by David Jason
Brian spoke to me a couple of days later and said, ‘You’ve given us such a problem. We wanted you for Ratty, but we’ve been listening back to that tape you made and we’re now very taken with the idea of you as Toad.’ It was Toad that I played, in the end, and they got Ian Carmichael to play Ratty.
What a cast Brian had managed to assemble. Ian Carmichael was a huge star. For the voice of Badger, Brian secured the services of Sir Michael Hordern. Sir Michael was, of course, one of the theatrical greats and a real hero of mine. Moly was Richard Pearson: I’d seen him many times in big television dramas. This was fairly sobering company to be lining up alongside. I felt like a bit of an interloper. Sir Michael, in particular, clearly didn’t have the first idea who I was or why he should be working with me. However, between takes, I soon worked out that if you got him on the subject of fishing, he was off. We got quite friendly – to the point where I felt able to call him Michael and he felt able to call me ‘My dear boy’.
Mind you, I was very proud when Brian related something to me that he had observed when we all did the first read-through together. Brian was watching from the control room, through the glass, and he told me afterwards that, when I started to read as Toad, giving it some energy, he could see the others visibly quicken, as though I had surprised them. A few chins came up and Brian said he thought there was a bit of game-lifting going on in the room from that moment as they responded to the energy. I know I could never have stood on a stage with Sir Michael Hordern doing Shakespeare and been competitive, but in the context of a recording studio, his Badger versus my Toad, I think I just about managed to hold my own.
One day, some time after these recording sessions, I went into a sound studio to do a voice-over for a commercial, and there was Sir Michael Hordern. This took me by surprise. I was a little shocked to see this giant of the theatre in these lowly environs.
I said, ‘Sir Michael, what are you doing here?’
He replied, ‘What am I doing here? My dear boy, I am doing what you are doing: I am being a vocal whore.’
Well, that’s one way of seeing it, I guess.
Brian Cosgrove became and remains a close friend. When we were recording in Manchester, I would frequently go and stay with his family, rather than in a hotel, and sleep on a camp bed up in the attic. Which had a floor and electricity, I should add. I wasn’t slung up there in the dark with the Christmas decorations. Indeed, Brian, who was deeply dedicated to his craft, had the attic kitted out for his home studio and it was, as such, the place he went to work when he came home from work.
Every morning, I had the challenge of getting to the bathroom before the rest of Brian’s family, in particular his two daughters, Jenny and Laura. I’d get to the door which closed off the stairs to the attic, only to hear the patter of feet on the landing and the shutting of the bathroom door. So I would sit at the foot of the stairs until I heard the bathroom door open again. At which point, in the time it took me to stand up and begin to open the door, there would be another pattering of feet and the sound of the bathroom door shutting again. Let me tell you, when you need to go … Anyway, it was a tiny price to pay in order to share the good company and homeliness of Brian and his wife Angela rather than mooch around in the sterile environment of a hotel.
In the basement, meanwhile, lived Brian’s collection of old fairground slot machines. These immediately fascinated me. Brian had acquired them from his neighbour, Cliff Mills. Seaside piers were going through a bit of a revolution, getting rid of their old penny machines and going over to electronics. A lot of this great, historic machinery was just dumped in bins, tragically. But this Cliff Mills was in the know, and he went round and picked up a lot of these unwanted items, virtually for the price of taking them away. Brian became one of Cliff’s best customers. He bought a whole load of penny slots, some of them very intricate, including a fabulous one which enabled you to fire ball bearings at a selection of tin cats sitting on a wall. Was Angela pleased about these acquisitions? I can’t comment, except to note, again, that they went in the basement.
