by David Jason
‘What’s happening with that plane?’
He says, ‘It’s being refuelled and then it’ll fly back to London.’
‘Put me on that plane,’ I say. ‘Go on – put me on it. You don’t want me in the country, I haven’t got a permit, I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m fed up … just put me on the next plane. I just want to go home.’
The immigration official gives me an appraising look. Something in the tone of my voice, and in the twitching of one of my eyes, informs him that he is no longer dealing with an entirely reasonable human being. This could have gone either way, maybe, but it seems to cause a softening in his attitude towards me. He places a calming hand on my shoulder and leads me through to his office, where he phones the theatre company, organises for somebody to come to the airport and collect me, stamps a piece of paper and admits me to his country.
‘Welcome to Australia, Mr Jason.’
I get to the hotel and crash out. The following evening I go and watch the play, which comes off very nicely and goes down well. Afterwards I’m introduced to the cast and the crew and I meet Andrew Sachs and Leslie Phillips, and everything seems very nice and very pleasant.
The next day we start rehearsals. Or sort of. The director tells me Leslie won’t be turning up today. ‘He thinks there’s no point coming in until you’ve at least done some blocking,’ the director says. Well, that’s a bit disappointing, but given that Leslie is working in the play at night, it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable. So I spend that day doing some blocking with the director, trying to get all my positioning sorted out.
The next day I go in at 10 a.m. Still no Leslie. Still no anybody, actually, apart from the stage manager. ‘Where is everyone?’ I ask. ‘I think they’ll be in about two,’ says the stage manager. ‘But I can rehearse with you if you like.’ The stage manager has the book with the script and all the moves in. We spend the morning rehearsing, with me playing my part, and him playing all the other parts in the play. Inevitably, this quickly becomes lunatic, on the grounds that I keep losing track of who he is. ‘Who are you now?’ I stop to ask – over and over again.
We break for lunch. After lunch it gets to two thirty. Still no Leslie, still no cast. ‘I’ll make a call,’ says the stage manager. He goes out to the phone and then returns with a grave face. He says, ‘I’ve got some bad news. The rest of the cast won’t work with you.’
‘Why ever not?’ I say.
‘Because you’re not a member of Australian Equity. You’re a blackleg.’
I didn’t know I needed to be a member of Australian Equity, any more than I knew I needed a work permit. ‘Isn’t this all taken care of by Derek Nimmo’s company?’ I say. ‘Apparently not,’ says the stage manager.
We spend the rest of the afternoon and the whole of the next day sorting out my Australian Equity problem. I end up arranging to pay my subs and become a member of Australian Equity. That’s twice now that Derek Nimmo’s company has let me down on the basic paperwork. But hey: onwards and upwards.
On the fourth day, the cast are free to work with me without breaking union regulations, so we get some stuff done. Or, at any rate, we get some stuff done after everyone turns up, which is in the middle of the afternoon. Still no Leslie, though.
Friday is the last day set aside for rehearsals for that week, and at last, that afternoon, Leslie finally appears. I’m very grateful: something like a full run-through might now be possible. ‘I’m going to be whispering,’ Leslie informs me, in a whisper, at the start of the session.
‘Sorry?’ I say.
‘I’m going to be whispering,’ Leslie whispers.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I can’t hear you. You’re whispering.’
‘Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say,’ whispers Leslie, in a now slightly irritated and slightly louder whisper. ‘I’m going to be whispering. I have to save my voice because I need it for the play.’
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘OK.’
Although, inside, I’m thinking, ‘This is not great.’
Off we go, me talking, Leslie whispering. We reach a point in the play where I’m standing centre stage with Leslie and he turns his back to me and addresses one of the other characters. It all goes rather quiet for me at this point, now that I can’t see Leslie’s whispering lips and I realise that I’ve missed my cue and have no idea what’s going on.
I think it’s safe to say the whole thing isn’t going tremendously well. In fact, I seem to be experiencing animosity and coldness from pretty much everyone in the cast. I think they all loved Andy so much, and had grown used to him: now here was this new boy barging in, whom nobody knew from Adam. The ranks closed against me. It was my first experience of that in a cast.
