by David Jason
Opposite the stage door, just beyond the pedestrianised shopping precinct, was a tower block built specially to house university students. The arrival of Darling Mr London must have coincided with a university vacation, because we were able to get cheap accommodation for the cast in the otherwise largely empty tower. Any way you could find to save money while out on tour was always welcomed, but on the negative side, the regulations in that tower block were just as stiff, if not stiffer, than in even the most draconian B&B. There was an 11 p.m. curfew, a strict ‘no guests’ rule and, just to ensure the regime was enforced, there was a bloke on the door with an Alsatian. The curfew was frustrating, but we would smuggle a few beers up with us after a show, and convene in someone’s room for some drinks and a chat. The facilities were spartan – a communal bathroom on the landing, and a single bed, as narrow as a plank. Yet somehow these antiseptic surroundings did not succeed in discouraging Derek Newark and Leena Skoog from letting nature take its familiar course.
One morning I went to Derek’s room to knock him up for breakfast. All I could hear from the other side of the door was hysterical laughter. I tapped on the door.
Derek said, ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s David.’
‘Wait a moment.’
Derek opened the door and there was Leena, tucked up under the sheets and lying on the tiny, almost monastically narrow student bed, which was now sloping downwards at a jaunty angle. During the course of the night, both the legs at the foot of the bed had got tired of lending their support to Derek and Leena’s combined exertions and had snapped clean off. They thought it was entirely hilarious. And so, I guess, did I, although I would have liked to have seen them explain it away to the bloke with the Alsatian.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Struggles with an inflatable life raft. The mouse that was a roaring success. And if it’s Tuesday, it must be Jakarta.
IN 1977, I was asked to go to the London Weekend Television Studios at Elstree to meet Ronnie Taylor. Ronnie was a writer who was very influential at LWT at the time. He was – like Spike Milligan, Dick Emery and countless others – one of that generation who had been in the war and had got involved in putting on shows, to pass the time and entertain themselves. When they came back from the war, they simply carried on. He was about my height – in other words, average. (Ahem.) He had greying hair, was neatly and conservatively dressed in a shirt and tie, such that you might believe he was someone with a sensible, proper job, rather than a writer of comic material. He had a warm personality and was extremely easy to like. He was also very quietly spoken. That’s often been a surprise to me, with comedy writers – it was certainly true of John Sullivan, for instance. You expect people who write funny things to be loud, and constantly saying things like, ‘So, there were these two vicars, right …’ Often it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Ronnie said he was going to do a pilot for a comedy series he’d written and he asked me to read for him. On the way home afterwards, I was thinking, ‘I recognise that stuff from somewhere.’ It seemed very familiar to me – the tone and pace of it. That turned out to be no surprise. Ronnie used to write radio scripts for Reg Dixon, who was a music-hall comic. Ronnie had decided he could adapt and modernise those scripts, and that was the substance of this series he’d come up with.
The show was A Sharp Intake of Breath – the breath in question being the noise people make, sucking air past their teeth, just before they tell you that they can’t possibly mend your car while you wait, or fix your gutter without also having to retile your roof, or before they stress the impossibility of satisfying any number of other straightforward requests for service. I had the starring role of Peter Barnes, an ordinary bloke who is constantly thwarted by authority and bureaucracy and petty officialdom as he tries to go about his life. Again, as so often with the parts I was getting at this time, the keyword seems to be hapless. The show had this nice kind of repertory idea, which was that Richard Wilson was in every episode but played a different part in each – my boss, my doctor, my solicitor, my father-in-law, my tailor. Richard had great timing and I admired him enormously and was very pleased for him with the success he went on to have in One Foot in the Grave. Similarly, Alun Armstrong played a mechanic one week and a tourist the next and a salesman the week after that. I think Alun was a bit confused about me because he assumed I would want to go to the bar at lunchtime and sink a few drinks, and I wasn’t interested. I think he found that a little uncomradely and it drove a bit of a wedge.