It was in Brian’s basement that I first met Marvo the Mystic. (No relation to Mystic Mavis in Birmingham, I’m pretty sure, though you never know.) Marvo is a wonderful figure, probably from the 1940s, who lives in a glass cabinet, wears a red jacket and a bow tie, and performs tricks if you cross his palm with silver. Specifically, if you put in a coin, he taps on the glass with his wand to get your attention and then, with his other hand, raises a small cone that sits on a little table beside him. Beneath that cone: nothing but air. He returns the cone to the table, and for the next few moments, his eyes go backwards and forwards and his eyebrows go up and down, in the manner of someone contemplating magic. Then he raises the cone once more – and, incredibly, there are now two coins on the table. Then he lowers the cone, taps on the window, raises the cone again – and the two coins have become one! Gobsmacking. And he’s only just getting started, because if you feed him another coin, the next time the cone gets lifted, it reveals a beetle. And on it goes.
I wanted to buy Marvo off Brian, and every time I went there, I asked him to sell Marvo to me, but he always refused. Eventually Brian said, ‘If you really want Marvo, why don’t we build another one?’ And that’s what we did: we constructed a perfect replica. We took apart the first Marvo, to see how he was made, and built another one from the ground up. Brian constructed the doll figure, and I looked after the mechanism.
While this project was under way, I would take the mechanics of the doll away with me on tour and work on them in my hotel room in the day. Something we were stuck on for a while was how to find Marvo some respectable eyes. But that was solved by a trip to an eye hospital in Manchester where very helpful staff showed us whole trays of glass eyes and allowed us to nab a couple. Marvo currently resides proudly in the hallway of our house, in full health, where he is happy to perform for a penny. (Cheaper than Mystic Mavis in Birmingham, definitely.)
* * *
EVEN THOUGH WORK was often sending us to different ends of the earth, my girlfriend Myfanwy and I were managing to grow close – although I should concede that, despite her best efforts to teach me, my grasp of the Welsh language still extended no further than ‘men in y barra’, which is Welsh for bread and butter. (Easy for a Londoner: you just need to say ‘men in a barrow’ in your best cockney accent.)
Myfanwy still had her little terraced cottage in Wales, which we went away to a lot. But in the early 1980s, I realised I had enough money to buy a place in the country nearer London that the two of us could go to at the weekends. After a little bit of hunting, I found a dilapidated cottage in Crowborough in East Sussex, a village I had always liked when visiting friends there. When I say ‘dilapidated’, it was, without doubt, the most ill-advised purchase I ever made in my life, with the possible exception of my first motorbike. I realised the place was, as the estate agents like to say, ‘in need of renovation’. What I hadn’t realised was quite how needy its ‘need of renovation’ was going to turn out to be. Every time I went near it, whole new layers of previously undisclosed damp and rot revealed themselves, and large areas of the building seemed to be held together with a combination of fungus and hope.
Still, I like a practical project, as you might have gathered. Myfanwy and I started going down to Crowborough when we could and digging the garden and attempting to restore this place. I also cunningly enlisted the help of friends. ‘Come and stay in my country cottage …’ was the cry, followed, in a slightly lower voice, by ‘… and help me finish building it.’ When I was doing Danger Mouse, Brian Cosgrove, the animator, and his wife Angela came to spend time down there and pitched in. My cousin Ken had his sleeves rolled up for months on end and played a huge part in the renovation. And one day, I invited our neighbours in London, Micky and Angie McCaul, to come and inspect (and, of course, help with) the work.
Our proud tour of the building took Micky and Angie upstairs, where the floorboards were all up, meaning you could on
ly cross the room by stepping on the exposed timber beams. Myfanwy went to put her foot on a beam, missed, hit the thin plaster instead and screamed as her leg disappeared through the ceiling into the room below. It would have been a nice bit of business, if she’d meant to do it. Micky McCaul lunged forward to grab her arms and prevent her going downstairs the quick way.