We try to rehearse for the second and final week – me with the stage manager and with some of the cast, on the odd occasion when they would turn up, and even less frequently with the whispering Phillips. The play finishes its Australian run on the Saturday. Needless to say, I am not invited to the last-night drinks.
We pack up and fly on to Singapore, with me feeling pretty bewildered and miserable, not to say frighteningly under-rehearsed. In Singapore, we have three days while the set is being built at one end of the hotel ballroom. Derek Nimmo is due to fly in to oversee the opening of this part of the tour. Determined to talk to him as soon as I can, I sit in the hotel’s splendid reception area and wait for him to come through.
‘David, my dear fellow, how are you getting on?’ he says.
‘Derek, I need to have a word with you,’ I say.
‘Oh, my dear boy, we’ll have some coffee, shall we?’
We sit together in the reception. He looks at me and he can tell that all is not well in the fields of Rome, or whatever that unforgettable quotation is.
I say, ‘I want to go home.’
‘I beg your pardon, dear boy?’ says Derek.
‘I want to go home on the next flight,’ I say. ‘I can’t do this tour. There isn’t one person in this company who will speak to me. Leslie Phillips can’t even be bothered to look at me.’
Derek asks me to explain in detail the problems. He is understanding because he has to admit that he’s had someone on the phone to him, expressing (albeit in possibly more choice words) that things are not exactly running smoothly. Derek has arrived expecting to have to calm the waters and now he’s got me in his face as well. He knows the show will be in some serious trouble, and so will his company, if I walk out at this stage. He pleads with me to stay.
‘Open tomorrow and do the show for a week,’ he says. ‘If you’re still unhappy, I’ll find a replacement.’
So I consent and on we go. The first night is, to say the least, interesting. Before curtain up, Leslie calls a cast meeting on the stage. ‘Now, listen up, everybody,’ he says, although I feel he’s only really talking to me. ‘Tonight we open. Remember: this is a farce. We’ve got to attack it. Keep up the pace, pace, pace.’
I thought to myself, ‘Christ. Pace? I am so under-rehearsed I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’ Everyone in a new play gets nerves on a first night but my nerves on this occasion are more like nightmares.
So we open. Leslie has got everybody going at breakneck speed. As the play goes on, everything is flying at me so quickly, I don’t know whether it’s Tuesday or a lemon. Every time I come offstage, I have pieces of paper with prompts and lines and clues written on them, stuck to the walls and the backs of the flats. Only those pieces of paper come between me and a rank, miserable, mumbling public humiliation.
Come the fourth night of the run, though, I’ve started to settle in a bit and the cast has calmed down. And so, I think, ‘I’m here, I’ve got to go through with it and I might as well enjoy it. Nobody’s talking to me, nobody cares, so I’ll see what I can do. I’ll play the play for my enjoyment and sod the rest of them.’ Because now I’m just beginning to sense that the audience is starting to like me.
The play requires Leslie to play a slightly oily fur-coat sal
esman who does his best to smooth his way into the affections of his female customers. I’m playing Crouch, his lowly assistant, who stitches the fur coats together, and I’m generally his stooge. As you enter stage left, there’s a kind of platform area, one step up from the main floor of the stage. At one point quite early in the action, Ann Sidney comes on, playing a potential customer. Leslie and I are standing together, over to one side, on the platform. Leslie’s line is something like, ‘Hey, Crouch, what do you think of her, then, eh? I’ll see if I can fit her with a coat.’
With that, he would give me a salacious nudge and set off across the stage towards Ann. This fourth night, he nudges me and I step down off the platform, as if propelled that way by his elbow, and give a look of confusion, as if to say, ‘How did I get down here?’ or perhaps, ‘Blimey, I seem to have shrunk.’ And there’s a big laugh from the audience where there hasn’t been a laugh before – much to Leslie’s confusion, as he heads across the stage with his back to me. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, and I can tell by the slight pause in his stride that the audience’s reaction has hit him. He thinks it’s something he’s done. But he carries on.
