David Jason: My Life

by David Jason

  The manager of the Jakarta Hilton laid on a huge banquet for us – champagne, groaning platters of fish, shrimp, lobster and salad, servants bowing and scraping. It was like being in some kind of fairy tale. The banquet was served on a dais under a flowing awning looking out over the gardens where exotic flowers bloomed and fountains danced. The idea that acting could open up experiences like these to someone from a terraced house in Lodge Lane seemed staggering to me.

  One night after a show the manager in Hong Kong arranged for cars to whisk half a dozen of us away to a restaurant in the backstreets where girls danced as we dined. Then, at the conclusion of the meal, we were all led through the restaurant’s kitchens, across a courtyard and up a metal fire escape where the manager smoothed a palm with Hong Kong silver and we were ushered into what I suppose we should refer to as the ‘special room’, with seats for us around a small platform. We sat and drinks were brought to us. And then a woman arrived, stepped up onto the platform, danced and gradually disrobed before … Well, how to put this? Let’s just say that – call me old-fashioned or hopelessly sheltered – I had no idea that you could use an unpeeled banana for quite those purposes. Neither, come to think of it (and, again, apologies for my naivety), did I have the merest inkling that you could press a ping-pong ball into service like that – nor that it would shoot quite so high into the air when you did so.

  Table tennis has never felt entirely the same to me since.

  When we’d been conversing, the hotel manager had told us that, in certain Eastern cultures, the most impolite thing you can do is point your foot at somebody’s head. It’s considered the worst kind of insult. Well, for the second part of our very special private show, a man and a woman entered. They also climbed onto the platform and disrobed and then commenced their act, which, suffice it to say, was as far removed from a matinee performance of Aladdin in Wimbledon over the Christmas period as it is possible to get. The girls who were with us were truly embarrassed – perhaps even horrified, although, it should be noted, none of them asked to leave. I’m sure I felt quite embarrassed to be sitting there too, but my attitude was, ‘Well, life is notoriously short, and how many times are you likely to get to see this sort of thing?’

  The couple reached a stage in their act where the female half was on her back with her legs pointing in a northerly direction, while her male partner knelt in close attendance. At this point the lady’s right foot attained a position extremely close to my face. Thinking I might lighten the atmosphere, which had grown heavy and somewhat awkward, I attracted the attention of the man and, pointing to the lady’s foot, feigned affront. He roared with laughter and told his partner, ‘The gentleman from London has just accused you of offending him in the basest manner.’

  Everybody completely collapsed at this. Well, when I say completely collapsed – the bloke on the stage didn’t completely collapse. One part of him didn’t collapse at all. Most impressive. But that’s the difference between a professional and an amateur, I guess.

  Mad times, all in all, with one sobering moment to put the madness starkly in relief. It must have been in 1982. We were heading out on a 747 which included, on its upper deck, for the use of we passengers of privilege, a cocktail bar. There we were, three or four of us, several hours into the flight, leaning on the bar, with an air hostess serving us with whisky sours, when, through the porthole, we seemed to see flashes of light on the far horizon, probably hundreds of miles away across the desert.

  I said, ‘What’s that over there? Can you see those flashes?’ A couple of the others gathered round.

  The air hostess said, ‘Oh, that’ll probably be the war.’

  I said, ‘Come again?’

  ‘Iran and Iraq,’ she said. ‘They’re at war.’

  Well, I knew that. But at the same time … what a peculiar and eerie moment for reflection this was. Somewhere way below us, people were firing rockets and bombs at each other. We, meanwhile, were suspended at 35,000 feet, in our unworldly little bubble, sipping cocktails, chinking glasses and saying, ‘Chin-chin.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Menace and hair-dye on the streets of Doncaster. Goodnight from him. And two blokes called Derek.

  THE DECISION OF the Two Ronnies to decamp to Australia for a year had an upside. It meant the BBC was suddenly bereft of new material from one of its most popular comedy acts. To help fill the gap, the first series of Open All Hours was rebroadcast, this time on BBC1, rather than on BBC2 where it had been hidden, relatively speaking, the first time round. On this second showing it attracted some attention and got good ratings, entirely supporting Ronnie’s feeling that the BBC should have gone that way with it in the first place.