Still, triumph: the show made it to a second series – six further episodes, broadcast in 1979. And now, having had the chance to see how the show and the cast worked, Ronnie was able to start writing with me and Richard and Alun and Jacqueline Clarke (who played my wife Sheila) in mind, writing for our voices, and knowing our strengths, so the show got stronger.
My favourite scene from the series arose from a conversation that Ronnie and I had, and came in the episode when Peter goes to the post office to pick up a parcel that’s waiting for him. Alun, as the postal worker, does the sharp intake of breath and gives Peter a thousand reasons why he can’t possibly unearth his parcel for him at that moment. Eventually, though, he gives Peter permission to go and root around for it himself in the backlog of undelivered mail. So I go into this metal cage and start looking for this parcel, amid all the other packages that are stacked up inside it. Among the parcels that I keep having to move is a fairly large one, partly unwrapped and with a tag hanging out of it saying ‘Pull here’. So, after some deliberation, curiosity eventually gets the better of me and I do, indeed, pull there. At which point it turns out that what the package contains is a canister holding an inflatable life raft, which now goes up inside the cage. This leaves me fighting in a confined space with a large quantity of uncontrollable and swelling orange rubber, and trying to get out but being unable to do so because the rubber is blocking the entrance. We couldn’t rehearse it very thoroughly because we only had two canisters, and we needed one, obviously, for the take. So the whole thing was a bit of an improvised situation and quite hard to manage. I had to try and keep camera-side of the raft, because obviously there was no mileage in me disappearing entirely behind the inflating rubber. But this was the kind of stuff I absolutely thrived on. Again, it felt like a hark back to the pioneering days of the old silent movie. The attitude was: here’s what you’ve got to do; see what you can get out of it; and hope you survive.
A Sharp Intake continued to perform OK in the ratings and, miracle of miracles, a third series was commissioned. It was, by that reckoning, the most successful programme I had been involved with – or certainly the longest-running. I couldn’t have been happier about it. The comment that had been made in the Stage about me having yet to find a writer to release my talent – well, I really thought I had begun to find that in Ronnie Taylor.
And then tragedy struck. At the end of 1979, just after we started recording the third series, Ronnie was taken ill over a weekend. We were told that he had been rushed to hospital and taken into intensive care with encephalitis. I had no idea what that was, or even how to pronounce it. It was, as I then learned, acute inflammation of the brain, and extremely serious. Even so, for the next two weeks, I simply waited to hear that he was getting better. I couldn’t imagine any other kind of news. I was sure he would soon turn the corner. It never occurred to me that he simply wouldn’t.
I was knocked sideways by Ronnie’s death and it must have been so awful for his family. He wrote for Val Doonican and I remember Val paying respects at the funeral, very movingly. It was a bitter blow. I’d just started to work closely with a writer whom I respected and who respected me. We were beginning to work together as a team. It was a wonderful feeling – a feeling of being part of the creative process. I had to wonder whether I would be lucky enough to find that ever again.
* * *
ANOTHER MESSAGE FROM my agent. ‘There’s a Manchester-based company looking for some voices for some cartoon chara
cters. Would you be interested in going along to a studio they’ve hired in Soho and reading for them? They’ll explain it all to you when you get there.’
As it happens, I’ve always loved cartoons. My love affair with them started when I was seven and my mother used to take me to the pictures with her. We used to go at least once and sometimes twice a week. Between the B picture and the A picture there would always be a section of cartoons – normally Looney Tunes or Walt Disney. We were there, ostensibly, for the John Wayne feature but the high point for me was always those cartoons. The colour and the vibrancy and the silliness made a wonderful impression on me.
So I headed to Soho and there I met a man called Brian Cosgrove and his business partner, Mark Hall. They had been doing a lot of animation work for children’s television – a cartoon series of Noddy, some stuff for Rainbow. The had also done a lovely series that I remembered seeing called Chorlton and the Wheelies – a very surreal piece in which characters appeared out of the ground and travelled around on a wheel. They showed me some drawings of a character they were calling Danger Mouse – a friendly-looking rodent with an eyepatch and a superhero-style ‘DM’ logo on his chest – and his sidekick, Penfold, a shy, slightly bald-looking, thickly bespectacled character. I said, ‘I can see that DM is a mouse, but what’s that supposed to be?’ Brian looked a bit chagrined. ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s a hamster.’