So that was fine. I got a slight reward. The next night, we do it again. Again, a big laugh. And I can see him now, thinking, ‘Where’s that come from? What am I doing? Or what is he doing?’ This time he turns round to look at me. And I stop looking around and give him a look. Whereupon we get another laugh for that. And as soon as he looks away, I give another puzzled look, and get another laugh.
At the end of that week, Leslie has clocked what I’m doing. So now, instead of nudging me, up on the platform, he puts his arm around me, so that I can’t make the move off the step. He also moves across to Ann backwards, so that he can keep his eye on me. So I think, ‘That’s all right: I can stand to lose that moment because I’ll get something else later on.’
And so, over the next week or two, I set out to explore the piece for my and the audience’s entertainment. There’s a portion of the play when I’m onstage and Leslie’s not. That’s when I decide I’ll have some fun. Which I do. I’m finding laughs that haven’t been there, and the occasional round to go with them – to the point where Leslie has to come up from his dressing room and stand in the wings and see what’s going on.
We finish in Singapore and move on to Jakarta. On the plane, one of the cast members comes and sits next to me. They say, ‘I’ve been asked if I would come and talk to you and ask you to go a bit easy on the rest of the cast.’ I say, ‘What do you mean?’ They say, ‘Well, you’re being very ungenerous. You’re getting all the laughs and you’re not being very generous to anybody else.’ I say, ‘I suppose you realise that nobody would even talk to me at the beginning of this. Nobody helped me at all. I’m only doing what I have to.’ I say that I think they ought to have a look at the billing. On the billing it says, ‘Leslie Phillips and David Jason in …’ I tell them, ‘That’s why I have to do it.’
From Jakarta on, to my intense relief, there’s a bit of a thaw in relations between us all. Leslie becomes a touch more friendly, starts to give me the time of day a little. Our relationship duly becomes workable – settles down into the tacit respect that each of us has for what the other can do. Fair play to Leslie: he didn’t have the first clue who I was and I suppose he needed me to prove myself to him. I’m glad I stuck around to do so.
It was hard to be glum for too long with audiences like the ones we got on those tours – great crowds of ex-pats, for the most part, working in the Far East on oil and engineering projects, maybe living over there with their families, working long hours and long days, and more than up for a laugh. They would book tables at the Hilton, and pitch up at seven for a drink. Then they would have dinner, and drink some more. Then at ten, we’d come on, and by that time, they were wonderfully well away.
And we did a very good job. OK, the productions could be a bit ramshackle in certain departments and less slick than they might have been in the West End. Derek’s wife Pat, who was very down to earth and nice as pie, used to come with us sometimes, as part of the management team, and occasionally shortage of numbers would mean she would be commandeered to sit in the corner, just offstage, and act as the prompt. Lovely lady – terrible prompt. She never used to know where she was in the play, which is not an especially useful trait in that line of work. One night, in Hong Kong as I recall, we got a bit lost, as happens from time to time. So I came to the prompt corner and whispered, ‘Next line, next line,’ only to hear Pat whisper back, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know where I am.’ So I had to go back out and ad lib. But we managed to get ourselves back on track and no serious harm was done.
Nevertheless, we handsomely entertained people who desperately wanted entertainment and who longed for a bit of contact with Blighty. These were people away from home on six-month or even year-long contracts, and they missed home, and we gave them some kind of taste of it.
Meanwhile, I was earning £500 a week, which was handsome money at this time, and being required to spend almost none of it. Nearly the only time I ever had to dip into my own pocket was when it came to settling the mountainous phone bills I ran up, calling my girlfriend Myfanwy back in Britain.
I worked with some good actors, too – especially on The Unvarnished Truth. When the offer came up to do the trip again, I didn’t hesitate. Frank Windsor was very quiet and very nice: a gentleman. John Fortune had a sense of humour so dry it almost crackled. Quite apart from being excellent comic performers, both were proper team players, which is what you need to be in a touring production, unless the whole thing is going to implode horribly. The three of us stuck together, helped each other out, and had a jolly time. The only problem I had with John, in all the days we spent together, centred on the unfortunate matter of a hair that, apparently unbeknown to him, had sprouted between his eyebrows and grown to a considerable length, and which was showing no signs of stopping any time soon. As the tour wore on, in passages of the play where John’s face and mine were necessarily close, the hair grew ever more to be a source of wonderment to me – its scale and luxuriance, its ability to survive John’s vision and stand alone against disaster.