  So, in 1980, four years on from the initial run, and with Ronnie now back in Britain, Roy Clarke was commissioned to write a second series, bringing Arkwright, Granville and Nurse Gladys Emmanuel together again for another shot at the glory which perhaps always ought to have been theirs. It was a highly exciting prospect for me – working with Ronnie and Lynda again, larking about in Doncaster – and yet, at the same time, I did have some anxieties about it. Granville the shop assistant – my role – was meant to be around thirty years old. I was now a full decade older than that, and – reader, let us not shy away from this subject – a degree less well appointed in the hair department than I had hitherto been. In the intervening years, time had performed its evil depredations and I had endured a certain amount of typical male-pattern thinning around the crown region. Furthermore, a little snow was beginning to appear around the eaves.

  Well, OK, that happens to thirty-year-olds, too. But I had other worries as well, about the nature of Granville’s character. I voiced these to Ronnie when we were discussing whether to go ahead. I said, ‘The relationship between Arkwright and Granville, as it’s written, is great and I can see it’s good fun. But I’m a bit worried about my age. Can I play down that far? Because if Granville is as old as I am, doesn’t the fact that he’s still on his own, failing to have any success with women still, by all implications a virgin – doesn’t all that stuff stop being good fun and start feeling a bit … weird? It’s sitting uncomfortably with me.’ I guess, most of all, I was worried about making Granville, this seemingly eternal shop boy, appear not to be playing with the full deck.

  Ronnie said he thought it would work – firstly because the make-up department is a wonderful thing. ‘They’ll believe you’re still Granville,’ he said reassuringly and while kindly refraining from staring too curiously at my bald spot. Secondly (and perhaps more importantly), Ronnie said there was some room for the issue to be conveniently blurred if Granville’s age continued never to be mentioned in the scripts. Thirdly, Ronnie pointed out that there was a permanent justification for Granville lacking life experiences because, of course, he was snookered by his job. That was Granville’s predicament and the source of all his wistfulness: the shop had become the full extent of his world and he didn’t have time for anything beyond it. Open All Hours: Granville’s problem was explained in the title. Ronnie was, as always, very wise, and if he thought it was OK, that was good enough for me.

  So I was persuaded, and off we went. In the make-up department, remedial measures were duly taken. I had to pin on a hairpiece at the back and to colour up what remained of my own legitimately rooted stuff with a spot of dye. As my dear daughter Sophie once said, cutting straight to the point, as small children do: ‘Can we see that programme when Daddy had black hair?’

  The cast and crew were welcomed warmly back to Doncaster – except, clearly, by the man who, while we were filming on the street outside Arkwright’s shop, burst past the camera, right in the middle of a take, and threatened me with a bread knife. Which doesn’t often happen.

  A bizarre moment, to say the least. It was night-time, but we were filming to make it look like early morning. I was outside the shop, as Granville, doing a reaction shot – dreamily looking up the road at the departing milk float containing his new, unrequited love,
the milk lady. Suddenly a large, middle-aged figure in dark, shabby clothing had come striding past the camera and was now standing right in front of me, brandishing a long, serrated blade and bawling meaninglessly. Funny how a certain kind of calm can descend on you in a situation like that. I neither shrieked nor turned and ran, as I might have done if I had been in a film. And, funnily enough, I kind of was in a film.

  I simply looked at this man rather quizzically, and said, in an attempt to be calming, ‘Was there something you wanted?’

  After a beat or two, a couple of guys from the crew got hold of the armed intruder and carefully led him away. Thereafter the police were summoned. The poor bloke turned out to live nearby and to be a fully paid-up member of the bewildered. Who knows what was going on in his head, but I don’t think he had me or anyone else in mind as a specific target. Nor do I think this was a motivated attack on Open All Hours specifically, or the sitcom genre in general. The bloke was just out and about with his bread knife. As you are. We regrouped, did the shot over, and were never again menaced with a serrated blade between then and the end of the fourth and final series in 1985.