‘We’ve got another actor coming in,’ Brian said. ‘He should be here shortly, and, if it’s all right with you, we’d like you both to have a go at both parts – read a scene or two and then swap over.’
I said, ‘Fine. Who’s the other actor?’
Brian said, ‘Do you know Bob Todd?’
My heart sank into my boots. I did indeed know Bob Todd. Bob had been a superb straight man – for Benny Hill, chiefly, but also for Sid James and Dick Emery and many others. In the process he had earned himself the memorable nickname ‘Silly Todd’. But all that was by the by. What I knew Bob Todd for was for the short and not particularly distinguished time we had spent together on a cruise ship to the Canary Islands a few years previously.
Not on holiday, I should add. This was 1974, and we were filming an episode of the Doctor at Sea comedy series, based on the Richard Gordon books. We both had bit parts. My character went by the wholly plausible name of Manuel Sanchez. He was a stowaway who lived in a wardrobe aboard the ship. He was eventually discovered by Robin Nedwell as the doctor – possibly it was even in Robin’s wardrobe. Memory fails me. Sanchez had to be taken to the captain, but he escaped into hiding again.
On the Tuesday, the director said, ‘We’re going to be filming the chase sequence on Friday. I want you to go around the ship and invent the chase sequence. Give it to me by Thursday latest so I can put it in operation to shoot it Friday.’ They had a wonderful swimming pool on board the boat, so I decided to run round it. I had to jump over a girl in a bikini and bump into Bob Todd, knocking him into the pool. I believe I bumped into a waiter with a teetering tray of drinks, upending it onto innocent passengers. What larks. It’s highly possible that Buster Keaton would have achieved more, I concede. But slap some comic music on top of it, and I didn’t do too badly.
(People who had bit parts in one or other of the Doctor series over the years: Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Maureen Lipman, Hattie Jacques, Roy Kinnear. I was in some very distinguished company.) The bonus attached to this otherwise quite menial job was that it required us to leave the Port of London on a cruise ship named the Black Watch, and voyage to Madeira and beyond. When we weren’t filming, we were free to disport ourselves on the ship among the passengers. And Bob certainly did disport himself, especially in the region of the bar, but also in the region of the dance floor. In particular he disported himself in the region of the dance floor after disporting himself in the region of the bar.
One night, not long after we had set sail, we were in the bar, with the cruise-ship band plying its trade in the corner. I remember him dancing with a woman who had recognised him off the television, and, as they danced, he undid the buttons on his braces, causing his trousers to descend gracefully past his knobbly knees to his ankles, where they remained while he continued to dance. The entire dance floor – and the woman he was dancing with, in particular – was thereby treated to the experience of Bob Todd’s gently sashaying Y-fronts. Bob seemed to find this most amusing – and there were quite a number of people in the room who shared his pleasure, thinking this was the act of a complete card. There were quite a few, too, who cringed with embarrassment.
The following morning, prior to filming, I was at breakfast with Robin Nedwell, who was the star of the show, and Bob joined us. He was, at least, wearing his trousers over his underpants by this time, but he had also put on dark glasses and was clearly nursing the hangover from Hades. He sat at the table with his head in his hands, for several moments.
‘Are you all right, Bob?’ I asked.
He replied, very quietly, ‘I will be in a minute.’ And with that he carefully and wincingly raised his hand to summon a waiter.
I was thinking, ‘Good idea. Maybe a plate of eggs and a couple of cups of strong coffee will sort him out.’
When the waiter arrived, Bob, in a voice that was obviously causing him traumatic pain to use, said, ‘Would you bring me a large brandy?’
Robin and I looked at each other and got on with our large and very tasty breakfasts. A couple of minutes later, the waiter duly brought the requested poison. Even the smell of it made the head swim. Bob downed it in one. After a beat or two, he was more or less ready to face the day.