Still, I have to say I later outdid Myfanwy on the ‘personal injury sustained during the renovation of the cottage’ front, by causing a gruesome amount of damage to my left foot while cutting a patch of long grass in the garden. Reader: be careful with a Flymo on a slope. As I stood above the overgrown area, sweeping the machine from side to side, I basically ended up mowing my foot. ‘It’s nothing,’ I bravely insisted, before removing my rubber shoe (a now slightly chopped rubber shoe), surveying the mess that lay beneath, and realising that it wasn’t nothing at all, but actually quite something. A neighbour came out and kindly helped me wrap the foot in a towel before calling an ambulance. Off to A&E for … what’s that, the 963rd time in this book? I ended up spending a week in bed with my foot up in the air in one of those contraptions beloved of cartoonists and Carry On films. The legacy is a completely inflexible big toe on the relevant foot. Ah, well. There are worse fates – and worse ways to injure yourself with a lawnmower.
* * *
SINGAPORE, HONG KONG, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Egypt … places that were just a vague rumour in a distant atlas, as far as I was concerned. Yet, as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, and as I turned from my thirties into my forties, I was to land up in all of them as a travelling actor. It turned out to be a horizon-expanding experience, in so many ways.
I owed this unforeseen and enormously privileged crash course in geography (among other subjects) to Derek Nimmo. Derek was a very successful actor in British films and television, but he was also a West End stage actor and a producer. He was dapper and very charming, and extremely well spoken. The stutter that he used to employ as the Reverend Mervyn Noote in the clerical sitcom All Gas and Gaiters, and also, as a matter of fact, while selling chocolate biscuits (‘P-p-p-pick up a Penguin’, as he used to say in the ads), was affected. But otherwise what you heard was exactly as he spoke – softly, gently, rather poshly. I don’t think he was particularly posh, in fact, but he was certainly wealthy. One evening, I was invited to his house for dinner. It was a grand, four-storey, terraced place in Kensington, very tastefully fitted out. Before we ate, we had drinks in the sitting room. Derek was wearing a velvet smoking jacket and on his feet was a pair of dark velvet monogrammed slippers. I remember thinking to myself, ‘I cannot believe it. Derek Nimmo actually has monogrammed slippers.’ Later, I told my girlfriend, Myfanwy that I wanted a pair of monogrammed slippers, just like Derek Nimmo’s, and she had them done for me. With my initials on them, obviously, not Derek’s. In fact, I’ve still got them, although I don’t wear them: they’re the kind that have no backs, so you end up curling your toes to keep them on, and they’ve got leather soles which means you don’t walk down stairs so much as ski down them.
Anyway, there we stood that evening, sipping politely at our glasses, and I found myself looking at this picture of Venice above the mantelpiece.
Derek said, ‘Do you like the picture?’
I said, ‘Yes, very much.’
Not wishing to appear ignorant about these things, I decided to take a flyer and dredge up a bit of my fairly minimal knowledge of art history.
I said, ‘It looks a bit like a Canaletto.’
To which Derek said, in that faltering way of his, ‘Yes. Well, it, er, it is a Canaletto, as a matter of fact.’
Derek’s ability to buy paintings can’t have been impeded, I imagine, by the highly imaginative decision he had taken to go into business exporting theatrical productions from Britain to the Far East. My understanding is that this enterprise had come about – in a very Derek-like manner – as the consequence of a ‘terribly nice’ conversation he’d had on an aeroplane while heading to Australia to watch the Gold Cup yacht race (a bit of a hobby of his). During the flight, he had found himself next to the chief executive of British Airways and they had got chatting about the old-fashioned concept of ‘dinner theatre’ – a form of entertainment which had largely fallen into obsolescence, in which clients in hotel restaurants sat down to a meal and, shortly after the serving of the coffee, watched a play. Derek and the chief exec were wondering why that didn’t really happen any more. Derek said that, if the notion were ever revived, he was very well placed to lay hands on some productions and some actors. The chief executive said that, for his part, he was very well placed to lay hands on some sponsorship from British Airways. And thus, over some spicy tomato juices and a handful of airline peanuts, were the wheels of commerce set into motion.
I think the first thing Derek did in this line was take a West End play, with himself starring in it, to the Hilton Hotel in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was still a British colony in those days and it turned out that there were a lot of people living and working there who wanted to see a play that had Derek Nimmo in it. Hilton Hotels duly expressed a willingness to stage the play at other Hiltons, elsewhere in the world. So now Derek had an airline and a luxury hotel chain on board, and suddenly, from this one play that he did in Hong Kong, he found himself dispatching productions to hotels in Cairo, Dubai, Muscat, Jakarta, Sydney and all stations east of Margate.