  Ronnie used to refer to me teasingly as the ‘Little Feed’ – the small bloke who set up his funny lines for him. That was pretty much a neat summary of my role in the show. Granville had his moments, of course – not least the Singin’ in the Rain spoof, where Granville gets caught in a downpour while sweeping up outside the shop and ends up giving it a bit of Gene Kelly. I had long conversations with Syd Lotterby, the director and producer, about this. We couldn’t spoof the whole routine because it was far too long and complex, so we needed to pick out the elements that people would remember. The three main ones, we reckoned, were: splashing through the gutter; swinging round the lamp post; and spinning with the umbrella. We had the gutter and we had the lamp post, and we decided to use the broom for the umbrella. Syd got me a copy of the film so that I could refresh my memory of what Kelly did and how he did it. We rehearsed the routine for several evenings after shooting had finished. And then we filmed it in one long night shoot, into the early hours of the morning, with the song played out to me in the street.

  That sequence was quite hard for me because, as we have previously discovered, my grasp of music is not the best. I also spent the evening in a state of some discomfort. The artificial rain machines used on these occasions have to pump out a really heavy quantity of water in order for it to register on the camera – actual rain would be hopeless for this purpose, funnily enough – and, as a consequence, your clothing gets soaked very fast and then stays soaked. Accordingly I was wrapped, under my costume, in cling film, to form a protective layer. Before the clothes went on, I looked like a supermarket chicken. Let me tell you, lest you are tempted to experiment with this: in monsoon conditions, cling film can just about be relied upon to keep the water off your body but it won’t keep you warm. It will, however, keep you extremely fresh. It won’t necessarily make you a better dancer, though.

  Anyway, beyond these showpiece moments, the simple fact of the Granville/Arkwright relationship meant I was there to be Ronnie’s stooge. I don’t recall this being particularly chafing. On the contrary, I was having an awful lot of fun and I felt extremely lucky to be where I was.

  At the same time, I can’t deny that there were at least a couple of moments when I found myself wondering whether I hadn’t just outgrown Granville, but whether I had also outgrown the kind of part that Granville was. One time, we finished an episode and discovered that we had overrun the thirty-minute mark by several minutes. So we sat in the editing room working out what to leave out in order to trim the show down to the requisite size. As I sat there, I could see all my funny stuff hitting the cutting-room floor. I had gone very quiet and Ronnie noticed and asked me if I was all right. I said, ‘Any jokes that I have are getting cut. All I’m left with is feeding you.’

  The following day, Ronnie wrote me a poem in rhyming couplets, full of mock-Shakespearean ‘thees’ and ‘thous’, the clinching lines of which were: ‘The future will provide thy need / Till then be content to be a little feed.’ It was his way of telling me not to get anxious, and that I shouldn’t forget that what I did had value. (Ronnie often sent me poems. He was constantly playing with words and was very quick at composing verses. On my forty-second birthday, which came while we were filming up in Yorkshire, he threw a party for me in Bawtry and presented me with a handwritten poem, put together that afternoon, which included this classic couplet: ‘He’s here tonight, without his pinafore / The lad we’re going to buy a dinner for.’)

  It was during the filming of Open All Hours that scandal threatened to engulf me, courtesy of the attentions of the British press. I was pictured in one of the papers emerging from Langan’s restaurant in London, apparently a little over-refreshed and in the company of what the caption darkly referred to as ‘a mystery blonde’.

  That was no mystery blonde. That was Ronnie Barker’s wife. Ronnie, I hasten to add, was just behind us. He, Joy and I had been out for a celebratory dinner. Langan’s had a revolving door and I had been unable to resist the opportunity to take Joy for a number of full spins in it before finally emerging, slightly dizzied. I found it very funny, obviously, to be linked in the national prints with Mrs Barker. All the same, it was the first time I properly realised that my movements were now somehow of interest to photographers and their employers. I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that.