The impression I forged of Bob over that week adrift on the waves was that he was not the most disciplined of performers. Bob was not a trained actor, so I think he needed alcohol to free himself – to get himself to the place where he could be funny. Otherwise he was inhibited. He wouldn’t have been the only comic performer for whom this equation was true. There have been many over the years and it’s my fortune that I’ve never been one of them.
And now here we were, drawn together again by the operation of fate and an agent’s phone call. When Bob arrived, we greeted each other warmly enough, had a little chat, went into the studio and did a reading. Bob, it seemed to me, was off the planet. He did a lot of bawling and shouting. He seemed to think the best approach to both characters was total madness. I tried my best to fit in with him, and bounce off him, but it was like trying to bounce off a wall of flame. I was comprehensively out-shouted and out-bawled. We all shook hands afterwards, and left, and I walked away thinking, ‘Well, that’s blown that. And thank you very much, Bob Todd.’
A couple of days later, Brian phoned my agent and asked, would I come back to the studio to read again.
‘Would that be with Bob Todd?’ I asked, slightly tentatively.
Apparently not, according to my agent. They wanted me to try out with someone else.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘So, who’s the other actor?’
My agent said, ‘Er … it’s Terry Scott.’
Good grief, as Danger Mouse himself might have said. Out of Bob Todd’s frying pan, into Terry Scott’s fire. Memories of Terry’s lordly demeanour during that BBC panto, and of the commandeering of funny lines during Hugh and I … Could I really share a studio with Terry Scott? Could I really pretend to be a talking mouse, while he was pretending to be a talking hamster? Wouldn’t his hamster end up eating my mouse alive?
Well, no it wouldn’t, as it turned out. And yes, we could share a studio. Perfectly easily, in fact. A good deal of growing up on my part, some mellowing on Terry’s part – I’m sure both those things were factors. Either way, we didn’t pause to revisit those days when I played the King of Gooseland to his swinging policeman. It’s perfectly possible that he never realised we had been in the same room, let alone hung together from its ceiling. But our voices clicked when we read together and, under Brian’s excellent direction, we ended up rubbing along perfectly well. S
ay what you like about Terry Scott, the man was a professional and he knew about character acting. I was Danger Mouse to his Penfold, and he was Penfold to my Danger Mouse, very happily for more than ten years and more than 160 episodes.
That first connection with Cosgrove Hall Films was the start of so much pleasure for me. If the thing you most love about acting is the chance to inhabit other characters, and disappear into them, how could you not love voicing animations? The secret, if there is one, is to treat the drawing as you would treat any other character you might be asked to play. You don’t think of yourself as adding a voice to a cartoon; you think of yourself as playing a character. Danger Mouse led to Count Duckula, its vampire-spoof spin-off, and those things in turn, after auditioning, led to me becoming the voice of the Big Friendly Giant in The BFG, the animated film version of the brilliant Roald Dahl story. Then, perhaps most excitingly of all, there was Wind in the Willows, from the Kenneth Grahame classic, which Cosgrove Hall made into a feature-length film at first, and then drew out into a long and very successful television series for children.
Brian and Mark wanted me to play Ratty, which I thought would be great. But I had an idea for Toad and it started to nag away at me. Everybody I had seen playing Toad had played him as a bit of a piece of work and more than faintly unpleasant. That’s the way the book seems to lead you. I thought, if that was the case, how could he have such nice friends – friends like Badger and Moly? I wanted there to be something lovable at the core of him. Sure, he’s a bit of a boor and a bit of a show-off and he periodically goes off on one – but he’s those things because, fundamentally, he’s childlike, and I thought if you could bring out the innocence of him, you would reveal there was no harm in him.
I pleaded with Brian to let me put a tape down of my interpretation of Toad. I wasn’t aiming to get the part – I was perfectly happy at the prospect of being Ratty. But, in all honesty, I didn’t think I could bear the thought of being part of it and yet hearing Toad played entirely as a wrong ’un. I thought, at least I could communicate my idea of Toad to the producers and perhaps they would impart it to whoever eventually ended up playing the part. At the very least, I would have got it off my chest and known that I had tried.