I went on three of these adventures in all. I was invited to take a production of No Sex Please – We’re British to Dubai, along with the wonderful Geoffrey Davies and Sally Ann Howes (who was Truly Scrumptious in the film of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). I went to the Far East with a production of The Unvarnished Truth, with John Fortune, Frank Windsor and Jo Kendall. And I went to Australia with Leslie Phillips and Ann Sidney in a farce called Not Now Darling.
Now, two of those three experiences were a pretty much unalloyed joy from start to finish. The other one starred Leslie Phillips.
Leslie was already by this stage in his career well established as a legend of British comedy thanks to his work in radio series such as The Navy Lark and then in British war films and Carry On movies. He had, under Nimmo’s aegis, embarked on a long tour of Not Now Darling, a farce written by Ray Cooney and John Chapman, which was booked to travel round Australia and then come back through the Far and Middle East. Leslie had been playing this character in a West End run for quite a while before this. The tour was already under way when Derek asked me if I would like to take over from Andrew Sachs, who was playing the co-lead in that play. Andy had to fly back at the end of the Australian leg because I believe he had been contracted to start work playing a Spanish waiter alongside John Cleese in a television series called Fawlty Towers. I wonder what became of that.
Anyway, I said, ‘Absolutely – fantastic’. The prospect was really appealing. I loved travelling and seeing new places, and I was also of the firm opinion that the opportunity to travel and see new places at someone else’s expense and while being paid should never be batted away lightly. Wages in the bin, living like a king – what could be better?
So, the plan is for me to fly out to Australia, two weeks before the play is due to finish there, meet everybody, including Leslie Phillips, and rehearse my role. Andy will continue to play for those two weeks in the evenings, while I rehearse during the day. Then we will leave Brisbane and fly to Singapore, where I will take over from him. It all sounds perfect.
So, I take a twenty-three-hour flight from Heathrow, with a couple of stops for refuelling, which feels like a fortnight. You get a bit stir-crazy, stuck in a tube that long. But I finally land in Australia, feeling no brighter than if important parts of my body had spent an entire day and a night being squeezed through a mangle. I queue up at immigration and I show my passport and I’m asked to explain what my business in Australia is.
‘I’m an actor,’ I say. ‘I’m joining up with a touring production.’
The man at the desk says, ‘Can I see your work permit?’
; Work permit? Do I need a work permit? Nobody told me I needed a work permit. But I’m sure that, if I do need a work permit, a work permit will have been arranged for me. Derek Nimmo’s company will have known about the need for a work permit, and will have sorted a work permit out. They wouldn’t have flown me all this way without organising a work permit, if a work permit is necessary.
My interrogator goes away to make some further enquiries. Quite a long time passes. He returns.
‘No, you don’t have a work permit.’
His other piece of good news: they’re going to search me. Nothing personal, just a routine, random thing, but they’ll need to have a look in my luggage. So I haul my suitcase onto the table, and they go through every single thing I’ve got. The search is so thorough that I’m beginning to suspect that it will soon extend to me, and that I will in due course find myself naked in a side room, bending over a table and hearing the snap of rubber gloves on an Australian immigration official’s wrists.
I’m right: the search does extend to me. Fortunately, though, they confine themselves merely to a vigorous pat-down. Still, all this takes quite a while, and I’m not getting any less tired, or any less irritable.
The search complete, I’m left sitting alone with my bags while, I assume, phone calls are being made and people are trying to work out what to do with me. I wait, and wait, and wait. And after that, I wait a bit more. And then, after that particular wait, I do a bit more waiting, before going back to waiting again. Eventually the waiting tips me over the edge. Through the window can be seen the plane I came in on, still on its stand. I get up, locate my immigration official and confront him with trembling lips.