  A couple of days later, a copy of this ruinously incriminating image of Joy and me, clipped from the newspaper, arrived in the post. On it was written the message, ‘Blackmail is an ugly word …’ I thought to myself, ‘What the hell is this?’

  Then I noticed the signature. It was signed ‘The Guvnor’.

  We did three series of Open All Hours in the 1980s. When Ronnie took the decision to bring it to an end in 1985, it was regularly getting audiences of more than 15 million. Ronnie used to say that Open All Hours was the comedy series he most enjoyed doing – even more than Porridge, which was arguably the more successful of the two. He once gave an interview in which he said, ‘I enjoyed Open All Hours more because of David.’ I was very touched and flattered by that.

  Soon after Open All Hours finished, I was talking to Ronnie and he told me that he was going to retire – not right then, but soon. Actors don’t really retire: there isn’t usually a formal moment. You don’t give up the business, the business tends to give you up. But Ronnie wanted to make a full stop. He was fifty-six at this point. We had recently lost Eric Morecambe and Tommy Cooper and I think that was playing on his mind. He didn’t want to work himself into an early grave. In the end, he retired on New Year’s Day 1988, when he was fifty-nine, bringing the curtain down on his career at the time of his choosing. For all that it disappointed me that he stopped producing work, I respected him so much for it. It gave him sixteen relaxed and contented years with Joy before his terribly sad death in 2005.

  A few days after his retirement, Ronnie sent me an official declaration, handwritten on a scroll of paper in a suitably formal script, with blobs of sealing wax and gold illuminations:

  WITNESS all ye now here present that I, Ronald William George Barker, known to the world of the footlights as Ronnie Barker, have now stepped from the spotlight after forty years and WHEREAS I have no longer any claim to the title The Guvnor, being that I no longer hold sway over nor have power to command supporting actors, bit players, stooges and feeds; NOW this hereby witnesseth that it is my chosen and deliberate intention forthwith to abdicate the said title of The Guvnor in favour of my good loyal and trusty servant David Granville Dithers Jason; and that he now is entitled to bear arms in the dignity of the office and title of THE GUVNOR and to enjoy all the privileges thereunto belonging. Signed in the presence of these worthies hereunder:

  Arthur Arkwright, Grocer

  Norman S. Fletcher, Director

  Rustless of Chrome Hall KGB, OM

  &

  Ronnie Barker, the
Ex-Guvnor

  GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

  You can imagine how much that meant to me. I never followed the instruction to take up that title, though. Wouldn’t dream of it. There was only one Guvnor.

  * * *

  ONE MORNING, WHEN we were rehearsing Open All Hours at the Acton Hilton, I was going up in the lift with Syd Lotterby when Syd said, ‘I’ve got something I want you to take a look at.’ He handed me a manila envelope. ‘Don’t show it to anyone,’ he said. ‘Take it home, have a read and tell me what you think tomorrow.’

  I was intrigued. I took the envelope home and opened it up. Inside was the script for the first episode of a comedy series. I sat down and began to read, and it was one of those ones where, within about a page and a half, you realise it’s got you hooked. It was about two brothers and their old grandad, living high in a council block in south-east London and making their way, apparently very unsuccessfully, as market traders. It had characters, it had some zinging lines, it had warmth – it seemed to have all the necessary ingredients. One character in particular jumped out at me: the elder of the two brothers – the irrepressible, wannabe entrepreneur. I thought to myself, ‘I know this man.’

  Right there in my flat as I read, I was spun back to the days of B. W. Installations, when Bob Bevil and I were going round to builders’ yards and literally knocking on the door in search of electrical work. In the East End of London we had happened on a contractor called Derek Hockley – a real East End player in a camel-hair coat, with immaculately greased hair and sharp clothing. He had a cockney accent you could have rolled up and beaten someone over the head with, and a habit of bringing his top lip slightly forward and flexing his neck as if trying to get the collar of his shirt to settle down. (He also slid me and Bob a mountain of work doing the wiring for Ind Coope pubs, so God bless him for that.) I could hear Derek Hockley’s voice and see his manner as clear as day in the character on the typewritten pages in front of me.