One night, the pair of us were killing a bottle of whisky in my room and I felt emboldened to raise the matter of the extraordinary hair. ‘John,’ I said, in a voice that may well have been rather slurred, ‘could you do me a favour? Can you get rid of that hair? It’s becoming something I’m fixing on, and I shouldn’t.’ John, whose voice was also possibly quite slurred, couldn’t have been more obliging. He removed the hair there and then. After which, I rather missed it, to be perfectly honest. But, on the whole, it’s always best to confront these things, actor to actor, and we never had a moment’s discomfort after that.
Royce Ryton, the writer of The Unvarnished Truth, also had a part in the play, so he travelled with us, too. Royce was quite an odd cove. On occasions he would wear a pink suit and walk around with a long feather quill in his hand, connoting to all and sundry his trade as a playwright. Well, I suppose it was easier to carry a quill around than a typewriter. Something happened which annoyed him at one of the airports – I think a three-hour delay was announced – and he lost his cool and was seen jumping up and down in his pink suit and feather – which is no outfit, really, in which to get angry.
What a lark the whole thing was, though. We were treated like lords and made to feel like stars, or thereabouts. An English-language newspaper in Dubai greeted my arrival with the headline ‘SUPERMOUSE IS IN TOWN!’
OK, so, technically, that should have been Danger Mouse. But who was quibbling? Not least when beneath the headline was a large photograph of me captioned ‘David Jason in A Short Intake of Breath’.
OK, so, technically, the photograph was a still from No Sex Please – We’re British. But again: who was quibbling?
There was so much that was new to me. To depart from Heathrow and, a few hours later, be arriving in Malaysia and walking past a sign at the ai
rport reading ‘Dadda smugglers will be executed’ (‘Dadda’ being the Malaysian word for drugs) – well, that was a sight to open a relatively untravelled Londoner’s eyes. Ditto the sight of the river in Jakarta, a tidal reach which comes in from the sea, where people openly crouched to do their business in the water. Ditto, again, the sight of that business, equally openly floating on the surface or stranded at the side of the water.
One minute I was in Dubai shopping for a dishdash to wear – the classic long cotton shirt garment – and finding a rather fetching blue one with an embroidered neck. The next minute I was seeing the pyramids in Egypt and looking at the death mask of Tutankhamun. And the minute after that I was bartering for a carpet in Singapore and being shown the notorious Changi Prison – a leading centre for corporal punishment by caning. We were taken there by the hotel manager who thought we ought to see it – if only from the outside. I don’t know whether he was issuing some kind of warning regarding the maintenance of standards in our performance, but it certainly looked like somewhere none of us wanted to end up and I’m sure that, deep down, we upped our game that night.
Derek Nimmo would frequently be having lunch with highly important people who were highly important for reasons that were never entirely clear to me – diplomats, business executives, political players. One day he invited me along to a lunch with a highly important sheikh. After we had eaten, the sheikh asked me meaningfully, ‘Would you like some tea?’ At this point, Derek gave me a gentle kick under the table and a look which suggested I might want to decline. ‘No, I’m fine, thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s Scottish tea,’ the sheikh added encouragingly. Again, I declined. For Scottish tea, as Derek explained later, read undercover whisky. Our pal the sheikh didn’t seem to take milk.
The hotel managers were, altogether, most obliging in showing us the sights – and some of these sights were amazing. In Dubai, the sheikhs seemed to be going in for competitive airport building. We visited a massive marble mausoleum, actually a terminal building, fantastically constructed – and yet only catering at that point for the arrival of two aircraft per week. It was explained to us that it was built, essentially, out of jealousy of the scale of the neighbouring sheikh’s airport. Well, it stands to reason: you wouldn’t want your airport to be smaller than anyone else’s, would you?
