, all in all, a flying success. The great shame is that there was one spectacular moment in the show that almost unfailingly brought the house down. It came where my character, Hawkins, is in bad odour with his wife, who has told him he will have to leave the marital bed and sleep on the pull-out sofa. By this point in the play, the audience have seen this sofa bed go up and down a couple of times, perfectly conventionally. This time, though, after I have readied myself and the sofa for bed, it is suddenly beholden upon me (not uncommonly in farces – but not uncommonly in certain B&Bs too, as I well knew) to find somewhere to hide in a hurry. Offstage could be heard, from all sides, the sound of the girls calling ‘Where’s Edward?’, clearly about to come on. So, in a desperate attempt to find
cover, I used to take a run the width of the stage and dive into the sheets on the bed, which was tricked so that it would close up with a snap and revert to being a sofa with me apparently vanished into the softly upholstered heart of it. From the auditorium, it looked like the sofa had eaten me whole. This, I tell you, with no word of a lie, stopped the show. People would be falling about, unable to believe their eyes. It was very difficult to achieve and relied on some cunningly removed bolts. I think it’s the best piece of business I ever did on a stage.
OK, there was a night or two when Sod’s Law was in operation and the bolts malfunctioned, meaning I would dive in and the sofa wouldn’t spring back together around me. And then the magic rather evaporated. But that happened surprisingly infrequently, and when it worked, it was brilliant.
We opened in Billingham in the north-east of England – and not for the first time in my life as a touring player. Billingham was a famous start-up destination, where many plays, with their eyes set on the West End, seemed to begin their uncertain journey – for the fundamental reason, I believe, that it was pretty cheap to do so. Billingham was famous for a) its shipbuilding and b) its chemical factory. You could see the smoke rising gently off the latter, and if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction the entire cast ended up with terrible throats. The theatre was a municipal building – meaning that it doubled as a concert hall and a lecture theatre. It also had attached to it a gymnasium and a roller-skating rink and your best hope was that the play you were doing didn’t contain too many quiet, sensitive moments. When the sound level on the stage dropped, you could hear the noise of the Wurlitzer organ pumping through the walls from next door, along with the thrum of the circling skates on the floor.
